Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life 9783110434781, 9783110427097

Citation preview

Utopia

European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies Etudes sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme en Europe Studien zur europäischen Avantgarde und Moderne Edited by Sascha Bru and David Ayers Editorial Board Jan Baetens ‧ Benedikt Hjartarson ‧ Tania Ørum ‧ Hubert van den Berg Advisory Board Dawn Ades ‧ Wolfgang Asholt ‧ Henri Béhar ‧ Timothy O. Benson ‧ Günter Berghaus ‧ Claus Clüver ‧ Antoine Compagnon ‧ Eva Forgács ‧ Cornelia Klinger ‧ Rudolf Kuenzli ‧ Bruno Latour ‧ Paul Michael Lützeler ‧ Laura Marcus ‧ Richard Murphy ‧ Peter Nicholls ‧ François Noudelmann ‧ Krisztina Passuth ‧ Marjorie Perloff ‧ Michel Poivert ‧ Susan Rubin-Suleiman ‧ Rainer Rumold ‧ Brandon Taylor ‧ Andrew Webber

Volume 4

Utopia

The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life Edited by David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen and Harri Veivo With the editorial assistance of Þorsteinn Surmeli

ISBN 978-3-11-042709-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-043478-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043300-5 ISSN 1869-3393 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Introduction David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson New People of a New Life Modernism, the Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Utopia  3

Ideology and Aesthetics Sam Cooper “Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” Futurism, Surrealism, Situationism, and the Problem of Utopia  17 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias  33 Marjet Brolsma Utopia through Art Building Bridges and Curing Culture in War-Torn Europe  49 Tessa Lobbes Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict The Dutch Writer Frederik van Eeden and His Mission as an Internationalist during World War I  59 Elza Adamowicz Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies Off the Map?  73 Erik Bachman Utopian Failure and Function in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen  89 Barrett Watten Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia From Leningrad to Occupy  99

vi 

 Contents Contents

Rationalism and Redemption Fae Brauer Magnetic Modernism František Kupka’s Mesmeric Abstraction and Anarcho-Cosmic Utopia  123 Cathy L. Jrade Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics  153 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter Utopie und Apokalypse in der österreichischen Kulturzeitschrift Der Brenner (1910–1954)  169 Sami Sjöberg Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde German-Jewish Visions of the Future  185 Natalia Baschmakoff From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” Perceptual Utopias in the Russian Avant-Garde (1910s–1960s)  199 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique Sound Representations of Utopia in the Works of Russian Musicians in the First Three Decades of the 20th Century  215 Bruno Marques Utopian Dimensions in Pedro Cabrita Reis A Melancholic Return to Modernist Paradigms?  229 Joshua Dittrich Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography Utopian Fragments in Hannah Höch’s Aus einem ethnographischen Museum  241

Contents 

 vii

Experimentation and Urban Space Kate Armond A Paper Paradise Ernst Bloch and the Crystal Chain  259 Irina Marchesini A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life Konstantin Vaginov’s Utopian Visions  275 Kate Kangaslahti Utopian Voyages Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Mural Schemes for the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris  289 Éva Forgács Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary László Rajk and the Na-Ne Gallery  307 Konstantina Drakopoulou Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens A Plan for Utopia in Action  323

Communities and Education Annebella Pollen Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts in the Ambivalent Modernism of the Kibbo Kift Kindred  339 Sarah Archino New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art  355 Sylvia Hakopian Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia An Analysis of Children’s Textbooks and Subjection under Fascism  369 Max Saunders The Future in Modernism C.K. Ogden’s To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series  383

viii 

 Contents Contents

Dmitrii Tokarev Escape from Utopia The Metamorphoses of Utopian Dreams in the Russian Avant-Garde in Exile (Il’ya Zdanevich, Boris Poplavskii)  397

Sexuality and Desire Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism Wilhelm Reich’s Influence on Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen’s Danish Surrealism  413 Claire Lozier Faire jouir le système Georges Bataille et l’utopie de l’impossible  429 Imre József Balázs The Non-Oedipal Android Towards a Surrealist Utopia in Postwar Romania  445 Per Stounbjerg From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City Jens August Schade’s Utopian Eroticism between Surrealism, Situationism and Popular Culture  459 Riku Toivola The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot  475 Jun Tanaka Dystopian Visions and Ideas of Death as a Transformation in Gilbert Clavel’s An Institute for Suicide  493 List of Contributors  503 Index  505 Colour Illustrations  517

About the Series – Sur la collection – Zur Buchreihe The avant-garde and modernism take centre-stage within European academia today. The experimental literatures and arts in Europe between ca. 1850 and 1950, and their aftermath, figure prominently on curricula, while modernism and avantgarde studies have come to form distinct yet interlocking disciplines within the humanities in recent years. These disciplines take on various guises on the continent. Within French and German academia, “modernism” remains a term rather alien – “die Moderne” and “modernité” coming perhaps the closest to what is meant by “modernism” within the English context. Here, indeed, modernism has acquired a firm place in research, signaling above all a period in modern poetics and aesthetics, roughly between 1850 and 1950, during which a revolt against prevalent traditions in art, literature and culture took shape. Similarly, the term “avant-garde” comes with an array of often conflicting connotations. For some, the avant-garde marks the most radically experimental arts and literatures in modernism from the 19th Century onward – the early 20th-Century vanguard movements of Futurism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, among others, coinciding with the avant-garde’s most “heroic” phase. For others, the avant-garde belongs to a cultural or conceptual order differing altogether from that of modernism – the vanguard exploits from the 1950s onward marking that avant-garde arts and literatures can also perfectly abide outside modernism. European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, far from aiming to reduce the complexity of various European research traditions, aspires to embrace the wide linguistic, terminological and methodological variety within both fields. Publishing an anthology of essays in English, French and German every two years, the series aims to compare and relate French, German and British, but also Northern and Southern as well as Central and Eastern European findings in avant-garde and modernism studies. Collecting essays stemming in large part from the biennial conferences of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), books in this series do not claim to exhaustiveness. Rather, they aim to raise questions, to provide partial answers, to fill lacunae in the research, and to stir debate about the European avant-garde and modernism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and into the 21st. The series attaches great value to interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics, and intends to encourage an interest in the cultural dimensions and contexts of the avant-garde and modernism in Europe.

x 

   About the Series – Sur la collection – Zur Buchreihe

L’avant-garde et le modernisme occupent actuellement une place majeure dans les universités européennes. Les arts et les littératures expérimentaux en Europe de 1850 à 1950 et au-delà font partie intégrante des programmes universitaires, tandis que les recherches sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme sont devenues, à l’intérieur des sciences humaines, des disciplines à part entière mais solidaires l’une de l’autre. Ces disciplines varient néanmoins à travers le continent. Dans les universités françaises et allemandes, la notion de « modernisme » reste plutôt étrangère : les notions de « modernité » et de « die Moderne » s’utilisent sans doute davantage pour ce que désigne la notion de « modernism » dans le contexte anglophone. Dans la recherche anglophone, en effet, la notion de « modernism » a acquis une certaine stabilité : elle désigne avant tout une période de la modernité poétique et esthétique, approximativement entre 1850 et 1950, au cours de laquelle a pris forme une révolte contre les traditions artistiques, littéraires et culturelles prédominantes. De la même façon, la notion d’ « avant-garde » prend des connotations divergentes, souvent conflictuelles. Pour certains, l’ « avant-garde » désigne les arts et les littératures les plus radicalement expérimentaux qui se développent à l’intérieur du modernisme à partir du XIXe siècle. Dans ce cas, les mouvements avant-gardistes du début du XXe siècle – dont le futurisme, l’expressionisme, le dadaïsme et le surréalisme – correspondent à la phase avant-gardiste la plus « héroïque ». Pour d’autres, l’avant-garde appartient à un ordre culturel et conceptuel entièrement différent du modernisme. Dans cette perspective, l’avantgarde survit au modernisme, comme en témoigne la permanence d’une sensibilité avant-gardiste après 1950. Loin de vouloir réduire la complexité et la variété des traditions de recherche européennes, la collection Études sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme en Europe vise à embrasser la grande diversité linguistique, terminologique et méthodologique à l’intérieur de ces deux domaines de recherche. Par la publication d’un volume d’essais en anglais, en français et en allemand tous les deux ans, la collection souhaite comparer et mettre en rapport les résultats issus des traditions de recherche française, anglaise et allemande, mais également d’Europe nordique et méridionale, centrale et orientale. La collection rassemble les travaux les plus novateurs et les plus stimulants de la recherche actuelle et se consacre à l’étude de l’avant-garde et du modernisme européens au cours des XIXe et XXe siècles. Le premier objectif de cette collection est de rassembler une sélection des textes présentés lors des rencontres bisannuelles du Réseau européen de recherche sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme (EAM). En ce sens, son ambition est moins d’épuiser un sujet que de soulever les questions, de suggérer quelques réponses provisoires, de combler certaines lacunes dans la recherche et, plus généralement, de maintenir vivant le débat sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme européens au cours des XIXe, XXe et XXIe siècles. La collection attache beaucoup



About the Series – Sur la collection – Zur Buchreihe   

 xi

d’importance à la recherche interdisciplinaire et intermédiale sur les esthétiques et les poétiques expérimentales et se propose de stimuler l’intérêt pour les dimensions culturelles et contextuelles de l’avant-garde et du modernisme en Europe.

Forschungsinitiativen zum Thema Avantgarde und Moderne nehmen in der europäischen Forschungslandschaft weiterhin zu. Die experimentellen Literaturen und die Künste in Europa zwischen ca. 1850 und 1950 und ihre Nachwirkungen sind als Lehr- und Forschungsbereiche an den europäischen Forschungsinstitutionen und in den Lehrplänen heutzutage nicht mehr wegzudenken. Avantgarde und Moderne haben sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu unterschiedlichen, aber mehrfach mit­ einander verzahnten Forschungsgebieten entwickelt. Innerhalb der französischen und deutschen akademischen Welt bleibt der Sammelbegriff „modernism“ weniger geläufig – „die (klassische) Moderne“ und „modernité“ fungieren hier als nahe liegende Äquivalente zu demjenigen, was im internationalen Kontext als eine zeitliche und räumliche Ko-Okkurenz künstlerischer Ausdrucksformen und ästhetischer Theorien namhaft gemacht werden kann, die ungefähr zwischen 1850 und 1950 angesiedelt werden kann. Auf ähnliche Weise entfaltet die Bezeichnung „Avantgarde“ eine Reihe häufig widersprüchlicher Konnotationen. Für manche kenn­zeichnet die Avantgarde den radikalsten experimentellen Bruch der Künste und Literaturen mit den Darstellungs- und Erzählkonventionen des 19. Jahrhunderts: im frühen 20. Jahrhundert zeugen davon Avantgardebewegungen wie Futurismus, Expressionismus, Dada und Surrealismus, Strömungen, die als die „heroische“ Phase der Avantgarde bezeichnet werden können. Ab den fünfziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts kommt diese Avantgarde weitgehend ohne modernistische Begleiterscheinung aus. Für andere gehört die Avantgarde zu einem kulturellen Umfeld, das sich, durchaus im Bunde mit der Klassischen Moderne, der Erneuerung ästhetischer Konventionen verschreibt. Die Buchreihe Studien zur europäischen Avantgarde und Moderne möchte der Kompliziertheit der unterschiedlichen europäischen Forschungstraditionen gerecht werden und strebt danach, die breite linguistische, terminologische und methodologische Vielfalt abzudecken. Anhand einer zweijährlichen Sammlung von Beiträgen in englischer, französischer und deutscher Sprache möchte die Reihe nicht nur die französisch-, deutsch- und englischsprachigen, sondern auch die nord-, süd-, zentral- und osteuropäischen Ergebnisse der Avantgarde- und Moderne-Forschung einbeziehen. Die Aufsatzsammlungen der Reihe, die größtenteils aus Beiträgen von den zweijährlichen Konferenzen des Europäischen Netzwerks für Studien zu Avant-Garde und Moderne (EAM) bestehen, erheben keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit. Ihr Ziel ist es vielmehr, Fragen zu stellen, einige Antworten vorzuschlagen, Forschungslücken

xii 

About the Series – Sur la collection – Zur Buchreihe

zu schließen und Debatten über die europäische Avantgarde und die Moderne im 19., 20. und 21. Jahrhundert auszulösen. Die Studien zur europäischen Avantgarde und Moderne legen viel Wert auf die interdisziplinäre und intermediale Erforschung experimenteller Ästhetiken/Poetiken und setzen es sich zum Ziel, das Interesse an den kulturellen Zusammenhängen und Kontexten der Avantgarde und der Moderne in Europa anzuregen. Canterbury & Leuven 2015



David Ayers and Sascha Bru

Previous books in this series: Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism, and the Fate of a Continent, ed. by Sascha Bru, Jan Baetens, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert van den Berg (2009). Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture, ed. by Sascha Bru, Laurence van Nuijs, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert van den Berg (2011). The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, ed. by Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru and Benedikt Hjartar­son (2013).

Introduction

David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson

New People of a New Life

Modernism, the Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Utopia

An early manifesto of the Russian Cubo-Futurists, dating from 1913, concludes by proclaiming that “We are the new people of a new life”.1 Whether one chooses to read the proclamation as a glimpse into a time yet to come or as a statement about the contemporary era and its radical break with the past, it can be seen as an emblematic expression of the historical avant-garde and its inherently utopian project. In their manifestoes and other programmatic writings the avant-garde movements presented their visions of a new life, a new society and a new man that marked a definitive break with the past, launching the readers into a utopian space of hitherto unknown life forms and experiences. Not least on the basis of the blueprints for a new order of life presented in the manifestoes, the avantgarde is traditionally seen as being inherently linked with utopian visions, which in their own turn often trigger a critique of the avant-garde or declarations about the (inevitable) failure of its project. The utopianism of the avant-garde clearly differs from earlier visions of utopia that were based on notions of continuity and progress. As one commentator has argued, the advent of the avant-garde signified that the “time had come for a relentless antagonism between the future and the past; the new, a value in and of itself, could come forth in all its radical purity only from the destruction of the old, in a violent break that would separate the old world from the one that was clamouring to be born”.2 Yet the antagonistic notion of utopia, which consists in the contemporary era’s break with the past or the future’s break with the present situation, was only the latest manifestation of a temporalised concept of utopia that can be traced back to the 18th Century, as history was following the historian Reinhart Koselleck - no longer seen to “take[] place in time, but through time” and time was “metaphorically dynamized into a force

1  David Burliuk et al., “From A Trap for Judges, 2”, in: Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (eds and trans.), Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, Ithaca and London 1988, 53–54, here 54. 2  Roland Schaer, “Utopia and Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes”, in: Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (eds), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, New York and Oxford 2000, 278–289, here 279.

4 

 David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson

of history itself”.3 The important shift in the understanding of temporality in the 18th Century consists in the fact that the future is no longer seen as an empty or neutral space for the unfolding of time, but rather as an open site for utopian projects. In the political field such projects were often related to the creation of a new revolutionary or totalitarian state, whereas in the aesthetic context they were often linked with visions of a new social order rooted in the aesthetic imagination and with the role of the artist as a visionary. Early examples of these different kinds of projects in the late 18th Century can be seen on the one hand in attempts to create a new revolutionary culture in the wake of the French revolution and on the other hand in Schiller’s view on the aesthetic education of man, where the realm of “free play” originating in the aesthetic imagination came to serve as the harbinger of a utopian order.4 The shift to the modern conception of history as progression or at least processual unfolding generated a shift in location of Utopia suggested by Thomas More’s classic text of 1516. While More’s Utopia and other similar Early Modern writings offer a kind of thought experiment designed to cast an ethical light on existing social practices, and to provide a source of philosophical reflection on human nature by way of a kind of estrangement-effect, there is no suggestion that these “utopias” might ever be brought into existence, even though it is the encounter with the New World which is one of the triggers for More’s engagement with radical social difference (Utopia is hazily set in the New World). There is already a stark difference between More’s Utopia, then, and the kind of utopian and socialist activity of Robert Owen, whose theories of utopian community were partly realised at the mill he directed in New Lanark in Scotland, and perhaps in greater intensity at his short-lived New Harmony community in Indiana. Owen’s projects may have foundered on economic realities as well as on the limitations of human nature, but he offered a clear example of the socialist utopia not as an abstract ideal but as a project realisable within a localised and bounded community. Yet for Friedrich Engels, writing in 1880, Owen’s accomplishment had merely served to create a proliferation of discourses about socialism in which each individual Saint-Simon or Proudhon offered no more than a “mish-mash” of ideas about what the future society must look like. Utopian socialism was one thing: scientific socialism another, and now that it was possible to grasp the nature of social forces

3  Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al., Stanford, CA 2002, 165. 4  See: Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1984; Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Stuttgart 1965.



New People of a New Life 

 5

and steer them by will, utopian socialism could be displaced by scientific socialism, with its central emphasis on the proletariat as the subject of history and the socialisation of production as the single act from which human emancipation would follow.5 Marx and Engels argued for a socialism which would be “scientific”, according to their own supposedly materialist version of Hegel’s theory of history as a progression towards human emancipation. The future society was no longer a matter for utopian speculation, and indeed it could no longer be mapped at all as its reality would depend on a transformation of human possibility that could not even be imagined from the position of the present. There is a shift then in the notion of the utopian from More’s thought-experiment, which was never intended as a model and presented elements that probably the author did not intend to advocate, via the actually-realised, community-based, utopian socialist experiments of Owen, to the rejection of all utopian speculation in the light of a theory of history which predicted an emancipated future as the inevitable goal of history. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not so much a confirmation of the Marxist theory of history, as its Bolshevik leaders believed it to be, but the first manifestation of a new reality – that the state itself could aspire to direct not just questions of economy and foreign policy, but all aspects of everyday life. Where once the creation of utopian communities had been the preserve of entrepreneurial individuals such as Owen, now the state had become the agent of change, a lesson which the Soviet state aimed to take to the rest of Europe and then the world, and also a lesson which other states quickly learned as they began, for example, to create state broadcasting companies such as the BBC, with the specific goal of bringing a controlled administrative power to bear on culture itself. If the state could focus such resources on the administration of the imagination itself, what would be the role of art in general, and what would be art’s role in anticipating the future? This question was especially acute for Russian artists and writers in the 1920s, although their particular dilemma was only the most polarised realisation of the question of artistic freedom and the role of art in the imagination of the future. If David Burlyuk and his Cubo-Futurist colleagues had brashly asserted in 1913 that they were “the new people of a new life”, the 1920s posed for them questions that they had not anticipated, as the Soviet state itself became the bearer of the project of creating a “new man”, and as Trotskii switched his attention from war to culture in Literature and Revolution (Literatura

5  First published in French translation in 1880 as Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique. The quotation is from: Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Aveling [uncredited], Moscow 1978, 49.

6 

 David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson

i revolyutsiya, 1924), where he resolved that the state must allow artists “complete freedom of self-determination” only “after putting before them the categorical standard of being for or against the Revolution”.6 Trotskii asserted that the art of the present, transitional period could not anticipate a future which was better imagined by the party than by artists, and could not properly be imagined by anyone at all. The Soviet state explicitly asked questions about the nature of artistic freedom and the role of imagination in creating the new utopia, but all advanced countries began to feel the impact of what was often thought to be an increasingly standardised culture led by the technologies of radio, sound recording and cinema. It was the sense of political and social closure that led Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno to develop the seeds laid by Ernst Bloch in Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1923) where, as Tyrus Miller explains, Bloch extended the notion of utopia “to encompass a philosophy of history and religion centered on collective anticipation and hope, a hermeneutics for interpreting works of art and culture as bearers of a future-oriented ‘utopian function’, and even a speculative ontology involving the unfinished nature of the present and the patency of the future in anterior times”.7 Bloch’s rich reconceptualisation of the concept of utopia was revisited over decades by Adorno, who many times reformulated the notion that art must somehow allow utopian hope without suggesting any accommodation to the present: At the center of contemporary antinomies is that art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal end.8

Adorno’s formulation brings forth the inherent paradox of aesthetic visions of the utopian: on the one hand the autonomous field of the aesthetic generates a critical view on the present by providing a glimpse into a utopian future or expressing “the dream of a world in which things would be different”;9 on the other hand it runs the risk of “providing semblance and consolation” because it originates in the same social structures that it allegedly explores from the outside. Whereas

6  Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky, London 1925, 14. 7  Tyrus Miller, Modernism and the Frankfurt School, Edinburgh 2014, 21. 8  Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis 1997, 32. 9  Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York 1991, 37–54, here 40.



New People of a New Life 

 7

Adorno’s notion of negativity provides us with a useful tool to describe modernism’s emphasis on aesthetic autonomy and its blissful moments of critical illumation, his remarks on the antinomies of the aesthetic also point toward the ambivalent character of the avant-garde project. The activities of the historical avant-garde movements were not only linked to notions of utopia in their presentation of the new life to come, its project was often driven by a praxis-oriented notion of utopianism, which aimed at the construction of a new society, a new culture and a new humanity. In many ways the avant-garde was less engaged in the search for utopia than in its practical construction, although this task was inherently linked to aesthetic experiments and investigations. This involves a perspective on utopia that sees it less in terms of a model of the new order of life than as a driving force for subversive activities directed against the existing social reality. In this sense one could refer to a utopian impulse functioning as the driving force of the avant-garde project, whereas this impulse is seen less in terms of Ernst Bloch’s notion of utopia as an impulse “governing everything future-oriented in life and culture”,10 but rather as the basis of concrete actions and a new aesthetic and cultural praxis.

Ideology and Aesthetics In his reflections on Karl Mannheim’s view on the links between utopia and ideology Paul Ricoeur has claimed that “the only way to get out of the circularity in which ideologies engulf us is to assume a utopia, declare it, and judge an ideology on this basis. Because the absolute onlooker is impossible, then it is someone within the process itself who takes the responsibility for judgment”.11 In the context of the avant-garde, this notion of the utopian moment as a negation of ideology is often linked with ideas of a new cultural order rooted in a genuine aesthetic experience. If the avant-garde project can be described as driven by a “utopian impulse”, this impulse was often linked with Romantic notions of the emancipating powers of the aesthetic imagination. In his article in the first section of this book Erik Bachman discusses the notion of utopia in Georg Lukács’ Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (The Specificity

10  Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York 2005, 2. 11  Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York 1986, 172–173.

8 

 David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson

of the Aesthetic), which deals with the utopian potential of art in its “capacity to evoke a human totality out of the scattered reified fragments that make up the life-world of the everyday”. This is a quite anti-romantic vision of the manner in which the mimetic power of art can call forth political action in its recipients. In Lukács’ vision, art works are not utopian at all, but have their function in the slow formation of the habits of the new man. Lukács’ social pragmatics have their counter in the spirit of the avant-garde which he so frequently denounced. This is nowhere better seen than in that primitivist strain of the avant-garde exposed by Elza Adamowicz in her discussion of the role of Mexico in the imaginary of French Surrealism. The Surrealist image of Mexico had little to do with the actual geographical location, history or traditions of the country, and in the writings of the Surrealists “Mexico” served primarily as a utopian space that presented a counter-model of Western rationalism and bourgeois culture, loaded with mythical and revolutionary energy, yet perversely over-writing the real people and politics of the country, as acidly noted by Frida Kahlo. If the Russian Revolution played a key role in leading to a utopian turn in the early 20th Century, a second important factor was World War I, which not only marked the end of utopian notions of cultural progress but also triggered new utopian visions. Various visions of utopia arising from the Great War are discussed by Brolsma, Lobbes, Demoor, Posman and Van Dijck. Whereas Brolsma and Lobbes explore the complex links between nationalism and utopian notions of internationalism that were meant to build bridges between the nations of Europe and lead to cultural regeneration, Demoor, Posman and Van Dijck discuss the modernist response to the war in the broader context of World War I literature. Following the end of World War II the implicit utopianism of the historical avant-garde movements enters a phase of ideological critique. The most powerful critical responses to the naïve utopianism of earlier avant-garde movements in the context of the neo-avant-garde were presented by the French Situationists. A symptomatic expression of this criticism can be found in Guy Debord’s La Sociéte du Spectacle (1967), in which he describes art as “at once an art of change and a pure expression of the impossibility of change”, further declaring: “The more grandiose its demands, the further from its grasp is true self-realization”.12 In Situationism, the critique of earlier avant-garde utopianism and its affirmative function, however, marks less a disillusioned break with utopian thought than a rethinking of utopia, not as a goal but as a driving force of cultural, ideological and social subversion – as Constant declared: “Artists are no longer trying to

12  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York 1995, 135.



New People of a New Life 

 9

escape the reality of social life, but they want to change this reality”.13 Sam Cooper discusses the role of utopia in Situationism, seeing the movement’s ambivalence less as a clear break with earlier avant-garde models than as a continuity of avantgarde projects of cultural renewal, which from the beginning were haunted by anxieties about their own failure and inevitable disappearance. Barrett Watten addresses the question of avant-garde utopianism in the contemporary period in his discussion of Language writing and its exploration of ways to foster utopian hope by means of the radicalisation of aesthetic form.

Rationalism and Redemption Writing on the evolution of the human species in the late 19th Century, the Russian author and one of the forerunners of Russian Cosmism, Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin, declared: A person flying horizontally on a bicycle – this is already motion toward the form of the angel, the highest human. Through the invention of these machines of horizontal flight, mankind moves closer to an angelic state, or toward ideal humanity. Every thinking human being can understand that the bicycle represents precisely those mechanical wings, the starting point or kernel of the future organic wings, by means of which humanity will undoubtedly break the fetters confining it to the telluric world, and humanity will escape by means of mechanical inventions into the solar world around it.14

The quotation presents a curious syncretic mixture of different utopian visions stemming from mechanics, esotericism, science and the world of everyday life. It is less a peculiar case of the esoteric imagination, which is often seen as specific to the Russian tradition, than a characteristic trait of modernist and avantgarde tradition. It has often been noted that the utopian visions of the historical avant-garde were “rooted in the apparently endless possibilities that early twentieth-century science and technology had opened up”.15 Yet the avant-garde interest in science was not limited to ground-breaking discoveries or technical

13  Quoted in: David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism, Edinburgh 2005, 218. 14  Quoted in: George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers, Oxford 2012, 19. 15  Christina Lodder, “Searching for Utopia”, in: Christopher Wilk (ed.), Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939, London 2006, 23–40, here 31.

10 

 David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson

innovations, but frequently embraced the theories, concepts and ideas of popular science or even pseudo-science.16 Fae Brauer’s analysis of the “magnetic modernism” and the “Anarcho-cosmic Utopias” of František Kupka focuses on the links between the artist’s Anarchist views, his involvement in the Theosophical movement and scientific theories of magnetism and vibration that were circulating in the early 20th Century. As Brauer argues, esoteric theories of spiritual evolution played a key role in Kupka’s understanding of the emancipatory role of the artist in raising the revolutionary consciousness of the people and leading it to the promised land of spiritual and Anarchist utopia. Related currents are dealt with in the works of the number of Russian artists discussed by Baschmakoff, who focuses on various manifestations of the “quest for a perception which would penetrate materiality”, which were linked with scientific and esoteric theories of perception. As Petrushanskaya-Averbakh’s article shows, such utopian concepts took on a different form in discussions of sound and music in Russia in the early 20th Century. Esoteric currents were an integral part of the utopian imagination of the early 20th Century and often served as counter-models of a rational order that was seen to have led humanity into an impasse. Sami Sjöberg analyses the impact of Jewish spiritualism and messianism on revolutionary politics and progressive modes of poetic expression in the early 20th Century, the idea of an “inner utopia” playing an important role in shaping a new revolutionary ethos with its specific view on the merging of art and life. Jrade’s article on the “utopian poetics” of Juan Gelman follows a related line and traces the links to the tradition of mysticism in the poet’s search for a utopian era that would mark the end of political repression and trauma. The Austrian magazine Der Brenner, discussed by Ender and Fürhapter, presents an interesting case of vitalist and religiously inspired visions of the “new man”, which are driven by an expressionist ethos that manifests itself in apocalyptic and redemptive visions of a new spiritual and cultural era. Bruno Marques’ analysis of the works of Pedro Cabrita Reis casts light on the continued impact of mythical and mystic traditions on the aesthetic practices of modernism. Marques explores the important role of archaic visions in the contemporary artist’s “demiurgic projects”, which present a counter-model con-

16  On the notion of pseudo-science and on the links between esotericism, Enlightenment and modern science, see for example: Dirk Rupnow et al. (eds), Pseudowissenschaft. Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008; Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Renko Geffarth and Markus Meumann (eds), Aufklärung und Esoterik. Wege in die Moderne, Berlin and Boston 2013.



New People of a New Life 

 11

testing the teleology of progress and positioning man in the world from a poetic and mythological viewpoint. Dittrich’s article on the “ethnographic” works of Hannah Höch, on the other hand, focuses on the critical reflections on the primitivist current of the avant-garde and explores the medial reflection of the West’s encounter with the Other in the artist’s photomontages. As Dittrich argues, the historical avant-garde’s engagement with the utopian image of the Other also had its critical potential, stressing the historicity of those traditionally located in a free-floating utopian space that served as a negative reflection of the Western cult of rationality.

Experimentation and Urban Space Visions of the urban play a key role in avant-garde utopianism, from Walter Benjamin’s melancholy focus on the coded utopian potentials of the city to successive waves of architectural idealism. Kate Armond shows how glass and crystal were the materials which allowed the architects of the Crystal Chain group to renegotiate the boundaries between humanity, buildings, and natural environment, and makes connections with Ernst Bloch’s utopianism and Ernst Haeckel’s notion of the “crystal soul”, to discover an avant-garde frustrated with the liberalism and rationalism, and in search of dramatic change. By contrast, Irina Marchesini presents Konstantin Vaginov’s remembered and imagined St. Petersburg as the utopian negation of the realities of Soviet Leningrad, with the art of the collector providing the (Benjaminian) means to keep the mythified past within reach. Kate Kangaslahti explores the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris, where the murals of Robert and Sonia Delaunay celebrated the future of leisure promised by the development of air and rail travel, an ideal of technology shortly to be interrupted by war. Éva Forgács unpacks the architecture and art of post-communist Hungary in an examination of László Rajk and the Na-Ne Gallery, articulating the moment in which the once ideal vocabulary of Constructivism was provocatively dissected and interrogated for its legacy of an idealism which had not survived actually-existing Communism. Konstantina Drakopoulou brings the question of the code of urban environments bang up-to-date in her analysis of guerrilla art in the streets of Athens in the wake of the economic downturn in Greece.

12 

 David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson

Communities and Education Utopian visions might be realised equally by states or by small communities set apart from the wider society. Annebella Pollen shows how the Kibbo Kift, an English outdoor organisation, attempted to model and anticipate the future, while at the same time evoking a pre-modern existence, with its calls for world peace and practices of handicraft and camping. Education was key to the formation of a new society. Sarah Archino explores the anarchistic approach to children and art in New York focalised on the Ferrer Center and Alfred Stieglitz’s 291. A quite different approach to education was set in motion by the Italian Fascist government under its education minister Giovanni Gentile, as Sylvia Hakopian shows in a detailed examination of the objectives of the committee which controlled the production and circulation of children’s textbooks. If fascism sought to offer a certain vision of the future and a definite model, the radical uncertainty of a world in which technological and scientific change had made societal change the norm rather then the exception was given polyvocal realisation in C.K Ogden’s book series, “To-day and To-morrow”. Max Saunders outlines how Ogden in effect crowd-sourced a vision of potential futures by commissioning essays from more than a hundred leading scientists and thinkers, in doing so claiming a key role for the overlooked genre of expository prose. The Russian Revolution was of course at the forefront of the collective utopian imaginary, and the artists of the early Soviet state were called on to realise the still-embryonic communist future. Russian avant-gardists who became exiles in the wake of the revolution found themselves differently situated, without any kind of state or cultural support. Dmitrii Tokarev explores the Parisian exile of Il’ya Zdanevich and Boris Poplavskii, and asks what could happen to the utopian project of a peculiarly Russian linguistic liberation in a French linguistic context where its particular strategies could not be easily communicated.

Sexuality and Desire Psychoanalysis may in its origins have had a socially conservative dimension, but its radical insights laid the ground for new psychologies of liberation. Wilhelm Reich advocated a new human freedom based on liberated sexuality, in contrast to Freud’s view that civilisation was of necessity based on sexual repression. Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam sets Reich in the context of the interest of his



New People of a New Life 

 13

contemporaries in child sexuality and explores his legacy in the work of Danish surrealist, Bjerke-Petersen. In her analysis of another great theorist of desire, Georges Bataille, Claire Lozier endorses Derrida’s claim that we should prefer the ‘im-possible’ to the utopian, since the impossible haunts the possible and gives its desire to social desire and action. Lozier finds in Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil a utopian impossibility which grounds a new possibility of being-together in the erotic. Imre József Balázs turns to the Bucharest surrealist group and shows how Luca and Trost fastened on Breton’s advocacy of compulsive love and amplified it into a Freudianised version of Marxism aimed at the eroticisation of the proletariat, with a nod to Reich but with a more colourful literary quality. Luca and Trost, not least in Luca’s postulation of a non-oedipal android, form a link to Deleuze and Guattari’s L’Anti-Œdipe and are remarkable for their framing of a psycho-­ corporeal strategy to counter the communist “new man”. The foundation of the new society in the body was not merely a textual exercise as far as the practitioners of nudism have been concerned. Per Stounbjerg picks up the discussion of Danish surrealism, focussing on Jens August Schade, whose eroticism paralleled the interests in sex of his contemporaries the original French Surrealists. When Schade’s work arrived in France in translation in the 1950s, it inspired a new nudist movement, Schadism, which in its emphasis on openness to contact and the accidental encounter proved influential in the Situationist circles which similarly celebrated the dérive, while Schadists put into practice some of the ideas which for Schade himself had been merely textual play. Bodily collectives have their correlative in the melancholy, isolated body. An exile from Russia who eventually returned, Aleksandr Vertinskii, was the author and performer of the famous “doleful ditties”, who performed his solo show as Pierrot. Riku Toivola shows how Vertinskii’s performances presented exile and alienation in the image of vagrancy, vagabondage, and forever unrealised yearning. This volume concludes though not with the desire of liberation or the yearning for a lost comfort, but with Jun Tanaka’s account of Gilbert Clavel’s little-­ known An Institute for Suicide, an ironic vision of state-administered suicide in a text which blends the preoccupations of decadence and surrealism in a dystopian vision of the convergence of the nihilistic service-state and the individual deathdrive.

Ideology and Aesthetics

Sam Cooper

“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” Futurism, Surrealism, Situationism, and the Problem of Utopia “Marx and Engels”, wrote Adorno in Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics, 1966), “were enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation”.1 At roughly the same historical moment, the Situationist International made a similar assessment of its own programme. When asked whether its various positions on art and politics were utopian, it dismissed the charge. It did not deny that its ambitions were to imagine and even attempt to prefigure radical changes to the organisation of production and of social life, but it insisted: “Everything we deal with is realisable”.2 In both of these instances, there is perceived to be a danger in the admission of utopianism. To represent a specific and distinct utopia is somehow to hamper the possible realisation of such a thing. For Adorno as for the Situationists, dialectical approaches are necessary, rather than any more affirmative version of utopian thought. To understand the Situationists’ method, I want to cast utopia as a problem within the avant-garde tradition that the group claimed to culminate. From the Futurists onwards, utopia was both necessary and impossible: necessary because the current organisation of social life was no longer tenable; impossible because the same conditions that necessitated utopia worked always to foreclose any effort towards its realisation. More specifically, I will argue that the relation of the historical avant-garde tradition to utopia must be considered alongside its relation to the process that makes utopia impossible – co-optation, or to use a Situationist term, récupération. If utopia stands for the possibility of imagining other worlds, récupération stands for the dogged self-preservation of this one. I will explore how the relation between utopia and récupération was discursively formulated across the earliest Futurist, Surrealist, and Situationist manifestos, and will argue that these enemies of utopia surreptitiously gestured towards utopia at the same moment as they declared it to be impossible. I will end with some suggestions

1  Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London and New York 1973, 322. 2  Situationist International, “Questionnaire”, in: Ken Knabb (ed. and trans.), Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley 2006, 178–183, here 180. Originally published in: Internationale Situationniste, 1964, no. 9.

18 

 Sam Cooper

drawn from contemporary avant-garde theory about how to think the two phenomena dialectically, which is to demand that avant-garde historiography be reconsidered.

Anxieties of Co-optation in the Futurist and Surrealist Manifestos As critics like Kenneth Burke, Marjorie Perloff, and Martin Puchner have demonstrated, the avant-garde manifesto is an intrinsically literary genre. It is also, I want to suggest, a disarmingly anxious genre. This suggestion may come as a surprise, not least because anxiety seems so far from the “violence and precision” that Perloff identifies in one of the genre’s foundational texts, F.T. Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto (1909).3 However, I am not the first to recognise that avantgarde manifestos often betray their authors’ anxieties. Five years after Marinetti’s manifesto was published on the front page of Le Figaro, the French newspaper’s editors published Ricciotto Canudo’s manifesto for an “Art Cérébriste”. Canudo’s text retains interest mostly as a bookend to the explosive first five years of Futurist manifesto-writing; Cerebrism never really took off. However, Le Figaro’s editors, perhaps now familiar with the conventions as well as the clichés of the genre, added their own preface: “Here is a manifesto in which several young artists, desirous of expressing a new way of thinking and an anxiety that is yet to be felt, have put their hopes and ambitions into words”. The editors declare themselves uninterested in Cerebrist Art itself, but are drawn instead to the act of its articulation and, specifically, to the anxiety that accompanies that articulation. “All anxieties are interesting”, they write, “Often they are fruitless, but sometimes they herald and pave the way for great progress”.4 As I hope to demonstrate, Canudo was not alone in exhibiting an anxiety at the same moment as he announced his new programme. Such anxieties pervade historical avant-garde manifestos, and serve to defer the utopias that the texts simultaneously herald. At the same moment as they describe the contours of a utopian vision, these manifestos also push it away. Utopia recedes into the future.

3  Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture, Chicago 1986, 80–115. 4  Ricciotto Canudo, “Cerebrist Art”, trans. Emily Haves, in: Alex Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London 2011, 67–70, here 67. Original publication: “L’Art Cérébriste”, Le Figaro, 9 February 1914, 1–2.



“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” 

 19

Similarly, at the same moment as they announce the arrival of their respective avant-garde groups, such manifestos question the very possibility of forming such groups. The manifestos doubt what they do as they do it. Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto sets the precedent and the clearest example of this combination of exclamatory bluster and pervasive anxiety. The latter is most apparent in relation to Marinetti’s historical consciousness. Puchner argues that manifestos often enact their own “revolutionary historiography” – a convention inherited from 19th-Century political manifestos, not least Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). “Many studies of the avant-garde”, Puchner explains, repeat the history of successions and ruptures fabricated by manifestos: symbolism broke with naturalism; futurism, with symbolism; vorticism, with futurism; dadaism, with futurism; surrealism, with dadaism; situationism, with surrealism; and so on ad infinitum. The avant-garde history of succession and rupture seems inevitable in hindsight, but it must be recognized as a specific effect of the manifesto.5

Puchner places Marinetti’s text at the fulcrum between a tradition of political manifestoing and another of artistic manifestoing. Marinetti’s commitment to “the project of a revolution”, rather than to the genre’s “socialist heritage”, gives his text particular significance in the effort to discern the type of historical consciousness bound into the manifesto genre.6 The utopia that Marinetti’s manifesto anticipates is deferred, however; its historical realisation is displaced by the avant-gardists whom Marinetti already imagines will succeed him. The wild ecstasy of his announcement of the Futurist programme is balanced by his admission of the movement’s limited shelf life. Mere paragraphs after he announces the birth of Futurism, the moment when he feels his heart “pierced by the red hot sword of joy”, Marinetti gathers himself, and confronts the two conditions that he recognises will soon kill off his movement. The first is institutional co-optation. “For too long”, he writes, “Italy has been a marketplace for junk dealers. We want our country free from the endless number of museums that everywhere cover her like countless graveyards”. In a moment of disarming sprezzatura, given the text’s sequential movement from narrative to listed proclamations to prophecy, Marinetti pauses to make a supposedly unforeseen association: “Museums, graveyards!… They’re the same thing, really, because of their grim profusion of corpses that no-one

5  Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, Princeton 2006, 71. 6  Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 79.

20 

 Sam Cooper

remembers”.7 For Marinetti, neither museums nor graveyards are places of veneration; they are where dead things are put. His challenge is to present Futurism’s vitality in such a way that does not facilitate its eventual consignment to the museum: “we, the powerful young Futurists, don’t want to have anything to do with it, the past!”8 The danger of institutional co-optation, recognised by Marinetti, would come to occupy a central place in avant-garde discourse. As Perloff reflects, “canonicity is almost invariably the enemy of the avant-garde”.9 Indeed, the hostility of most avant-garde movements towards the institutions of bourgeois society frequently betrays the movements’ awareness of their vulnerable relation to those institutions. The accusation of having been co-opted soon became a familiar gesture within the avant-garde tradition’s fierce sectarianism. As early as 1914, for example, the Russian Futurist Natalia Goncharova wrote to Marinetti to denounce Italian Futurism as a “new academicism”.10 Academic and art-world criticism on the avant-garde, likewise, has obsessively focussed on the problem of co-optation, and has inherited the anxieties found in the avant-garde’s inaugural texts. Paul Mann’s Theory-Death of the AvantGarde (1991), for example, is both a product and a critique of aporetic debates about co-optation, with its proudly pessimistic conclusion that the avant-garde tradition has served primarily to generate discourse about itself, and because bourgeois society is itself a discursive economy, the tradition has facilitated its own reconciliation with the institutions it ostensibly rejects. “The avant-garde’s historical agony”, writes Mann, “is grounded in the brutal paradox of an opposition that sustains what it opposes precisely by opposing it”.11 The other condition that Marinetti believes will kill off Futurism, even at the moment of its birth, is generational change. In a passage that is difficult to read without some degree of bathos, Marinetti declares that Futurism might be young but its representatives aren’t: “The oldest among us are thirty: so we have at least ten years in which to complete our task. When we reach forty, other, younger, and more courageous men will very likely toss us into the trash can, like useless manuscripts. And that’s what we want!”12

7  F.T. Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” [1909], trans. Doug Thompson, in: Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos, 1–8, here 6. 8  Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 7. 9  Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License, Evanston 1990, 34. 10  Natalia Goncharova, “Letter to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1914)”, in: John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt (eds), Amazons of the Avant-Garde, New York 1999, 314. 11  Paul Mann, Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis 1991, 11. 12  Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 7.



“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” 

 21

Marinetti’s addendum is crucial, blurted out as though he realises that he has displayed a weakness and desperately grasps to reclaim it as a strength. To be tossed into the trash can is “what we want”: Marinetti predicts the end of Futurism even as he announces its beginning. He chooses not to imagine the fullest realisation of Futurism, but its replacement with something else. Indeed, he even wills the future obsolescence of Futurism: its impermanence, the recognition that it will quite soon be superseded, is the very proof of its authenticity. Marinetti imagines his generation of Futurists hunted and killed by a younger generation, “driven by a hatred made all the more implacable because their hearts overflow with love and admiration for us”.13 This is an instance of aufheben, as the violent generational overthrow cuts off the promise of Futurism and continues it. The possibility of Futurism is realised and foreclosed at the same moment, and the Futurist utopia is deferred. By the time of André Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto (1924), the specific problem of institutional co-optation bore with greater weight on avant-garde theory and practice. Breton’s response to the threat of institutional co-optation was different to Marinetti’s response to the inevitability of generational co-optation. While Marinetti welcomes the future obsolescence of his movement as a form of dialectical continuity, Breton performatively overstates the incommensurability of his movement with the culture into which it is announced. At the end of the first manifesto, Breton writes, “Surrealism, such as I conceive of it asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defence”.14 Ostensibly, Breton argues that Surrealism is so radical, so fundamentally incompatible with bourgeois society, that it cannot be reconciled with and co-opted by the institutions of that society. The degree of overstatement, however, belies his anxiety rather than his confidence. Breton makes efforts in his manifesto to insulate Surrealism against its institutional co-optation. He too defers utopia: his manifesto refuses to directly represent the Surrealist vision, but nonetheless maintains its presence throughout. Curiously, to make this deferral, Breton makes recourse to Romantic and Gothic aesthetics, particularly as they appear in English literature. Not long after he presents his Freudian account of Surrealism’s dialectical composition – “the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into an absolute reality, a surreality” – Breton presents “the imagination”

13  Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 7. 14  André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)”, in: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor 2010, 3–47, here 47.

22 

 Sam Cooper

and “the marvellous” as Surrealism’s central tenets.15 “Imagination alone offers me some sense of what can be”, he writes, though its fullest realisation is obscured by the “reign of logic” and the “absolute rationalism that is still in vogue”.16 His distinction between a beleaguered imagination and an overbearing rationality is, of course, central to the versions of Romanticism offered by Wordsworth, Blake, and De Quincey, each of whom frequently reappears in later iterations of Surrealist practice, particularly its Anglicised variants. Herbert Read’s Surrealism (1936), for example, one of the first English accounts of the movement, presents Surrealism as a continuation of literary Romanticism.17 Like “the imagination”, “the marvellous” is latent to modern society but its realisation is obstructed. Breton notes “the hate of the marvellous which rages in certain men”, but insists that “the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful”.18 He demonstrates the marvellous by way of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ Gothic novel The Monk (1796), whose characters are stirred by a “passion for eternity”, and which “exercises an exalting effect only upon that part of the mind which aspires to leave the earth”.19 Breton’s use of Romantic and Gothic literary motifs lends the Surrealist utopia a sublime aspect: transcendent and terrifying by turns; present in the text by way of empty signifiers like “the marvellous” but also absent, exceeding and escaping representation. Thought that leaves the earth – true utopianism – becomes necessary and impossible in Breton’s first manifesto. Peter Nicholls offers a similar account of the paradoxical status of utopia in Breton’s Surrealism. Nicholls focuses on automatic writing, the practice of free-associative writing without conscious design that, purports to provide an unmediated experience […] of the unified self, the self in its waking and dreaming life. Only in restoring the integral connection of consciousness to the unconscious can experience become whole again. Yet at the same time, the medium of this connection is language, a system of signs whose very mode of operation entails a certain negation and separation.20

15  Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 14. 16  Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 5, 9. 17  I have written more extensively on the connections between French and English Romanticisms and Surrealisms in: “The Peculiar Romanticism of the English Situationists”, Cambridge Quarterly, 42, 2003, no. 1, 20–37. 18  Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 14. 19  Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 15. 20  Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, Basingstoke 2009, 307.



“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” 

 23

The Surrealist utopia, or the realised imagination, involves the unification of conscious and unconscious states, but the Surrealists’ conceptualisation, articulation, and communication of that utopia necessitates the use of language that simultaneously binds the project to consciousness. To represent utopia, therefore, would be to foreclose its realisation. The possibility of utopia remains immanent, but unrealised and obscured. As Henri Lefebvre wrote, in a different context but in the face of the same paradox, “the space that contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible”.21 Bourgeois society produces Surrealism as its antithesis, through its suppression of the imagination and the marvellous, but instead of allowing for a dialectical encounter, bourgeois society co-opts Surrealism, which it remakes in its own image. As Breton concludes: “Existence is elsewhere”.22

Situationist Reassessments The Surrealists’ response to the paradox of language as medium of and obstacle to utopian thinking, Nicholls argues, was to celebrate the “negating power of language”. They recognised that the capacity of language to destroy the thing it names reflects its status as “the very medium of a desire which (according to Hegel) expresses itself as a force of negation”. “Now we can see”, Nicholls continues, “how Surrealism offers itself as the summation of one major strand of avantgarde activity, as it strives at once to cancel and to preserve the Dada moment of pure negation, its lyric pursuit of the marvellous always shadowed by the death which makes it possible”.23 The Situationist International (SI) was also expressly conscious of its place in an avant-garde tradition preceded by Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. It was what Joshua Clover has recently called a “genealogical avant-garde”, whose claims are made “largely by reference to previous avant-gardes”.24 The SI was founded, in 1957, as the unification of a number of avant-garde groups of varying obscurity. In advance of the founding congress held in the Italian village of Cosio

21  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford 1991, 189– 190. 22  Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 47. 23  Nicholls, Modernisms, 308. 24  Joshua Clover, “The Genealogical Avant-Garde”, in: Lana Turner Journal, 2014, no. 7 – available at: http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/print-issue-7-contents/the-genealogical-avant-garde (accessed 11 February 2015).

24 

 Sam Cooper

d’Arroscia, Guy Debord produced a pamphlet titled “Rapport sur la construction des situations et sur les conditions de l’organisation et de l’action de la tendance situationniste internationale” (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organisation and Action, 1957). Like the young men whom Marinetti imagined would denounce Futurism, Debord is emphatic that each avant-garde movement preceding his own had been absolutely and irretrievably co-opted.25 The “puerile technological optimism” of Marinetti’s movement, Debord writes, “vanished with the period of bourgeois euphoria that had sustained it”. Dada’s “almost immediate dissolution”, Debord continues, “was an inevitable result of its purely negative definition”. Surrealism, too, had facilitated its own undoing. Its single-minded belief in the unconscious had been undone because it became commonly known “that the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic writing is monstrous and that the whole ostentatious genre of would-be ‘strange’ and ‘shocking’ surrealistic creations has ceased to be very surprising”.26 In the following year, an anonymous article in the first issue of the SI’s journal continued the assault on Surrealism, which had been “recovered and utilised by the repressive world that the surrealists had fought”.27 “Nothing”, the article declares, “constitutes such a clear return of the subversive discoveries of Surrealism than the exploitation of automatic writing [into] ‘brainstorming’”.28 The task of a new avant-garde, Debord’s “Rapport” argues, must be an expressly anti-capitalist one. It “must abolish not only the exploitation of humanity, but also the passions, compensations and habits which that exploitation has engendered”. As the positive complement to this project of negation, a new avantgarde must also “find the first elements of a more advanced construction of the environment and new conditions of behaviour”.29 To meet these challenges, the SI was to pursue the “constructed situation”, which Debord defines as “the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into

25  Debord was only just younger than Marinetti at the moments when their respective texts were published: in 1909, Marinetti was 32; in 1957, Debord was 25. 26  Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action”, in: Knabb (ed. and trans.), Situationist International Anthology, 25–43, here 27–29. 27  Situationist International, “The Bitter Victory of Surrealism”, trans. Reuben Keehan, Situationist International Online, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/bitter.html (accessed 11 February 2015). Originally published in: Internationale Situationniste, 1958, no. 1. 28  Situationist International, “The Bitter Victory of Surrealism”. 29  Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations”, 36.



“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” 

 25

a superior passional quality”.30 Yet even in this founding document, the problem of co-optation looms large. Debord discusses how modern capitalism always develops new forms of co-optation, which range from socio-economic strategies such as statist intervention in the economy, to “confusionist” strategies such as the trivialisation of potentially dangerous ideas – this is how automatic writing became mere “brainstorming”. The constitution of the SI was itself a response to the problem of co-optation, an effort to resist it, if only temporarily. The group’s programme, Debord writes, is “essentially transitory”. The situations that it constructs will be “ephemeral, without a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts”.31 The Situationists’ “Manifesto” finally appeared in 1960 in the fourth issue of the group’s journal. The anonymous text is clearly indebted to Marinetti and Breton’s first manifestos, particularly in its structure, whereby a narrative is followed by a more systematic outline of the new group’s principles, followed in turn by speculations on the new group’s likely successes and limitations. However, the text is also insistent on the SI’s singularity, not just in its particular political-aesthetic programme, but also in its historical consciousness. On the one hand, the Situationists’ “Manifesto” contains the group’s most recognisably utopian ambitions. The text argues that the automation of production and the socialisation of “vital goods” will reduce the amount of time spent at work, so the SI’s first task will be the ludic and free construction of a life not separated into work time and leisure time. Prior to that moment, the SI’s most urgent objective will be the seizure of UNESCO to fight against the bureaucratisation of art and culture.32 On the other hand, the manifesto insists upon the SI’s essential difference from the avant-garde groups that precede it; in fact, the SI will abolish the tradition from which it emerges. It “will inaugurate what will historically be the last of the crafts”, and as such will be “anti-specialist”. When the SI’s utopia is realised, “[e]veryone will be a Situationist”.33 This formulation actually repeats one from Debord’s “Rapport”, which predicts that in a classless society “there will no longer be ‘painters’, but only Situationists who, among other things, sometimes

30  Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations”, 38. 31  Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations”, 41. 32  Situationist International, “Situationist Manifesto”, trans. Fabian Thomsett, Situationist International Online, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html (accessed 11 February 2015). Originally published under the title “Manifeste” in: Internationale Situationniste, 1960, no. 4. 33  Situationist International, “Situationist Manifesto”.

26 

 Sam Cooper

paint”.34 Debord’s vision is itself indebted to Marx and Engels’ account of the possibility, in a communist society that does away with the capitalist division of labour, that an individual could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner […] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”.35 Like those of the Futurists and the Surrealists, the Situationists’ manifesto ends on the theme of judgement: “To those who don’t understand us properly, we say with irreducible scorn: “The Situationists of which you believe yourselves perhaps to be the judges, will one day judge you”.36 In 1967, Debord restated the Situationists’ relation to the historical avantgarde tradition: Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it; Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. The critical position since developed by the Situationists has shown that the abolition and realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.37

As such, the SI presented itself as the culmination of the historical avant-garde tradition that, as Peter Bürger later described, sought “the destruction of art as an institution set off from the praxis of life”.38 Importantly, the Situationists do not abandon or renounce their precursors; the avant-garde tradition remains potent despite the successive co-optation of each of its manifestations. The Situationists share Marinetti’s position that the eventual obsolescence of avant-garde movements proves their authenticity: about Surrealism, Debord writes that what is important “is not whether it is completely or relatively right, but whether it succeeds in catalysing for a certain time the desires of an era”.39 The SI’s response to the history of co-optation recognises, to borrow a phrase from Tom Bunyard, what is relevant in the tradition’s obsolescence.40

34  Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations”, 42. 35  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. C.J. Arthur, London 1996, 54. 36  Situationist International, “Situationist Manifesto”. 37  Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, London 2006, 106. 38  Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis 1984, 83. 39  Situationist International, “Situationist Manifesto”. 40  In light of the purchase by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France of Debord’s archive in 2011, the surest sign of his posthumous co-optation, Bunyard argues that the most vital aspects of Debord’s work might be those which have been co-opted, precisely because revolutionary strategy must emerge from and respond to specific historical conditions. Once those conditions pass, it is inevitable that the strategy will need to be superseded. Tom Bunyard, “Relevance in Obsolescence: Récupération and Temporality in the Work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International”, in: Fungiculture, 2014, no. 1 – available at: http://www.fufufo.com/wp-content/ uploads/2014/12/Relevance-in-Obsolescence.pdf (accessed 11 February 2015).



“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” 

 27

Récupération I want to identify a particular debate that arises from the SI’s historical consciousness, which has been pursued by some of the group’s more recent descendants, and which might offer a means of conceptualising the possibility of utopian thinking and the process of co-optation not as irreconcilable opposites in the avant-garde tradition, but as dialectical counterparts. Utopian thinking might not represent a paradox, as in the Surrealist problem of language, but a dialectical challenge. Through the avant-garde tradition, the threat of co-optation might, in fact, have served to encourage the preservation and protection of utopian thinking. To explore these suggestions, I shall first substitute the vague term co-optation for the Situationists’ preferred term, récupération. Although récupération is a familiar term in the discussion of late modernist aesthetics, politics, and the SI, it only appears in the group’s later texts. Récupération has been anachronistically applied to the SI’s earlier texts by translators in place of words like recouvert and retournement. Unlike many of the SI’s other key terms, récupération was never given a pastiche dictionary definition, nor was it as insistently circumnavigated as the titular concept of Debord’s La Société du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle). Some translators stick with “co-optation”, but this loses the black-humoured connotation of healing. More specifically – and this is why I think the Situationists chose this term rather than an existing discourse of, for example, reification – récupération tends to relate specifically to aesthetic experience and its reclamation by capitalist society. Because the Situationists chose to represent contemporary capitalism by way of a visual metaphor, the spectacle, récupération might also be understood in visual terms. However, neither the spectacle nor récupération is limited to visual fields: the spectacle “is not a collection of images” but “a relation between people that is mediated by images”.41 With tactical hyperbole, the Situationists maintained that the spectacle, as the dominant order of things, claimed all aesthetic experience as its own. As Debord and Pierre Canjuers gloomily considered in 1960, even the most antagonistic art might ultimately reinforce the spectacle’s power, but that doesn’t entirely negate art’s potency: At one pole, art is purely and simply recuperated [récupéré] by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity – an isolated creativity which serves as an alibi for the alienation of all other activities.42

41  Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 7. 42  Guy Debord and Pierre Canjuers, “Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program (1960)”, in: Knabb (ed. and trans.), Situationist International Anthology, 387–393, here 391.

28 

 Sam Cooper

Thus, art retained a privileged and necessary status. The Situationists were stuck with it just as the Surrealists were stuck with language, despite their shared recognition that the medium through which their utopias might be thought was precisely what betrayed their realisations. As Attila Kotányi put it, at the SI’s fifth conference the next year, We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that has no value. I don’t mean that we can continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be invaded [envahi] by society and used against us.43

Kotányi clearly articulates an anxiety of récupération: he concedes that the Situationists must do art, but also that art – under the conditions of the spectacle – will undo the Situationists. Récupération makes the Situationist project necessary and impossible. Kotányi’s comments were made in a debate about the role of art in the SI’s practice, the outcome of which was that the group expelled its so-called “artistic” members. The group’s practice is normally periodised into an early “artistic” phase and a later theory-oriented phase, when art was deemed rather too vulnerable to récupération. A similar shift has been recognised in avant-garde practice beyond the SI: Jonathan Eburne and Rita Felski, for example, argue that different schools of critical theory adopted, from the 1960s onwards, an avant-gardist sensibility once an avant-garde practice based on aesthetic production no longer seemed feasible: “The oppositional energies of the avant-garde find their continuation and completion elsewhere – not in the bad-faith gestures of a newly commodified neo-avant-garde, but in the practice of radical critique itself. Theory, in other words, shoulders the antinomian and anti-institutional role previously assigned to radical art”.44 The Situationists’ own theoretical turn is normally understood as a turn to negation, iconoclasm, and even iconophobia; its representative practice is détournement, an essentially disruptive act, rather than the SI’s earlier attention to the dérive, an essentially creative act. However, I want to suggest that throughout the SI’s oeuvre the group maintains the possibility of utopian thought and even suggests some of its content – this is what I mean when I propose, above, that these avant-gardes surreptitiously

43  Situationist International, “The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg”, in: Knabb (ed. and trans.), Situationist International Anthology, 114–117, here 115. Originally published in: Internationale ­Situationniste 1962, no. 7. 44  Jonathan Eburne and Rita Felski, “Introduction”, in: New Literary History, 41, 2010, no. 4, v–xv, here vii.



“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” 

 29

gesture towards utopia at the same moment as they declare it to be impossible. Like Breton’s association of the Surrealist vision with the Romantic Sublime, which exceeds representation and must be substituted for empty signifiers, the Situationist utopia is not articulated programmatically, but it appears obliquely through a discourse of immediacy, directness, and unification. As early as the Situationists’ “Manifesto”, the group decree that a “realised Situationist culture” would introduce “total participation”, the “directly lived moment”, “complete communication”.45 It is no coincidence that Jacques Rancière accuses the SI of clinging to a “Romantic vision of truth as non-separation”.46 Similarly, Debord’s La Société du Spectacle begins, “All that was directly lived has receded into a representation”.47 This opening gambit to Debord’s most comprehensive account of his thinking has the advantage of adding a temporal dimension to the related problems of utopia and récupération. The preconditions of a Situationist utopia, the experience of a life “directly lived”, have existed before now, but the emergence of the spectacle has obscured them. I am reminded again of Lefebvre’s verdict, “the space that contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible”. Geoffrey G. O’Brien has recently observed that “‘Avant’ makes a certain kind of sense only as a fantasized temporality; avant-gardes have usually described themselves less as militia and more as time travellers, or as the latter then the former”.48 O’Brien compares the avant-gardist to Adorno’s description of the lyric speaker, in “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft” (On Lyric Poetry and Society), as having returned to the “blind present” from “a fully realized ‘humanity’ […] to bestow angry gifts of analysis and judgement”.49 When he locates the not-irretrievable preconditions of a Situationist utopia in a pre-spectacular past, Debord also acts as a time-traveller, though one who moves in the opposite direction to O’Brien’s. Récupération, too, has been conceived as a temporal problem throughout the avant-garde tradition. Marinetti foresaw how younger generations would consign Futurism to the museum; Breton considered how he would be judged in the future; the Situationists judged that Surrealism might once have been revolutionary, but its status had changed. Kotányi, most clearly, depicts récupéra-

45  Situationist International, “Situationist Manifesto”. 46  Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London 2009, 6. 47  “Tout ce qui était directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une représentation”. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 7. 48  Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 189–190. 49  Geoffrey G. O’Brien, “CHORD”, in: Lana Turner Journal, 2014, no. 7 – available at: http:// www.lanaturnerjournal.com/print-issue-7-contents/chord-obrien (accessed 11 February 2015).

30 

 Sam Cooper

tion as something that happens in time: the spectacle will soon invade the SI’s works. The SI never resolved the problem of récupération. When it auto-dissolved in 1972, Debord justified the decision as necessary to prevent the SI’s organisational presence from impeding the development of a wider-reaching Situationist consciousness.50 Debord’s demand in 1991 that all his work be removed from publication and pulped can also be understood as an effort to evade récupération.

Post-Situationist Reassessments I want, finally, to turn to a lineage of post-Situationist thought that has taken up the problem of récupération in explicitly temporal terms, and which offers a means to rethink the relationship between utopia and récupération in the avantgarde tradition. This lineage is represented by the French group Théorie Communiste (TC), an example of Eburne and Felski’s transposition of avant-garde activity into theoretical practice, and a part of the “communisation” current in contemporary left thought. Specifically, TC has allied the Situationists’ understanding of récupération with Marx’s discussion of the subsumption of labour by capital. TC take from Marx two types of subsumption: formal subsumption, which is when capital engulfs an existing labour process, in a manner equivalent to how absolute surplus value is obtained by doing more of what already happens, such as lengthening the working day; and real subsumption, which is when capital adapts and remodels a labour process in its own image, in a manner equivalent to how new technologies are developed to make the extraction of relative surplus value increasingly efficient.51 TC use subsumption to periodise capitalist history: formal subsumption precedes real subsumption; a labour process is engulfed, then adapted. TC regard the 19th and early 20th Century as a period of “classical” class struggle when labour attempted to assert its self-identity in distinction to capital, principally through political organisation, unionisation, and the founding of the welfare state, all of which TC group under the term “programmatism”. As the 20th Century progressed, programmatism was formally subsumed by capital, so that the antagonism between labour and capital was made internal to capital and reconciled.

50  Situationist International, The Real Split in the International, trans. John McHale, London 2003. 51  The first two issues of the journal EndNotes (2008, 2010) offer translations and histories of TC. This account is drawn primarily from: “The History of Subsumption”, EndNotes, 2010, no. 2, 130–153.



“Enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realisation” 

 31

Labour’s self-reproduction thus became capital’s self-reproduction, which completed the real subsumption of labour. Though TC argue that the real subsumption of labour has accelerated since 1968, they point to the emergence of new forms of resistance, characterised by the proletariat’s self-negation. That self-negation, and the refusal to predict utopian alternatives to capitalism, is the crux of communisation – a project which Roland Simon, of TC, claims that the Situationists anticipated: they were, he says, “among the first to be able to speak of revolution as the abolition of all classes”.52 TC’s periodisation of subsumption is roughly equivalent to the account of récupération that I have drawn from Marinetti, Breton, and in particular the SI: subsumption and récupération as processes that happen in time, once and for all; the response, though imperfect, is to turn to negation. However, the EndNotes collective, an Anglo-American equivalent to TC, have recently offered a critique of the latter’s account of history, to question whether we can observe a causal movement from the formal to the real subsumption of labour. EndNotes suggest instead a non-linear, perhaps cyclical, movement between the two, because real subsumption can facilitate further formal subsumption elsewhere. Importantly, they argue that “[al]though formal subsumption may well precede real subsumption temporally in the case of any given capital, real subsumption is inherent to the concept of capital from the outset”.53 I want to suggest that EndNotes’s account can be transposed onto récupération. Perhaps it is not something that happens in time, but it is the dialectical counterpart to the utopian aspirations of avant-garde practice. To consider récupération in ontological rather than teleological terms casts the anxiety of the manifestos in a different light. Récupération becomes something that is constructed discursively as the necessary antithesis to utopia; both might be thought exercises rather than real possibilities. After all, despite its prevalence in avantgarde discourse, récupération remains abstract and indistinct. How might it be quantified? Is it irreversible? Does récupération, in relation to aesthetic objects, not confine texts and their afterlives to singular, fixed meanings, and ignore the variety and indeterminacy of aesthetic experience? These suggestions might serve to destabilise the verdict that the avant-garde tradition of the 20th Century was recuperated, first in its parts and subsequently as a whole. We might begin to rethink avant-garde historiography beyond the

52  “Interview with Roland Simon”, in: riff-raff, 2005, no. 8 – available at: http://www.riff-raff. se/en/8/interview_roland.php (accessed 11 February 2015). 53  EndNotes, “The History of Subsumption”, 150 (drawing on: Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Leiden 2002, 76).

32 

 Sam Cooper

version offered by the manifestos, and approach récupération not as a historical inevitability but a discursive formation that accompanies and works dialectically to sustain the avant-garde’s utopian ambitions. We are yet to become Situationists, but we may be enemies of utopia for the sake of its realisation.

Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias In recent years, both modernism studies and utopia studies have drastically expanded in scope. Under the impulse of the “New Modernist Studies”, critics have been exploring a wide array of texts, produced in roughly the first half of the 20th Century, which, in some cases, share very little with such icons of British modernism as The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room or Ulysses. Of interest to the re-invigorated field of modernism studies have been a keen awareness of those figures operating in the margins of modernist networks, popular and ephemeral publications and the notion of the everyday. An important impulse to the field has come from periodical studies and the focus on modernist magazines has proven one of the most fruitful “expansions”. Especially in order to understand early modernist writing, work that bridges the late 19th Century and modernism’s key year 1922, magazines such as The English Review, The Egoist, Rhythm and Blast have proven invaluable. In parallel, utopia studies have opened up from a focus on the genre of the literary utopia to what Ernst Bloch has called “the utopian impulse”, which enables a connection between a diverse constellation of genres and experiences.1 In contrast to the wariness with the totalitarian implications of utopian projects after World War II, the reception of the work of Ernst Bloch and Karl Mannheim in the 1980s made it possible to reengage with the concept of utopia. Bloch’s concept of the utopian impulse, which refers to the desire to configure a better world rather than to a concrete plan for a better future, and Mannheim’s grappling with the problem of the relationship between ideology and reality, have spurred critics to look into the concrete surroundings in which utopian impulses come about and to which they respond. In modernism studies, this has led to a renewed attention to the spectre of political energies that informed literary projects of the early 20th Century. Nathan Waddell’s Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (2012) and Rosalyn Gregory’s and Benjamin Kohlmann’s Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945 (2012), for example, cover a differentiated terrain of utopian pulsations. Both address the question of how various modernist writers experimented with the discourse of utopianism, in ways that enable them to scrutinise the here-and-now. These writers’ utopian texts, Waddell explains quoting Bloch,

1  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, Oxford 1986.

34 

 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

are “transcendent without transcendence”.2 They invest in change, in breaking with the present situation, yet without a clearly defined goal in mind. For Gregory and Kohlmann “minor” utopias, a concept Jay Winter introduces in his chapter in their volume, refer to “imaginings of liberation usually […] on a smaller scale, transforming some but not all of the world, and lacking the grandiose pretensions or the almost unimaginable hubris and cruelties of the ‘major’ utopian projects”.3 This chapter elaborates on the notion of the minor utopia in relation to the dreams of a better future, published by soldiers or military personnel in World War I military magazines, and to the constellations or enclaves in which these magazines were created – constellations, we show, that enabled modernist work to develop. Curiously, the expansive drive of the New Modernist Studies has not yet led to a full-scale reconsideration of World War I writings. Of course magazines published by soldiers differ from modernist magazines in that they function as part of the military system, lacking the autonomy claimed by modernist projects. The current scholarly interest in the institutional entanglements of those modernist projects, however, calls for a reconsideration of the non-modernist status of those publications. Conversely, scholars of World War I rarely enter into conversation with modernism studies, old or new. In the field of World War I studies, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995) highlight the discrepancy between modernist and wartime writing. Fussell notes that the “roster of major innovative talents who were not involved with the war is long and impressive”.4 By contrast, the writers who were moved “to recall in literary form the war they had actually experienced” are considered “lesser talents, always more traditional and technically prudent”.5 For Winter, the war did not lead to modernist expression. By his account “the Great War reinforced romantic tendencies” in poetry and encouraged “traditional elements”.6 And yet, in a very obvious sense, the war is what links both fields. Especially in a British literary context, World War I counts as the event that ushered in modernism; expatriates Pound and Eliot rose to the forefront of the literary scene after the war, making

2  Nathan Waddell, Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900– 1920, Basingstoke 2012, 9. 3  Jay Winter, “Minor Utopias and the British Literary Temperament, 1880–1945”, in: Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (eds), Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945, Basingstoke 2012, 71–84, here 73. 4  Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford 1977, 314–315. 5  Fussell, Modern Memory, 315. 6  Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge 2014, 221.



World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias 

 35

the break with Edwardian and Georgian poetry official. Scholars, however, have tended to focus on the ways in which canonical modernist authors have dealt with the traumatic memory of the war rather than, as Vincent Sherry argues we should, with the material reality of the war years. Put bluntly, the war, for modernism studies, is what led to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), which captures the horror of the war years as an impersonal interval in its “Time Passes” section, and to David Jones’ redemptive musing on heroism in his meditation on the notion of an interval, In Parenthesis (1937). Only recently have critics started to concentrate on modernism in relation to the political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of wartime Britain. Mark Larabee’s Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction (2011) and Paul Jackson’s Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine (2012) are good examples of the ways in which critics have started to respond to Sherry’s diagnosis that modernism studies suffers a “dearth of commentary on the modernist war – as a historical subject, as an event reconstructed from its record in contemporary political and intellectual culture”.7

Modernism and Military Magazines? In Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1999), Robert Pippin quotes Nietzsche’s summary of the modernist time sense: “some massive, traumatic event, the ‘great event’ of modern times has occurred. Some possibility of going on as we had before has come to some sort of end”.8 In 1914 this amorphous trauma turned real and writers, both highbrow London intellectuals and soldiers at the front, responded to it. Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003) looks into the London literary and intellectual circles of the war period, but the literary context of the trenches and military units, with which those modernists who served such as T.E. Hulme, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and David Jones would have been familiar, is still largely unexplored. This chapter argues that the understanding of time, as expressed in the literary contributions to military magazines, is where modernist experiment and wartime writing meet – without, that is, subscribing to the same agenda. The grappling with the hereand-now in these texts, with the moment of war, constitutes the starting point for minor utopian reconfigurations.

7  Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism, New York 2003, 7. 8  Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, Oxford 1999, 78.

36 

 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

Modernist writers considered themselves freed from a determinist Hegelian historical scheme, but they did not sever ties with the past per se. As is well known, the sense of freedom, the ability to pick and choose from history and a variety of aesthetic and intellectual traditions, is at the heart of such modernist masterpieces as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos. The clarion call to “make it new”, informed by a Bergsonist understanding of time that highlights tapping past energies in order to invent new constellations, leads to autonomy: artist and art are unbound. The modernist sense of literary autonomy goes hand in hand with a sense of urgency and contrariness. Modernist writers are famously writers of “the moment”. Unmoored from a past, they explore alternative aesthetic, psychological and social formations, different from the 19th-Century frameworks they had grown up in, without investing in a “beyond”. The flipside of autonomy is the sense of alienation and the painful awareness that “now” is all there is. This is what many soldiers in the trenches experienced. Of course the military regime imposed a very strict routine, but on a more existential level these soldiers were living Nietzsche’s projected traumatic event, acutely experiencing that the “possibility of going on as we had before has come to some sort of end”. In the magazines they published while in service they often turned to literature to deal with that experience. While, as Winter points out, these compositions are riddled with traditional elements and romantic echoes, it does not imply that, contrary to the modernists, these authors continued to work in accordance with older literary models. Their literary frame of reference may predominantly have been that of a popular romanticism, but their confrontation with a radically new configuration of life and death asks for a more nuanced reading of the ways in which they understood time and temporality. A piece that exemplifies the extent to which time was an issue for soldiers fighting in the war is “Our Dying Speech”, published in The Gasper, the magazine of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st Royal Fusiliers that ran from September 1915 to September 1916. “Our Dying Speech” was published in the November 1915 issue. This is how it opens: “We are somewhat in the position of the Pirate Chief in ‘Peter Pan’, who, fearing that, when he died, time might not allow the making of his dying speech, would make it now”.9 The Peter Pan reference may take us into the domain of popular culture, but the narrative gesture of voicing a conclusion, not at the actual end of one’s life, points to a radically fractured experience. Death, here, is not so much a distant Other or glorious conclusion, as an ever-present twin. The destructive shock of World War I showed that the increasing control over, and regularisation of life processes, which Michel Foucault situates as starting in the 18th Century and which had catalysed the 19th-Century ideal of progress,

9  Editorial, “Our Dying Speech”, in: The Gasper 1, 1916, no. 9, 1.



World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias 

 37

were not able to keep the threat of random death at bay. Quite to the contrary, biopolitical measures taken during the war – which we take here to include the use of yperite as chemical warfare agent enabling mass destruction, as well as the mobilisation of bodies on an unseen scale – positioned death at the very heart of life. Wilfred Owen’s phrase “these who die as cattle” has become part of our collective memory, and numerous critical journalists, as well as soldiers writing about the conditions in the trenches, tended to describe the circumstances as bestial. Such a return of the human being to an animal state, for Foucault, implies a radical encounter with death since “[t]he animal appears as the bearer of that death to which it is, at the same time, subjected; it contains a perpetual devouring of life by life, […] containing within itself a nucleus of anti-nature”.10 As Alan Warren Friedman has argued, a narrative struggle with death is a constant in modernist fiction. Where Victorian death comes with stable rituals, and, however unexpected, is given a place in a meaningful chronology, modernist death is all over the place.11 In modernist fiction, Friedman argues, death is elided, refracted through memory, or presented as a material fact. Modernism’s fascination with a time that is out of joint is, in many ways, a response to the destructive encounter with death that was World War I. While soldiers on the frontline did not have the rhetorical skills or the time to elaborate on the mechanisms of this radical experience of death as a narrative problem, they did address it. “Our Dying Speech”, furthermore, is a bold critique of British war policy, with the soldiers refusing to relinquish their right to speak as citizens: Lord Kitchener, in the early days of the War, said that, as a soldier, he had no politics. Should the same apply throughout the Services – even to the immense number of temporary soldiers that constitutes half the electorate? As soldiers we are manifestly and totally debarred from criticizing the orders of our superiors. Nor have we any desire or occasion to do so. But we do feel that as citizens we have, and should exercise, our right to criticize the War policy of our Government. The Yellow Press and the Cocoa Press make their conflicting voices heard in the land, but the tongue of neither speaks the thought of the country. And what the Army thinks of the conduct of the War no paper knows or cares […]. Everyone now knows that the Dardanelles Expedition ought to have been begun two months earlier than it was, or not at all. […] It is the Home Government we blame. One hundred thousand casualties make a costly blunder. […] What German armies can do we can do: what German officers can do our officers can do: but at present military matters are merely manipulated by a Council of inexperienced civilians, which we accept as a Government.12

10  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York 1973, 273. 11  Alan Warren Friedman, Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise, New York 1995, 18. 12  Editorial, “Our Dying Speech”, 1.

38 

 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

Soldiers at the front were writing from a paradoxical situation. On the one hand they were at the heart of the conflict, fighting for Britain, yet on the other hand they found themselves on the outside: they felt unrepresented, both politically and in the public sphere. In this sense, the soldiers writing for these magazines shared with the modernist authors whom Sherry focuses on a deep mistrust of the mainstream press. As Graham Seal notes in his study The Soldiers’ Press: Very little official propaganda […] appeared in trench journals, though reactions to it featured aplenty in the deep mistrust of and antipathy to the mainstream press. So pernicious and notorious did British mainstream propaganda and press reports become that the phrase “Can’t believe a word you read” became a catch-cry among troops at the front and was reflected in trench commentary, verse and illustration.13

Soldiers used magazines and gazettes to make themselves heard and to imagine alternatives. Quite often, these alternatives took the form of a utopian projection or a dream. The fascinating aspect of these “dream” projects in trench journals and unit magazines is not that they are traditional pieces coming out of the core of the modernist schism between old world and new, but that, in line with modernist experiment, they complicate our understanding of belonging (tradition or “inside”) and rupture (“outside”).

Utopia Inside Out In his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia Paul Ricoeur draws on Karl Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie (1929, translated 1936) to argue for an ongoing dialectic between ideology and utopia, with the former standing for shared context, or tradition, and the latter for rupture. Ricoeur’s understanding of ideology and utopia is important in the context of modernism studies because it modifies our understanding of the utopian “make it new” impulse aimed against a beguiling ideology that distorts reality. That is the scheme we find in theoretical frameworks that have left their mark on modernism: we find it in Marx’s opposition between practice or science versus ideology, in Bergson’s understanding of a true sense of time that would set people free, and in Freud’s theories of the unconscious. For Ricoeur, the (Marxist) model that sets ideology in opposition to reality is inadequate, because reality is symbolically mediated from the beginning. Ricoeur

13  Graham Seal, The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War, Basingstoke 2013, 132.



World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias 

 39

admires Mannheim for grappling with exactly this problem.14 He takes both ideology and utopia to be the driving forces of reality. A model that sets utopia in opposition to reality is inadequate because reality is not a given to be discovered but always in the making, with conflicting forces operating on it. Ideology serves as the integrative force in this processual reality and the utopian impulse is what makes possible change and rupture: “The intention of the utopia is to change – to shatter – the present order”.15 On the whole, Ricoeur’s dialectic serves integration more than revolution, with utopia, or the possibility to imagine an elsewhere, as a cure for the pathology of ideological thinking, “which has its blindness and narrowness precisely in its inability to conceive of a nowhere”.16 Because it is focused on the ways in which ideology and utopia interact, Ricoeur’s scheme would seem an apposite vantage from which to consider utopian contributions to World War I magazines, which were part of the ideological war machinery. The utopian projections of the soldiers in the magazines, however, complicate Ricoeur’s outline in which a utopian vision formulated in tension with a present collective constellation (ideology) makes it possible to revamp that constellation. This movement is what we find in a classic 19th-­ Century utopian text such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887, which, from the mind of a 19th-Century dreamer, pictures the transformed world of the future, the year 2000, and thus urges contemporary readers to engage in collective future-building. Texts such as “The Ideal Army” (Gasper, October 1915) or “Utopia”, published in October 1917 in The Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, complicate this movement because they set out from an enclave, which they seek to secure as enclave. They do not, in other words, voluntaristically call for a better future. For example, the writer of “The Ideal Army” does not picture an escape from the Army per se. He keeps the Army formation but transports it to a Biblical land of Cockaigne, where there are no Army rules:

14  George Taylor summarises Mannheim’s paradox: “One of Mannheim’s real achievements is that he expands the concept of ideology to the point where it encompasses even the one asserting it. The viewpoint of the absolute onlooker, the one uninvolved in the social game, is impossible, says Mannheim. As Ricoeur puts it, ‘To call something ideological is never merely a theoretical judgment but rather implies a certain practice and a view on reality that this practice gives us’ (lecture 10). Any perspective expressed is in some sense ideological. The circularity of ideology is Mannheim’s paradox […]”. George Taylor, “Editor’s Introduction”, in: Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York 1986, ix–xxxvi, here xv. 15  Taylor, “Editor’s Introduction”, xxi. 16  Ricoeur, Lectures, 17.

40 

 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

‘Twas in a vision fair, some adumbration Of Paradise came faintly to my sight, And I beheld the absolute negation Of Army methods now considered right. In this, my dream, I saw a camp enchanted, Where orders never seemed to be obeyed, Where rifles were in all directions slanted By Tommies unashamed and unafraid. Fatigue machines I saw there, automatic, An endless string that pulled your rifle through, With, if your shooting chanced to be erratic, Oceans of oil and miles of four-by-two. The packs were all suspended from the shoulders And held aloft by little gas balloons, While buttons, to the joy of us beholders, Were black; and there were many other boons.17

Not directly involved with military action but very much a part of the war machinery, the author of “Utopia” projects migration plans for the Third London General Hospital. She does not dissolve the hospital but has it transported to a pastoral setting: There is a corner in Sussex to which I should like to transplant the Third and all that therein is from April to October. It is a jewel of a village set in the perfect matchless setting of the Downs, and the site where the Hospital should miraculously appear is by a river that winds down to a tiny haven where the great white ships might transfer their precious burden to barges to take them “home” […]18

In a sense, these writers’ utopian visions are concerned with keeping their present situation intact rather than with projecting a way out that would lead to large-scale reform. They want for the horrors of the war to go away, but they do not want to get out of the community they find themselves in. At this point it is worth pointing out that the original Utopia, More’s foundational text, also concerns an isolated community, an island separated from the mainland when the founder causes a great trench to be dug. Fredric Jameson underscores the radical secession of More’s island – a quality that sets it apart from Bellamy’s world state. “The Machiavellian ruthlessness of Utopian foreign policy […]”, Jameson reminds us, “rebukes all Christian notions of universal brotherhood and natural law and

17  Strozzi, “The Ideal Army”, in: The Gasper 1, 1915, no. 71, 3. 18  Eve, “Utopia”, in: The Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, 3, 1917, no. 1, 19.



World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias 

 41

decrees the foundational difference between them and us, foe and friend, in a peremptory manner worthy of Carl Schmitt”.19 Small-scale community feeling, it appears, are part of utopia’s origins. While the utopian projections we encounter in the trench journals and unit magazines share with More’s utopian blueprint a division between “us” (the unit, the hospital) and “they” (society at large), they operate differently from More’s model. The writers of these texts start from a moment and a place that is outside of social space and everyday life yet that, at the same time, constitutes a regularised interval: they’re soldiers and nurses working for their country, heroes, not rebels. It is this situation – the situation of being outside and yet belonging, of an outsider’s utopian enclave created by an ideological machinery rather than utopia as a healthy counter-force in ideological practice (as in Ricoeur’s model) – that gets explored in the contributions to the magazines. These writers do not seek to break with a given situation and dramatically build a new life. Rather, we can read them as wanting to prolong a non-situation: the feelings of community and outsider-experience are genuine, but they are also ideologically sanctioned as the morale that helps the overall war apparatus function, and thus not on the “outside” at all. In addition, those feelings are fractured by the pervasive presence of loss and death, they are intervals for breathing, not spaces one can build a life in. In line with the modernist minor utopias Gregory and Kohlmann outline, these texts relinquish totalitarian ambitions.20 In fact “The Ideal Army” and “Utopia”, caught between outsider utopian desire and military ideology, seem to foster little ambitions whatsoever, which sets them apart from the imaginative modernist energy at work in the texts that are the subject of Utopian Spaces of Modernism. And yet, it is precisely the complex outsider/insider dynamic of those World War I constellations that also made it possible for budding modernist projects to develop during the war. The situation of being outside and yet belonging that we find, on a micro level, in World War I trench journals and unit magazines is related, on a macro level, to the situation of the state of exception, that borderline situation at the intersection of the legal and the political when legislative organs suspend democracy because of an extreme situation (war, insurrection, resistance). World War I played a decisive role in the generalisation of such a state of exception, which has become a much-discussed concept for political situations of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Concerning the British situation, Giorgio Agamben reminds us that

19  Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, New York 2005, 5. 20  Gregory and Kohlmann, Utopian Spaces of Modernism, 7.

42 

 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

immediately after war was declared, the government asked parliament to approve a series of emergency measures that had been prepared by the relevant ministers, and they were passed virtually without discussion. The most important of these acts was the Defence of the Realm Act of August 4, 1914, known as DORA, which not only granted the government quite vast powers to regulate the wartime economy, but also provided for serious limitations on the fundamental rights of the citizens (in particular, granting military tribunals jurisdiction over civilians).21

The state of exception, Agamben shows, problematises a logic of inside and outside. “How”, he asks, “can an anomie be inscribed within the juridical order?”22 He argues that the state of exception “concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur […]. Being-outside, and yet belonging: this is the topological structure of the state of exception”.23

Christopher R.W. Nevinson and The Gazette of the 3rd: Minor Utopian Entanglements The state of exception has been taken as a fruitful paradigm for modernist studies: the suspension of democracy created space for individual vanguard writers to think about and experiment with political alternatives in their work.24 What has not been explored, however, is how the particular constellations of a military magazine and unit, as regulated “outsides”, in some cases became the environment for modernist experiment to develop. The futurist war drawings that Christopher Nevinson published in the Gazette of the Third London General Hospital show that this, too, is possible. Unlike “Utopia” and “The Ideal Army”, these drawings are minor utopian visions that counter the ruling army ideology, not in the least through their radical forms, from within a paradoxically ideological enclave position. Before the war, Nevinson’s work was utopian in a much clearer sense. With the publication of the futurist manifesto “Vital English Art”, which the artist devised together with his Italian brother-in-arms Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the

21  Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago 2005, 18–19. 22  Agamben, State of Exception, 23. 23  Agamben, State of Exception, 23, 35. 24  For a detailed discussion of the ways in which avant-garde authors have employed literature to envision and experiment with political possibilities, see for example: Sascha Bru, Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Garde, Edinburgh 2009.



World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias 

 43

English public was given “the signal for battle”.25 “Vital English Art” presented the readers of The Observer, in which it first appeared, with a totalitarian vision: it wanted to “break away violently” from tradition, from “the pretty-pretty, the commonplace”.26 Hailed with much rhetorical violence, that clean break in art made room for a new world to be designed. In futurist projects the English public could already find the first utopian blueprints for this reinvention. Almost as soon as war broke out, Nevinson enlisted in the army and, after a few months spent as a Red Cross ambulance driver in northern France, he joined the military hospital in Wandsworth as an R.A.M.C. orderly. Yet for Nevinson as for most futurists, the collision with the reality of warfare proved in many ways to be anti-climactic. What remained of the programmatic cult of violence, machines and speed was a “sense of broken promises and shattered ideals – both political and aesthetic”.27 What would happen to the futurist aesthetic? And more importantly for us here, in light of all this horror, could futurist forms still celebrate utopian visions? The ten little-known drawings that Nevinson published or reproduced in the hospital magazine between October 1915 and July 1919, we argue here, bear the mark of his artistic struggle (see figs 1–3). In his introductory essay to Modern War Paintings (1917) the critic P.G. Konody suggests we think of Nevinson’s war art as a “modified Futurism” that offered a “compromise between the purely representational and a carefully thoughtout geometric”.28 Indeed, as these drawings come to mirror reality more closely and become less radically futurist in form, they grow darker and harsher at the same time, for now they incorporate the horrific reality of warfare. To avoid the “pitfalls” of committing exclusively either to abstraction or to verisimilitude is, as Osbert Sitwell wrote of “England’s only Futurist”, to give in art “the whole business of warfare”.29 We can discern a similar balancing act in the work of

25  The publication itself was not entirely uncontroversial: Lewis and other signatories sent a letter to The Observer dissociating themselves from futurism, and disrupted one of Marinetti’s performance-lectures at the Doré Galleries. See: Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922, Cambridge 1986, 124. 26  Filippo T. Marinetti and Christopher R.W. Nevinson, “Vital English Art”, in: Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, Futurism: An Anthology, London and New Haven 2009, 196– 198. 27  Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, Princeton 2009, 234. 28  Christopher R.W. Nevinson, Modern War Paintings by C.R.W. Nevinson, with an essay by P.G. Konody, London 1917, 20. 29  Osbert Sitwell, “Introduction”, in: Albert Rutherston (ed.), Contemporary British Artists: C.R.W Nevinson, London 1925, 1–31, here 24.

44 

 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

Fig. 1: Sketch by C.R.W. Nevinson, Gazette of the Third London General Hospital (October 1915), Imperial War Museum, London. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Fig. 2: Sketch by C.R.W. Nevinson, Gazette of the Third London General Hospital (February 1916), Imperial War Museum, London. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.



World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias 

 45

Fig. 3: Sketch by C.R.W. Nevinson, Gazette of the Third London General Hospital (April 1916), Imperial War Museum, London. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

­ evinson’s­Vorticist nemesis, Wyndham Lewis. Reliving his war experience Lewis N wrote in Rude Assignment: “Upon waking I found an altered world: and I had changed too, very much. The geometrics which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling”.30 Of Nevinson’s idea that radical forms violently anticipated a vision of the future, then, little seems to have remained by the time he arrived at the Third London General Hospital, a year, almost to the date, after the publication of his utopian manifesto. The concept of the “minor utopia” offers a productive way to think about and conceptualise Nevinson’s artistic struggle with futurism during the initial war years. His art work in the Gazette no longer propounded totalitarian blueprints. Instead, for the artist, the hospital and its magazine provided an opportunity to urgently re-engage with the now, that is, with the “moment” of a war that took place outside of England. Such an acute experience of the historical present, which entailed a reconfiguration of life and death, is what we also encountered in the editorial of The Gasper, and for many it led, as it did for Nevinson, to a “queer insight”,31 a rethinking of principles that precluded all former fanfare

30  Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment, Santa Barbara 1984, 139. 31  In a letter to Robbie Ross. See: Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London 1990, 197.

46 

 Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, Marysa Demoor

and ­proclamations­in capital letters. Rather, Nevinson’s futurist reconfiguring of the present was meant to convey a critique of the war. His depiction of hospital life as he felt it is dark and kafkaesque in its disregard of human individuality. The hospital appears mechanical in his drawings, and the human beings that are gathered there exist only as wounded and distorted bodies, in effect nothing more than mere cogs in the larger machinery of warfare. That critical stance is significant, for it illustrates that the futurist forms of Nevinson’s drawings in the hospital magazine were still carried forward by a utopian impulse, to borrow Bloch’s words, but importantly an impulse that had lost a belief in its own messianic ambitions. By its very name, futurism (even in a modified form) is forward-looking. Implicit in Nevinson’s futurist critique of the status-quo, then, is a modest belief in a different world beyond the here-and-now, the “imaginative proximity”32 of which, as Perry Anderson has suggested, informed the modernist aesthetic at large. Nevinson’s pieces are out of tune with most other voices in the hospital Gazette, which serve, as our reading of “Utopia” and “The Ideal Army” has illustrated, to affirm rather than to counter the community-ideology of the army. To oppose is to do so on different (artistic) terms. In that sense Nevinson’s revision of futurism and his inherent critique substantiate the notion, as old as conflict itself, that the critical representation of the horrors of war required a new language. Yet central to our present inquiry, this apparent opposition that sees his vision defying Eve’s “Utopia” in the pages of the same magazine is easily overlooked, even as it evidences the complex and dynamic nature of war utopianism as well as of army periodicals more generally. Nevinson’s drawings constitute cracks in the uniform voice of the Gazette. Those cracks – the minor utopian impulses of a futurist project countering a dominant army ideology from within – prevent wartime artistic efforts from stagnating. Yet, the case of “the only Futurist in England” demonstrates that utopian constellations are more complex than Ricoeur suggests, for, especially during the critical historical moment of World War I, we have seen utopia emerge from the heart of ideology. Modernist energy took root in army magazines as a counter-force, and Nevinson as an artist can be said to exemplify that crucial dialectic. On the one hand, he sensed in the catalogue of his 1916 exhibition that “[t]he intensity of the present time is producing a vital art in England”,33 thereby correlating the exceptional moment of war to a sense of opportunity for artists to oppose tradition and status-quo and

32  Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution”, in: New Left Review, 144, 1984, 96–113, here 104. 33  Nevinson, Modern War Paintings, 21.



World War I, Modernism and Minor Utopias 

 47

to experiment with form. And the art of the moment is vital precisely because it can do such things. Yet, the state of emergency is a two-way street: while it instils the world of art with a sense of momentum, it implies at the same time a politicisation of artistic institutions and discourses. This explains why Bru defines the state of emergency in terms of “an anachronism”, for it sees “[t]he relative autonomy of modern literature, along with its function to devise aesthetic modes for contemplating society [cast] back into a premodern state in which literature and art are momentarily subjugated to political (and religious) demands”.34 Like Wyndham Lewis and Paul Nash, Nevinson was commissioned as an official war artist in 1917. Ever since, all his work pertaining to the conflict had required, in his own words, “the approval of the British Empire”.35 One such infamous case of censorship, which has become one of the better-known anecdotes from the war archive, bears repeating here. On designing his second one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1918 the painter had been informed that his Paths of Glory (1917), an impressionistic representation of two dead British soldiers in No Man’s Land, was in violation of DORA regulations that prohibited the depiction of the dead. “I pasted brown paper over it rather than leave a hole on the wall”, the artist related in his autobiography, “and wrote ‘Censored’ across it in the manner of French newspapers”.36 In so doing, he cleverly subverted the conventions of art in order to convey a political commentary on the practice of censorship. Nevinson embodied many of the paradoxes of the state of exception: a radical futurist turned official war artist, one who experimented with futurism’s forms yet came to reject its totalitarian project, developing from within the pages of an ideologically anchored hospital periodical, a minor utopian alternative.

34  Bru, Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes, 37–38. 35  Christopher R.W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice, New York 1938, 142. 36  Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice, 149.

Marjet Brolsma

Utopia through Art Building Bridges and Curing Culture in War-Torn Europe In the autumn of 1914 the German expressionist painter Franz Marc (1880–1916) glorified World War I as a “European civil war, a war against the inner, invisible enemy of the European spirit”. Marc, who in August 1914 had voluntarily enlisted for military service and died in the Battle of Verdun, considered the war to be a “purification” or “blood sacrifice” that had the capacity to cure “our European disease”.1 Like Marc, many artists and writers in the belligerent countries interpreted the Great War in spiritual terms and welcomed its outbreak as a catharsis that could save Europe from cultural decay. In their view modernity had led to a “disenchantment of the world” and had triggered an unbridled materialism, a moral decay, a fragmentation of society, a lack of spirituality and – particularly worrying for artists – a tasteless art without style. In 1914 a large number of these critical intellectuals embraced the war as an incitement for creativity and hoped it would help modern man to escape the boredom and wearisome routine of everyday life in Europe’s “decadent”, “weakened” and “lethargic” industrialised capitalist society. In their perception the war seemed to satisfy a craving for adventure, heroism, danger and a radical unselfishness, that before 1914 was suppressed by the prevailing materialism and rationalism. Many members of the cultural elite actively contributed to the war propaganda, that was of great importance in this first total war. They praised their nations’ supposed superiority and unity in articles, pamphlets, open letters or poems; and justified their countries’ war efforts, often by claiming to fight for the salvation of the “true” European “culture” or “civilisation”. However, not only did intellectuals play a notorious leading role in the “cultural mobilisation” of 1914, many artists and writers were also at the forefront of the “cultural demobilisation” that took place after 1918. Most of these pacifist and cosmopolitan intellectuals, who often initially had supported the war, but during or after 1914–1918 had changed their minds, now came to believe that the war was a catastrophic result of the crisis of culture, instead of the desired solution or cultural “purification” that Marc had anticipated. In their perception, the war had liberated the unconscious drives and hidden instincts of men that had been

1  Franz Marc, Schriften, Cologne 1978, 163–167. All translations of quotations are by the author except noted otherwise.

50 

 Marjet Brolsma

supressed for too long by the dominance of the rationalist and “mechanistic” worldview of the liberal bourgeoisie of the 19th Century. Not only rationalism but capitalism too was believed to have paved the way for the uncontrolled national egoism that had plunged Europe into the trenches in 1914. Instead of offering a “catharsis”, the Great War had turned out to be a catalyst that exacerbated the dissatisfaction with European civilisation that had been growing among intellectuals since the fin-de-siècle. The fact that during 1914–1918 a large number of artists had abandoned their “natural” international openness in favour of a fanatic nationalism, and neglected their alleged duty as cultural guides and “good Europeans”, was seen as symptomatic for this cultural crisis, at least in hindsight. After the guns had fallen silent, many members of the artistic elite felt that bringing about a durable peace and more humane world, and curing the ailing European civilisation, required a restoration of the lost European brotherhood of writers and artists. In the post-war years many initiatives were undertaken to realise this utopian dream of intellectual fraternity in Europe. For example, two days before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the French socialist newspaper Humanité published a Déclaration d’indépendance de l’esprit, drawn up by the French writer and pacifist Romain Rolland (1866–1944). Already in September 1914, Rolland had opposed the war frenzy and called upon European artists, novelists and academics to rise above the battle, instead of being carried away by irrational political passions and nationalist delusions. In this widely read and discussed manifesto of 26 June 1919, Rolland again urged the cultural elite of Europe to unite and to maintain its moral independence from national, political or class interests.2 Less than two months before, the Clarté movement was founded by the French war veteran and Marxist novelist Henri Barbusse. The adherents of this international movement envisaged both a reconciliation of Europe’s intelligentsia and a renewal of the social and political order, as necessary preconditions for a lasting peace. In 1921 the PEN-club was established in London as an international forum where poets, essayists and novelists from all over the world could meet and exchange thoughts and in this way enhance peace and international understanding. In August 1922, the Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle (CICI) was set up as an advisory body to the League of Nations. One of its most prominent and active members was Paul Valéry, the French poet who had diagnosed Europe in his famous essay La crise de l’esprit (1919) with an alarming “crisis of the mind”. Internationalist cultural periodicals like The Criterion (1922), Europe (1923), Revista de Occident (1923) or Europäische Revue (1925) also aimed

2  Romain Rolland, Quinze ans de combat (1919–1934), Paris 1935, 1–6.



Utopia through Art 

 51

at repairing the artistic and literary bonds in Europe and functioned as transnational meeting places, where ideas about the future of Europe were articulated, exchanged and disseminated across national borders. Many of the pacifist and cosmopolitan artists and writers participating in these and other internationalist initiatives, viewed art as the perfect instrument for bringing about peace and reconciliation and curing the cultural crisis that seemed to have led to the Great War. This supposed function of art will be explored in this article by analysing the artistic views and activities of the chief-editor of the Dutch monthly De Stem (The Voice, 1921–1941) Dirk Coster (1887–1956). Not only was Coster one of the leading art critics in the Netherlands in the 1920s, he also was an important cultural mediator who was involved in various initiatives to enhance solidarity among European artists and writers. His monthly De Stem familiarised the Dutch audience with the humanist thought of prominent European intellectuals such as Thomas Mann, Julien Benda and Romain Rolland, and was at the time regarded as the most important internationalist cultural journal in the Netherlands. Therefore, particular emphasis will be placed on Coster’s contacts across borders, his internationalist engagement and the cultural transfer of ideas from abroad.

Art as a Remedy for War-Torn Europe The attraction of art as a remedy for Europe’s problems can be explained in several ways. First of all, its significance as a transnational European frame of reference gained a new urgency in the years after World War I. Referring to artistic developments abroad seemed to confirm the notion of a shared European culture and to enhance a feeling of transnational solidarity and understanding. For instance, T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion reported regularly on the literary state of affairs in different European countries as a way of fostering mutual awareness. This same ideal encouraged the German cultural mediator Ernst Robert Curtius to publish extensively about French art and culture, and Stefan Zweig to write a hagiography of Romain Rolland presenting his close French friend as “the European conscience”. In particular the common European artistic and cultural heritage was invoked as a fundament for a shared identity. In the introduction to Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957, Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria have emphasised that in the interwar-years not only the ideal of a federal European state or a political cooperation of nation-states seemed to provide an answer for Europe’s crisis, but according to many intellectuals the

52 

 Marjet Brolsma

past also seemed to offer the essential elements for constructing a cultural unity.3 Like cultural nationalists who in the 19th Century had enthusiastically harnessed paintings, poems, historical novels or musical works to revive the supposedly glorious past of their nation and to confirm the alleged trans-generational affiliation with the nation’s ancestors, internationalist writers and artists in the 1920s turned to the great European painters and novelists of the past in order to stress the ancient roots of a common European culture and subsequently to promote the idea of a shared European destiny. When in 1932 the CICI for example organised a conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s death, all participants praised the German writer as an exemplary European. In their perception Goethe was a role model for contemporaries because of his universalist convictions and his capacity to maintain his intellectual independence in an era of transition and fundamental insecurity.4 Art not only was appreciated as a binding force and a means to communicate transnationally or as a barometer of civilisation that passively reflected the level of modern culture, it was also seen as a lever to actually change society. In his well-known work Rites of Spring (1989) Modris Eksteins argues that the advance of anti-rationalism during and after World War I was accompanied by an aestheticisation of life and the notion that art and reality had blended. Therefore, after the Great War the avant-garde ideal of changing society through art was shared in much wider circles.5 Also in the Netherlands, which had remained neutral during 1914–1918, the perception of art as an agent of societal change and of regeneration of culture was widespread among intellectuals. For instance, Theo van Doesburg, the leader of De Stijl, believed his neo-plasticism could cure capitalist individualism and nationalism, while the architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage published in 1915 plans for a “Pantheon of Humanity” to be set up on a hill in central Europe after the Armistice. It was not just artistic pioneers like van Doesburg and Berlage who dreamt of bringing about a brotherhood of man through art: many of their more traditional colleagues shared the same view. When in 1920 the Dutch artistic establishment met at the conference of the umbrella organisation Verbond van Nederlandsche Kunstenaarsvereenigingen (League of Dutch Artists’ Associations)

3  Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria, “Introduction: Europe during the Forty Years Crisis”, in: Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria (eds), Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957, New York 2012, 1–9, here 2. 4  Annemarie van Heerikhuizen, “Paris 1933: A ‘société des esprits’ Chaired by Paul Valéry”, in: Carlos Reijnen and Marleen Rensen (eds), European Encounters: Intellectual Exchange and the Rethinking of Europe (1914–1945), Amsterdam and New York 2014, 139–154, here 143. 5  Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Boston 1989, xv–xvi.



Utopia through Art 

 53

dedicated to “the duties of the artist in a changing society”, they too concluded that, in the words of the museum director Hendrik Enno van Gelder, artists should be galvanised by “the ideal of a unity of beauty and society”.6 In the 1920s Dirk Coster was one of the leading literary critics in the Nether­ lands and a prominent member of the Dutch branch of the PEN-club. Coster championed a synthesis of art and society, and embraced literature as a means to create a more humane world. Already before the Great War he had engaged in a controversy with the poet Willem Kloos, one of the leading figures of the aestheticising Tachtigers (“Eighty”) movement, who had proclaimed that poetry should be “the most individual expression of the most individual emotion”.7 Coster’s deeply intertwined artistic convictions and anti-rationalist world view were strongly inspired by Lebensphilosophie or “philosophy of life”. This heterogeneous philosophical movement, that drew heavily on the German Romantics and the ideas of Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, had, in particular in Germany, become very popular in the first three decades of the 20th Century, because of its radical rejection of rationalism, its prospect of an all-encompassing synthesis, and the beneficial connotations surrounding the concept of “life” (like “authenticity”, “youthfulness”, “vitality”, and “strength”). The adherents of Lebensphilosophie contrasted the notion of a superficial reality only visible to the eye with the belief in a concealed, elemental “life force” or vital power, that couldn’t be captured by the intellect. Their basic assumption was that man could only access this deeper, hidden layer of reality through his inner world, emotions, intuition or instinct. According to its promoters, the life force or “stream” was a pervasive, omnipresent and all-embracing principle, an immanent dynamic power that comprised the material and spiritual world, individual and cosmos, the temporary and the eternal. Through a process of affirmation – Bejahung (Nietzsche), Erlebnis (Dilthey) or intuition (Bergson) – the individual human being was able to make contact with this universal, hidden life stream, and experience – or “live through” – his place in the totality of life. Coster, who was deeply influenced by the German Romantics, believed that an uncompromising acceptance or affirmation of “life” would lead to a self-fulfilment of the individual and a more humane society. In his perception literature was an important gateway to this salutary effect of the immanent life force, because novelists, poets and artists seemed to hold a more vigorous will to live

6  Kunst en kunstenaars in de veranderende maatschappij. Handelingen van het derde Algemeene Kunstcongres te ’s Gravenhage 7, 8, 9 october 1920, The Hague 1921, ix, 264–265. 7  Paul de Wispelaere, “Dirk Costers levensbeschouwing”, in: De Vlaamsche Gids, 42, 1958, 577–588, here 578–579.

54 

 Marjet Brolsma

than common mortals. Genuine great works of art had the capacity to disclose to man the exceptional vital energy that had motivated the artist when he created his work. A person who became “intensely” captivated by a book or painting, turned into a “co-creator” and was, according to Coster, galvanised by the same regenerative “life force” that had inspired the artist. Therefore, the most important judging criteria for an art critic in Coster’s view were “intensity” and “humanity”.8 Although he never described himself as an expressionist, Coster’s artistic beliefs were closely related to the German and Belgian exponents of humanitarian expressionism, with whom he shared the romantic utopian ideal of bringing about a pan-human brotherhood through literature.9 After the horrors of World War I, Coster placed his hopes in particular on Fëdor Dostoevskii, whom he – as did for example Hermann Hesse, André Gide, John Middleton Murray and Stefan Zweig – embraced as a harbinger of renewal because of what was assumed to be his typically Russian spiritual and redemptive potential, and his fierce assault on Western rationalism. In his highly-acclaimed essay Dostojevski (1920), Coster praised the Russian novelist as an exponent of Lebensphilosophie and as a brilliant psychologist, who had exposed the hidden, unconscious world, where elementary instincts and intuition were in control, and was therefore able to cure “Europe’s spiritual need” which had culminated in the collective violence of 1914.10

A New European Spirit in Art and Literature Dirk Coster not only tried to contribute to a reconciliation in Europe and a rejuvenation of culture by promoting Dostoevskii’s revitalising message, he also was involved in the project that resulted in De nieuwe Europeesche geest in kunst en letteren (The New European Spirit in Art and Literature, 1920), a Dutch-German-Italian-English-Belgian collaboration aimed at an international understanding by informing the European audience about literary developments

8  De Wispelaere, “Dirk Costers”, 580–581, 585; Dirk Coster, “De beteekenis der litteratuur voor het leven”, De Stem, 3, 1923, 587–597, here 593; J.J. Oversteegen, Vorm of vent. Opvattingen over de aard van het literaire werk in de Nederlandse kritiek tussen de twee wereldoorlogen, Amsterdam 1969, 113–114. 9  Paul de Wispelaere, Van Stem tot anti-Stem. Een historisch beeld van het tijdschrift De Stem als brandpunt van humanistische en vitalistische stromingen in de Nederlandse literatuur tussen de twee Wereldoorlogen, Antwerp 1974, 51. 10  Dirk Coster, Dostojevski. Een essay, Arnhem 1920, 12.



Utopia through Art 

 55

abroad. Dirk Coster and the other participants – Friedrich Markus Huebner (1886–1964), Romano Guarnieri (1883–1955) and the ambassadors of the Clarté movement Douglas Goldring (1887–1960) and Paul Colin (1895–1943, presented as a Frenchman rather than as a Belgian) – had met in the summer of 1919 and in the following winter joined forces for a lecture series in the Netherlands.11 In his introduction to De nieuwe Europeesche geest in kunst en letteren, which contained chapters about literary life since 1914 in Holland, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and France, and also appeared in German as Europas neue Kunst und Dichtung (1920), Coster had emphasised the spiritual unity of Europe.12 In Coster’s view, the “new European spirit” was a transnational driving force that was most clearly reflected in literary works. In 1914 this European spirit that transcended national borders had manifested itself in a nationalist “blind heroism”. However, due to the bloodshed of the trenches and the disappointing Treaty of Versailles of 1919, it had gradually evolved into an urge for justice and no-more-war which in the post-war years instigated Europeans all over the continent, even in countries like the Netherlands that had not been drawn into the conflict.13 In his foreword to the German edition, the cultural mediator Huebner also claimed that the misery of the war had awakened in all the peoples of Europe the concealed, underlying love for their European fatherland, and that art had the unique ability to foster this European awareness and brotherly love. According to Huebner, who in August 1914 initially had been overwhelmed by the war frenzy, becoming acquainted with literary and artistic life abroad, would enhance the therapeutic effect of this “European contemporary spirit”. Art and reality in Europe had never before been so closely intertwined and therefore Huebner argued that salvation was to be expected of artists, not of statesmen or successful entrepreneurs.14 Which particular form of art Huebner had in mind became

11  Huebner displayed a clear interest in the Clarté movement and had published extensively about Barbusse and Clarté in the German socialist journal Die Glocke. Whether he actually had joined the movement is however unknown. See: Hubert Roland, Leben und Werk von Friedrich Markus Huebner (1886–1964). Vom Expressionismus zur Gleichschaltung, Münster 2009, 84–86. 12  Three years later also a Czech edition appeared under the title Nové evropské umění a básnictví (1923) which included an introduction by the playwright Miroslav Rutte. Huebner’s essay on “Expressionism in Germany” was published in French translation in Paul Colin’s journal L’Art Libre (in January, February and March 1920) and Coster’s contribution “The Development of Modern Dutch Literature” also appeared in French as “Panoroma d’une littérature inconnue” in La Revue européenne in 1927. 13  Dirk Coster, “Voorwoord”, in: Dirk Coster, Paul Colin, F.M. Huebner, Douglas Goldring and Romano Guarnieri (eds), De nieuwe Europeesche geest in kunst en letteren, Arnhem 1920, 5–12. 14  Friedrich Markus Huebner, “Einführung”, in: Dirk Coster et al. (eds), Europas neue Kunst und Dichtung, Berlin 1920, 7–15, here 7–10.

56 

 Marjet Brolsma

clear in his contribution to the volume, the essay “Expressionism in Germany”, in which he stated that expressionism was able to “fraternally unite the spirits and turn Europe for the first time into a single unified emotional sphere”.15 Less than a year after the publication of De nieuwe Europeesche geest in kunst en letteren similar utopian expectations motivated Dirk Coster to found the literary monthly De Stem. In the first issue Coster and his co-founder and close friend Just Havelaar (1880–1930) declared their journal to pursue a reconciliation of ethics and aesthetics, which had been ruthlessly separated by the rationalism of the supposedly styleless 19th Century. They extolled the allegedly regenerative, reciprocal influence of art and society and – inspired by Romain Rolland’s ideal of intellectual independence – stressed the neutrality of their journal. De Stem declared its intention to publish essays, poems and stories that exposed an unspoiled “life intensity” and vigorous “humanity”, regardless of the political or religious affiliation of its author.16 Coster’s journal was international not just in its outlook but also in its content and printed articles of a considerable number of foreign intellectuals, among others of Maksim Gorkii, Rabindranath Tagore, Thomas Mann, André Gide, Romain Rolland and René Arcos (the editor of Europe). De Stem also offered a platform for young humanitarian expressionist poets and novelists from Flanders, like Wies Moens, Victor J. Brunclair, Eugeen de Bock, Marnix Gijssen and Achilles Mussche. Several poems by Moens, Gijssen and Mussche appeared in Coster’s Nieuwe geluiden (New Sounds, 1924), a selection of Dutch poetry from the years 1918– 1923 that was inspired by the well-known expressionist anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (Twilight of Humanity, 1919) edited by the German journalist Kurt Pinthus. In his introduction Coster underlined that the European literature of the post-war period was characterised by a strong and turbulent urge to “surrender” to the all-encompassing “élan of life”. However, this intensified will to life had not always been as regenerative as he had hoped and had sometimes manifested itself in “fascism”, “harshness” and “cruelty” instead of “love” or “humanity”.17 Coster’s concern about what he described as the “dark will to life” that seemed to galvanise many of Europe’s young poets and writers, would strongly increase in the following years. Once again, he looked abroad for support. Coster p ­ ublished

15  Friedrich Markus Huebner, “Het expressionisme in Duitsland”, in: Coster et al. (eds), De nieuwe Europeesche geest, 123–148, here 139. Huebner’s “Der Expressionismus in Deutschland” is reprinted in: Thomas Anz and Michael Stark (eds), Expressionismus. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910–1920, Stuttgart 1982, 4–13. 16  Dirk Coster and Just Havelaar, “Brief aan de medewerkers van De Stem”, De Stem, ­1, ­1921, 2–6.­­ 17  Dirk Coster, Nieuwe geluiden, Arnhem 1924, xix–xx.



Utopia through Art 

 57

large parts of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals, 1927) in De Stem, as well as Thomas Mann’s “Deutsche Ansprache” (German Address) in which the German novelist, after the electoral gain of the Nazis in September 1930, had “appealed to reason” and exposed the vitalistic, irrational underpinnings of Nazism. By the end of the 1920s Coster felt compelled to give up the ideal of political neutrality as well as his long-held belief that artists and writers would pave the way for the regeneration of culture and for European reconciliation. The engagement of intellectuals with Fascism and Nazism – ideologies that in the 1930s would also attract his old internationalist friends Huebner and Colin – confronted Coster with the downside of his anti-rationalist Lebensphilosophie, as much as with the impotence of his utopian ideal to change society through art. In the speech he delivered celebrating the tenth anniversary of De Stem, Coster concluded: “In our time, it is no longer about works of art. It is about the salvation of the world”.18

Conclusion Like Franz Marc, Dirk Coster devoted his life to art. The Dutch literary critic and the German expressionist painter were members of the same generation, who shared an internationalist outlook and a common desire to solve Europe’s cultural crisis. But unlike Marc, who in 1914 believed the Great War was a “purification” that had the capacity to save Europe from cultural decay, Coster regarded the war frenzy of the European artistic elite as a symptom of the cultural crisis, rather than its cure. In many ways Coster can be regarded as exemplary among the European artists and writers who after the catastrophe of 1914–1918 believed that art would be the perfect medicine to restore intellectual fraternity and to cure the crisis of European civilisation, which in their view had led to World War I. Coster was strongly inspired by humanistic ideas and developments abroad and in the 1920s engaged in various attempts to build transnational bridges and to regenerate culture. However, by the end of the decade, he abandoned his ideals. It was the renewed susceptibility of European artists and writers to violent and nationalist delusions and their engagement with the totalitarian extremes that in the perception of Coster and like-minded contemporaries scattered the utopian dream to bring about a more peaceful and humane society through art.

18  Dirk Coster, “Bij het tienjarig bestaan van ‘de Stem’ II”, De Stem, 10, 1931, 401–408, here 403.

Tessa Lobbes

Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict The Dutch Writer Frederik van Eeden and His Mission as an Internationalist during World War I1 On 4 August 1914, the very same day that Germany invaded Belgium, the famous Dutch writer and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) wrote in his diary: “The war is a moment of cataclysm […]. These eruptions need to calm down first, and then, the Kreis will build a new life. This catastrophe will only bring this new life closer”.2 Amid the dystopian present of the Great War, van Eeden sounded surprisingly hopeful. Referring to the Forte Kreis – his pre-war international, peace-loving “council of wise men”3 – van Eeden strongly believed that war between nations would lead to international forms of politics and culture. Fascinatingly, he especially saw possibilities for the continuation of internationalist ideals in a small country which was not involved in the war, namely his own country, the neutral Netherlands. In cultural life, the Great War gave rise to movements of withdrawal and rapprochement. On the one hand, the War obstructed international dialogue. As nationalism rose, borders were closed and former friends became enemies. But on the other hand, it also created new spaces and opportunities for intercultural encounters. Neutral countries such as the Netherlands, Spain, Argentina, Switzerland and Sweden inhabited these new spaces.4 Neutrality reduced

1  Research for this article is carried out within the framework of the HERA-project “Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict: Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents during the First World War (CEGC)”. I would like to thank Geert Buelens, Hubert van den Berg, Marjet Brolsma and Pieter Huistra for their useful comments. 2  Frederik van Eeden, Dagboek, 1878–1923. Deel III/1911–1918, Culemborg 1971, 1382. 3  Jan Fontijn, Trots verbrijzeld. Het leven van Frederik van Eeden vanaf 1901, Amsterdam 1996, 341–360. 4  Other spaces of cultural encounters were for example the battlefields and the prisoners of war-camps where soldiers from diverse nations and empires encountered each other, naturally within a forced context. For colonial encounters on the battlefields, see: Daniel Steinbach, “Power, Majorities and Local Minorities: German and British Colonials in East Africa during the First World War”, in: Panikos Panayi (ed.), Germans as Minorities during the First World War: A Global Comparative Perspective, London 2014, 263–288; For encounters in POW-camps, see: Heike Liebau, “Das Deutsche Auswärtige Amt, indische Emigranten und propagandistische

60 

 Tessa Lobbes

the ­Netherlands often to a powerless bystander, yet that same neutrality and the absence of severe censorship also allowed opportunities to emerge. The Netherlands served as a “free zone” where intellectuals, spies and refugees from diverse nations could interact. The absence of war activity meant that neutral countries formed excellent places to reflect on the post-war society. Dissident opinions espoused in pacifist essays and European projects were published and discussed far more openly in neutral zones than in occupied territories. This continuation of intercultural contacts also incorporated more officially orchestrated encounters, as Dutch intellectuals were confronted with a variety of cultural propaganda from all belligerents, both France and Germany as well as Great Britain, each trying overtly or covertly to persuade them.5 In his articles on German cultural propaganda, Hubert van den Berg interestingly shows that propaganda had many faces. It did not result solely in unilateral exchanges in which belligerents tried to make Dutch intellectuals more familiar with German or French culture, but also in more bilateral cultural exchanges, based on a belief in a so-called shared culture.6 In this article, I seek to analyse the impact of the Great War on the internationalist ideas of the Dutch writer Frederik van Eeden. How did the War, which at the time was often framed as a conflict between German Kultur and French civilisation, affect his views on cultural encounters and on the relationship between the nation, internationalism and pacifism? After all, many European intellectuals, famous for their European or cosmopolitan attitudes, such as the writers

­ estrebungen unter den südasiatischen Kriegsgefangenen im ‘Halbmondlager’”, in: Franziska B Roy, Heike Liebau and Ravi Ahuja (eds), Soldat Ram Singh und der Kaiser. Indische Kriegsgefangene in deutschen Propagandalagern 1914–1918, Heidelberg 2014, 109–144; For neutral Switzerland, see: Landry Charrier, “Réseaux de sociabilité et échanges internationaux en Suisse pendant la Grande Guerre”, in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 62, 2012, no. 3, 424–438. 5  On French propaganda in neutral nations, including the Netherlands, see: Jean-Claude Montant, La Propagande extérieure de la France pendant la première Guerre mondiale: l’exemple de quelques neutres européens, Lille 1989. On German propaganda in the Netherlands, see: Hubert van den Berg, “The Autonomous Arts as Black Propaganda: On a Secretive Chapter of German ‘Foreign Cultural Politics’ in the Netherlands and Other Neighbouring Neutral Countries during the First World War”, in: Gillis Dorleijn, Ralf Grüttemeier and Liesbeth Korthals Altes (eds), The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de Siècles (1900 and 2000), Leuven 2008, 71–120; Nicole Eversdijk, Kultur als politisches Werbemittel. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen kultur- und pressepolitischen Arbeit in den Niederlanden während des Ersten Weltkrieges, Münster 2010; Ismee Tames, “Oorlog voor onze gedachten”. Oorlog, neutraliteit en identiteit in het Nederlandse publieke debat, 1914–1918, Hilversum 2006. On British cultural propaganda, see: Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After, London 1989. 6  See: Van den Berg, “The Autonomous Arts as Black Propaganda”.



Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict 

 61

Guillaume Apollinaire, H.G. Wells and Stefan George, were transformed in August 1914 into more nationalistic war enthusiasts. Moreover, internationalist and pacifist attitudes of that time had complex meanings and were often mingled with patriotic outbursts and a worship of violence.7 How did van Eeden, as a Dutch outsider, respond in his writings and activities to this discordant atmosphere? Did he limit himself to a rather idealist reflection, or did he undertake concrete actions? What role did he assign to the Netherlands during the War and how did he use the benefits of a neutral Dutch free zone to promote his ideas?

Confronted with War Van Eeden interpreted the outbreak of war as a personal failure, despite his self-awareness that he had done much to try and prevent it. Since the 1890s, van Eeden had been working intensively on the creation of a more peaceful, internationalist and socially equal world. He was known as a utopian thinker who had replaced the focus on the aesthetic with an engaged and ethical approach to writing, visible in his psychological novels. Through his speeches and translated essays on international cooperation, such as Happy Humanity published in New York in 1912, he had built up a global network of like-minded intellectuals such as the American writer Upton Sinclair, the German philosopher Erich Gutkind, the French writer Romain Rolland, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Swedish scientist Poul Bjerre. His fascination with German culture was reflected in the strong presence of Germans such as Gutkind, the theologian and writer Florens Rang and the advocate of social anarchism and pacifism Gustav Landauer in the Forte Kreis, founded in June 1914, alongside the Dutch writer Henri Borel and the Swede Bjerre. In addition to internationalism, van Eeden felt equally attracted to socialism. Inspired by Henry Thoreau, he had established his

7  Geert Buelens, “Peace through War and Revolution: Socialism, Nationalism and Internationalism in Flemish, Dutch, and French Literature of the Great War”, in: Thomas Shannon and Johan Snapper (eds), Dutch Literature and Culture in an Age of Transition: The Berkeley Conference on Dutch Literature 2005, Münster 2007, 47–59; Geert Buelens, “Facing Your Friend as Enemy: Nationalism and Internationalism in Avant-Garde Circles around the Great War”, in: Hubert van den Berg and Lidia Głuchowska (eds), Transnationality, Internationalism and Nationhood: European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, Leuven 2013, 43–59; Francis Mus, Hubert Roland and Dennis van Mol, “Discours internationaliste et conscience identitaire des échanges culturels: l’exemple belgo-allemand (Der Sturm, Résurrection)”, in: Sascha Bru et al. (eds), Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, Berlin 2009, 267–282; Roland Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914, Kansas 1982, 1–13.

62 

 Tessa Lobbes

own social experiment in 1889, a self-supporting commune named Walden.8 Van Eeden was quite a typical pre-war utopian intellectual, with his seemingly paradoxical ambitions. He combined socialist and aristocratic thinking. The Kreis, for instance, was a gathering of elitist gentlemen, who believed that artists were the best-equipped people to lead the world. He also rejected socialist materialism, holding on to a religious view of ethics and egalitarianism and being fascinated by Spiritualism.9 The German invasion of Belgium, just another small neutral nation and the closest neighbour of the Dutch, immediately undermined van Eeden’s international contacts. Despite his hope that the Kreis would survive the hostilities, it fell apart. Rang and Gutkind defended the German invasion and, according to a bitterly disappointed van Eeden, were “totally drunk” with nationalism.10 The violation of international law, the rumours of German atrocities and the confrontation with Belgian refugees made van Eeden sick for days and increased his mood swings. The Belgian cause troubled the writer so much that he felt obliged to take responsibility. He abandoned neutrality and took a firm, what was then called “anti-German” stand.11 Indeed, the maintaining of official Dutch neutrality implied the exclusion from coalitions and battlefields, but not the complete aloofness of all Dutch citizens. By 1915, as was the case in many other neutral nations, Dutch society was divided between anti-Germans, pro-Germans and neutrals.12 Van Eeden expressed his commitment to the war far more in journal articles, political essays and public lectures than in poems, novels or plays. The horror, as he often lamented, obstructed his creativity. In September 1914, van Eeden published a series of open letters to the Belgians, as well as manifestos ­condemning­

8  Fontijn, Trots verbrijzeld, 341–360. 9  Mary Kemperink, “Wohin führt der Weg? Utopismus und Vitalismus in der niederländischen Literatur des Fin de Siècle (1890–1910)”, in: Jaap Grave, Peter Sprengel and Hans Vandevoorde (eds), Anarchismus und Utopie in der Literatur um 1900. Deutschland, Flandern und die Niederlande, Würzburg 2005, 65–76. 10  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1391, 1397. 11  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1384, 1387, 1398. 12  Ismee Tames, “‘War on Our Minds’: War, Neutrality and Identity in Dutch Public Debate during the First World War”, in: First World War Studies, 3, 2012, no. 2, 201–216; For Switzerland, see: Landry Charrier, “La Suisse pendant la Grande Guerre, ‘front de la dissidence’ et plate-forme d’échanges franco-allemands”, in: Alisa Miller, Laura Rowe and James E. Kitchen (eds), Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War, Newcastle 2011, 125–144.



Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict 

 63

German atrocities.13 By signing the King Albert’s Book,14 the most prestigious pro-Belgian propaganda initiative, he most publicly expressed his anti-German attitude, an act which Germany, but also the Allies, could not allow to pass by unnoticed. Van Eeden soon came into contact with the French propaganda services, based in the French Embassy in The Hague. His occasional collaboration with French propaganda officers consisted of secretly handing over some of his articles in order for them to be translated and disseminated in the French press.15 This covert cooperation was beneficial for both parties. It allowed van Eeden to promote his ideas abroad, and the French authorities were eager to use the support of a famous neutral voice, who was presented as impartial – which of course van Eeden was not.

Blueprints for an International Community One could wonder if van Eeden’s involvement in French propaganda implied that he had turned against German culture. Had he become a supporter of pure French civilisation? And had he consequently lost his faith in international cooperation? Not at all. Van Eeden was far more pro-Belgian than exclusively pro-French. He loved French culture but did not judge it as more valuable than German culture. He saw nationalism as a general European problem, also condemning British and French chauvinism, but his aversion to the German version was more virulent.16 Yet van Eeden was far more anti-Prussian than generally anti-German. Quoting

13  Alfons Diepenbrock, Frederik van Eeden and Samuel Muller, “Leuvens verwoesting. La Grande Allemagne. Ondeugdelijk excuus”, in: De Groene Amsterdammer, 13 September 1914, 1; Frederik van Eeden, “De oorlogstoestand. Frederik van Eeden aan de Belgen”, in: De Telegraaf, 14 September 1914, 5. 14  Thomas Henry Hall Caine, King Albert’s Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women throughout the World, London 1914, 170. 15  Van Eeden passed some of his articles to his Kreis-friend Borel, who worked as a translator at the French propaganda office where van Eeden’s articles were sent to French journals as Le Figaro. So far, I have not found any evidence of official transfers of French money to van Eeden for his cooperation. See for example his open letter to the Flemish people published on 14 September 1914 in De Telegraaf, translated into French and published in Le Figaro: Frédéric van Eeden, “En Belgique. Lettre d’un Hollandais aux Flamands”, in: Le Figaro, 28 December 1914, 2. See also: Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1404; letter from Borel to van Eeden, 16.09.1914, 18.09.1914, 26.09.1914, Bijzondere Collecties (BC), University of Amsterdam (UvA), Collection van Eeden (VE), Borel dossier. 16  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1407, 1415.

64 

 Tessa Lobbes

the British writer Bernard Shaw, one of the few war opponents, he wrote in his diary: “We are fighting Potsdam, not Germany. The Germany of Bismarck has bored us for more than fifty years, we want to see if the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven is still alive”.17 Van Eeden shared Shaw’s belief that the destruction of Prussian militarism would bring back the real German culture of Beethoven, which opened the way to “the liberation of humanity”.18 Here, van Eeden, like many of his colleagues, was referring to the power of this catastrophe to produce regeneration. The War, he was certain, was not meaningless. This idea formed the heart of his essay Bij ’t Licht van de Oorlogsvlam (At the Light of the Flame of War) in 1915 – a compilation of his lectures in the autumn of 1914 – in which he advised the Dutch reader to see “the light” the War would bring. He presented the War as a necessary step in what he interpreted as a systematic development of the world towards peace. Once the militarist-nationalist culture had been exterminated, a new life would be built which should above all be international.19 Inspired by Switzerland and the United States, van Eeden presented a new post-war world as a federation of small communities. In consultation with his good friend Rolland, who operated as an anti-war publicist from Swiss exile, he advocated the European idea, in the form of a European federation. The small communities could consist of Walden-like groups or national communities. These groups, as van Eeden put it, would still need armies, but on a reduced scale.20 His internationalism clearly did not go hand in hand with pacifism or a rejection of violence, a fact already illustrated by his defence of a military counter-attack against Germany. As the translator of Tagore’s poems on peace, van Eeden was approached in September 1914 by Dutch pacifist and anti-militarist organisations, which had a strong tradition. He authorised their use of a number of his poems but refused to join them. On the contrary, van Eeden supported military service – even allowing his son to join the army – arguing that a country must be able to defend itself when it was attacked, as the Belgian army was demonstrating.21 His vision of international life also encompassed more democracy and a republican form of government. The War would lead to the overthrowing of all monarchs – his own Dutch Queen included – emperors and tsars: “In this war, it

17  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1386. 18  Frederik van Eeden, Bij ’t Licht van de Oorlogsvlam, Amsterdam 1915, 105. 19  Van Eeden, Bij ’t Licht, 95–105. 20  Romain Rolland, “Pour l’Europe. Un appel de la Hollande aux intellectuels de toutes les nations ”, in: Au-Dessus de La Mêlée, Paris 1915, 101–108; letter from Rolland to van Eeden, 12.01.1915, BC, UvA, VE, Rolland dossier; van Eeden, Bij ’t Licht, 103–107. 21  Correspondence between Frederika Broeksmit and van Eeden, BC, Uva, VE, Broeksmit dossier; Frederik van Eeden, “Weerbaarheid of weerloosheid”, in: De Telegraaf, 7 August 1915, 1.



Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict 

 65

all boils down to the fact that peoples do not feel truly represented by their rulers […] the governments are power-hungry […]. Democracy stands for: right to representation”.22 While maintaining his earlier focus on the leadership of intellectuals, he also called on numerous occasions for more democracy and expressed his large enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution in 1917.23 Van Eeden thus stuck to his internationalist belief and became more of a democrat, but the War also forced him to re-examine the value of the nation-state, as his call for a federation of national communities demonstrates.

The “Dutch Calling” Van Eeden developed a rather ambivalent attitude towards the role of the nationstate. In 1915, he reflected on a play about the misleading nature of national sentiment – in which a Dutch boy who feels German spies on Holland and in the end discovers that he is British – but at the same time he conceived a national anthem in which the Netherlands was cherished as the loveliest place on earth.24 Like many of his Dutch colleagues the War forced van Eeden to reflect deeply on the character and the orientation of the Dutch nation. His aversion to military chauvinism did not translate into a total rejection of nationalism. In contrast to the aggressive patriotism of large nations, van Eeden praised Dutch nationalism for being “good and pure”, relating it to the non-violent and peaceful attitude of a small nation.25 His sensitivity to a feeling of national belonging and the existence of specific national characteristics also increased during the War. For instance, he welcomed the positive effects that the common Dutch effort to guard the borders had on the Dutch character. Following a visit to his son’s barracks, he wrote: “The Dutch soldiers look loutish, unsightly, but patient and cooperative. I see many good things in this supreme effort by our people”.26 Van Eeden approvingly observed a shift from a “narrow-minded”, “materialistic” attitude to a more “decisive” and idealistic one.27

22  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1381, 1574, 1576–1577. 23  Letter from van Eeden to Rolland, 3.11.1914, BC, UvA, VE, Rolland dossier; van Eeden, Bij ­’t Licht, 87–105. 24  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1423; Chr. Krah and Frederik van Eeden, ‘Volkslied’, in: De Groene Amsterdammer, 18 July 1915, addendum. 25  Eeden, Bij ’t Licht, 128–129. 26  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1382, 1386, 1400. 27  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1386; van Eeden, Bij ’t Licht, 117–125.

66 

 Tessa Lobbes

The idea of a “pure” and moderate Dutch nationalism enabled van Eeden to reconcile the national and the international, by presenting the pursuit of internationalism as being an asset of the Dutch. “Here in Holland”, he claimed in December 1914, “we have to keep cosmopolitan life going. We are chosen to do so”.28 Van Eeden’s portrayal of the Dutch as a people elected for promoting internationalism is closely related to the idea of a self-appropriated “Dutch task” of peace, and this international orientation was repeatedly claimed by Dutch artists, politicians and academics from the end of the 19th Century on. According to the topoi, what was perceived as this “natural” Dutch longing for internationalism stemmed from its neutral stance, its small size and its tradition of tolerance, referring to historical examples such as the Peace Conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907.29 Similarly, van Eeden referred in 1915 to a “Dutch calling”. The Dutch had to set an example, by showing their “good and pure nationalism”, their longing for peace and their respect for international law to other nations. Van Eeden’s national anthem incorporated a similar message, praising his country for its devotion to “peace and freedom”.30 In contrast to several defenders of this “Dutch calling”, van Eeden refused to label this pursuit of internationalism as a specifically Dutch national characteristic. Looking at the struggle for freedom in the Netherlands, he argued: “This is not a Dutch product or monopoly. This is the freedom desired and needed by every nation in its highest development. But due to the special circumstances mentioned, we are better equipped than many other nations to have a pure sense of this freedom and to put it into practice”.31 From van Eeden’s perspective, the Netherlands, as a small, international-oriented nation, had already reached a high level in the evolution towards a world community, but any nation could achieve this level in time. Nevertheless, he added critically that the Dutch also still had a long way to go. He often observed a shallow interpretation of internationalism and rejected what he described as the “peace rush” in The Hague. These burgeoning pacifist initiatives, he argued, often had little ideological depth

28  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1408. 29  For the idea of a “Dutch calling” in scientific life, see: Geert Somsen, “‘A small people but a great nation’: Scientific Prestige and International Mediation in the Netherlands”, in: Madelon de Keizer and Ismee Tames (eds), Small Nations: Crisis and Confrontation in the 20th Century, Zutphen 2008, 47–63. On the world of historians, see: Jo Tollebeek, “The Hyphen of National Culture: The Paradox of National Distinctiveness in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1860–1919”, in: European Review, 18, 2010, no. 2, 207–225. 30  Van Eeden, Bij ’t Licht, 126–135; Krah and van Eeden, “Volkslied”. 31  Van Eeden, Bij ’t Licht, 128.



Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict 

 67

or were motivated by crude materialism, as Dutch merchants preferred to stay out of the War, instead making big profits from smuggling.32 By portraying the Netherlands as a facilitator of cosmopolitanism and peace, van Eeden presented a concrete agenda for action during the War. He thus did not limit himself to merely writing about the ideal future; he also wanted to put his ideas into practice. This agenda testified to van Eeden’s wish to design specific roles or tasks for neutral Dutch intellectuals during the War. Yet, this idea of a neutral task was not a Dutch prerogative and also inspired Danish, Swedish and Swiss writers, academics and artists who, equally in their capacity as neutrals, assigned themselves similar roles as advocates of peace and freedom. During the War, van Eeden kept close contact with neutral intellectuals as Poul Bjerre and the Swedish politician Hjalmar Wijk, the Swiss exile Romain Rolland, and the Swiss winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Alfred Fried with whom van Eeden discussed plans for the restoration of the international community and peace.33

Repairing the Dialogue Van Eeden developed two plans for the reconstruction of the international community. In the first two years of the War, he focused on bringing intellectuals from all nations back together. He believed that Prussian militarism had to be defeated not only with weapons, but also through international debate. An Allied military victory was not a final step. German intellectuals, he argued, also had to become aware of their moral mistakes.34 By restoring the international dialogue, nationalist Germans would be confronted with different opinions. Van Eeden undertook diverse projects in this respect. For instance, he never lost contact with the German cultural world during the War and consciously decided to continue writing to his “drunk on patriotism” friends such as Rang and Gutkind. He also approved the further publishing of his pre-war novels which had been translated into German before the War, hoping the ideas expressed in them would influence

32  Van Eeden, Bij ’t Licht, 117. 33  On neutrals and their longing for the creation of specific “neutral” political and cultural roles during World War I, see for example: Linda Sturfelt, “From Parasite to Angel: Narratives of Neutrality in the Swedish Popular Press”, in: Johan den Hertog and Samuël Kruizinga (eds), Caught in the Middle: Neutrals, Neutrality and the First World War, Amsterdam 2011, 105–120. See also: Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen and Sven Widmalm (eds), Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture and Politics after the First World War, New York 2012. 34  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1397.

68 

 Tessa Lobbes

Germany, as his war-time articles were mostly refused by the German press due to their anti-German tone.35 Van Eeden also set up more public international dialogues. In November 1914, referring to the Dutch task of cosmopolitanism, he decided to use his editorial work at the Dutch periodical De Groene Amsterdammer to offer intellectuals from all nations a platform where they could freely discuss the War.36 The international tribune in which van Eeden confronted divergent opinions on the War ran from December 1914 until the summer of 1915.37 He gave ample room to often censured anti-war voices from Germany and Austria, such as the pacifist novelist Otto Borngräber, the writer Walter von Molo and Gustav Landauer, who struck a different note from the German propaganda. War critics from France, such as Rolland, and from Great Britain, such as the writer Israël Zangwill, joined them. But van Eeden also invited pro-war intellectuals, namely the French nationalist writer Maurice Barrès and the German novelist Jakob Wassermann. Neutral intellectuals such as the Swiss poet Carl Spitteler, as well as Bjerre and Fried, also participated.38 Bjerre praised van Eeden’s initiative, while linking the tribune to another task of all neutrals to unmask belligerent propaganda lies. As outsiders, Bjerre argued, neutrals were able to shatter propaganda, as they were not wrapped up in the logic of war. In this respect, in a letter to van Eeden accompanying his piece for the tribune, Bjerre emphasised their common goals: “We have to, we as neutrals, try our utmost to explain to the belligerents what happened. Because of the general confusion in which they are drawn, they are not able to see this”.39 Van Eeden published Bjerre’s article “Vom neutralen Horizont” in German, so that Germans could understand the message.40

35  Letter from van Eeden and Borel to “die Freunde des Kreises”, 02.09.1915, BC, UvA, VE, Hjalmar Wijk dossier. See also: Gutkind, Rang dossiers; Fontijn, Trots verbrijzeld, 383–385. 36  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1408. 37  See also: Marjet Brolsma, “Frederik van Eeden. Zelfbenoemde vredesapostel”, in: Frits Boterman, Arnold Labrie and Willem Melching (eds), Na de catastrofe: De Eerste Wereldoorlog en de zoektocht naar een nieuw Europa, Amsterdam 2014, 213–225; Frederik van Eeden, “Een stem uit den vreemde. Die heutige Lage Europas von Walter von Molo, Wien”, in: De Groene Amsterdammer, 6 December 1914, 2. 38  Correspondence van Eeden, BC, UvA, VE, Borngräber, von Molo, Wassermann, Freud, Zangwill, Landauer, Rolland, Barrès, Spitteler, Bjerre, Fried dossiers. 39  Letters from Bjerre to van Eeden, 02.02.1915, 10.02.1915, BC, UvA, VE., Bjerre dossier. 40  “Wir müssen – wir neutrale – aber alles tun um die Kriegsführenden Mächte darüber aufzuklären was jetzt geschieht. Sie können es selbst in der allgemeinen Verwirrung in welche sie hineingezogen sind nicht sehen”. Frederik van Eeden, “Internationale Tribune. Poul Bjerre ‘Vom neutralen Horizont’”, in: De Groene Amsterdammer, 28 March 1915, 2–3.



Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict 

 69

The promotion of war-critical German voices led van Eeden to a second project. He played an important role in the dissemination of the notorious German antiwar manifesto J’accuse! Von einem Deutschen (I Accuse! By a German), written anonymously and printed in Lausanne in 1915, in which the author accused the Emperor and army of dragging their people into war with lies. The dissemination of this manifesto, which was actually written by the German pacifist Richard Grelling in Swiss exile, underlines the importance of neutral networks in the circulation of dissident writings.41 Despite German censorship, van Eeden received the manuscript from Switzerland in June 1915. Writing in his diary, he expressed his joy at this, as he believed that a German moral awareness was finally growing: “I am full of the book ‘J’accuse!’. This is at last the terrible indictment, which had to come. This is the turning point. […] Only a German was able to write something like this […]. Now Germany is saved. Terrible sufferings are still to come, but the final result is now clear”.42 Van Eeden tied his name and fame to the manifesto by writing an introduction for the largely successful Dutch translation. In this instance, he had clearly pushed the boundaries of neutrality. When the German envoy failed to persuade the Dutch authorities to ban this translation for violating neutrality, he attacked van Eeden personally by censoring his literary work in Germany.43 Despite all German efforts, J’accuse! still spread from the Netherlands to France and Great Britain, where it became an important propaganda tool. Even the soldiers were able to read this manifesto as airborne propaganda services dropped hundreds of copies over the French trenches.44

Peace Apostle Van Eeden went a major step further than simply facilitating the international dialogue. In January 1917, he was charged by the International Committee for Immediate Mediation to travel to Great Britain as a secret peace negotiator.45 This Committee testified to the shared desire of both neutral intellectuals and pacifist

41  Anonymous, J’accuse! Von einem Deutschen, Lausanne 1915. 42  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1436, 1439, 1454. 43  Richard Grelling and Frederik van Eeden, Ik Beschuldig! Van een Duitser, Utrecht 1915; van Eeden, Dagboek, 1533; Fontijn, Trots verbrijzeld, 383; letters from Suter to van Eeden, 1915–1916, BC, UvA, VE, Suter, Hermann Fernau dossier. 44  Paul Moeyes, Buiten schot. Nederland tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog 1914–1918, Amsterdam 2001, 322. 45  Letter from van Eeden to Wijk, 3.12.1916, 20.12.1916, BC, UvA, VE, Wijk dossier.

70 

 Tessa Lobbes

feminists to promote peace. It included writers, scientists and politicians such as van Eeden’s Swedish friends Wijk and Bjerre, and was led by the Hungarian pacifist and feminist Rosika Schwimmer, who operated from Sweden. This gathering of intellectuals illustrates the important role of “citizen diplomacy” in the attempts to restore peace on a political level. In December 1915, Schwimmer had led the Peace Expedition – financed by the American automobile magnate Henry Ford – whose peace ship had sailed to Sweden, Norway and The Hague, trying to bring about a ceasefire and to convince neutrals to lobby for peace. Disappointed by the poor results, in June 1916 Schwimmer founded the International Committee for Immediate Mediation and sent out neutral peace apostles such as van Eeden, Bjerre and Wijk to London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow in order to open up secret high-level peace negotiations towards the spring of 1917.46 Van Eeden’s trip to London was not the result of a naïve, utopian peace project; it was meticulously prepared in collaboration with the Dutch and the belligerent governments. Invited by Bjerre in October 1916 to join this peace mission, van Eeden started his negotiations from the Netherlands, using his contacts with Dutch politicians and envoys from the belligerent countries in The Hague.47 Assisted by his good friend, the rather pro-French Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs John Loudon, van Eeden was introduced to the German envoy Friedrich Rosen, a man known as European-minded and whom van Eeden described as remarkably open-minded. Van Eeden’s conversations with Rosen coincided with the official German tentative to open up peace negotiations in late 1916. Van Eeden’s friends among the British, American and French envoys facilitated his departure to London on 31 December 1916, where a meeting with the British Prime Minister Lloyd George was scheduled in a bid to convince him to meet the Germans in The Hague.48 Thus the overtly anti-German van Eeden agreed to bargain with the Germans. He explained his actions by stating that people had suffered enough and that the German “overconfidence had been broken”.49 Yet we might wonder, from a strategic perspective, whether van Eeden was a suitable peace envoy. In their role

46  See: Bruna Bianchi, “Towards a New Internationalism: Pacifist Journals Edited by Women, 1914–1919”, in: Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Bader-Zaar (eds), Gender and the First World War, Basingstoke 2014, 176–194; David Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I, New York 2008, 207–231. 47  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1538, 1552–1568; letter from Bjerre to van Eeden, 11.10.1916; letter from van Eeden to Wijk, 3.12.1916, BC, UvA, VE, Wijk dossier, Bjerre dossier. 48  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1552–1568; letter from van Eeden to Wijk, 3.12.1916, 08.12.1916, BC, UvA, VE, Wijk dossier; Fontijn, Trots verbrijzeld, 436–451. 49  Van Eeden, Dagboek, 1552–1553.



Designing a Peaceful World in a Time of Conflict 

 71

as promotors of peace, neutrals tended to portray themselves as the “detached neutral” – not the opinionated neutral – who understood all the parties’ sensitivities. However, Rosen argued, probably with justification, that van Eeden’s Deutschfeindlichkeit was his main asset during his talks with the Allies. Nevertheless, in London Lloyd George could not be convinced and van Eeden returned to The Hague empty-handed. In the summer of 1917, when Schwimmer stayed over in van Eeden’s Walden for several weeks to discuss possible neutral projects for peace, he gave it another try, by inviting representatives from Paris and London to the table.50 All these peace negotiations, instigated by neutrals at a high political level, failed. They were forced to await the total moral and physical exhaustion of November 1918. The peace missions left van Eeden worn out, yet he was grateful to have been able to undertake this “small yet so important task” for humanity.51 His experience of an international peace project prompted him, from spring 1918 onwards, to develop further his plans for the design of a City of Light or a world republic. As van Eeden became increasingly caught up in severe mood swings, the City of Light assumed more and more illusionary and utopian dimensions, which differed substantially from his more concrete projects during the War.52

50  Letter from van Eeden to Wijk 26.02.1917, 26.07.1917, 04.08.1917, BC, UvA, VE, Wijk dossier. See: Schwimmer dossier; Eeden, Dagboek, 1565, 1604–1612. 51  Eeden, Dagboek, 1565. 52  Fontijn, Trots verbrijzeld, 452–460.

Elza Adamowicz

Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies Off the Map? On the Surrealist map of the world, Le Monde au temps des surréalistes,1 drawn up by an anonymous cartographer in 1929, the Pacific Ocean is situated at the centre of the world, New Guinea, Easter Island, China and Mexico are magnified, while the United States has disappeared, and Western Europe is reduced to a tiny promontory at the outer limits of the vast Russian landmass.2 In contrast to the commonly used Mercator map, with its eurocentric world view, this map exposes the ideology of the imperialist position by shifting the focal point from “centre” to “margin”, hence inverting established eurocentric views as well as the

Fig. 4: “Le Monde au temps des surréalistes”, in: Variétés (Brussels; special issue: Surréalisme), 1929, 26–27.

1  Variétés (Brussels; special issue: Surréalisme), 1929, 26–27. 2  The present essay developed from an earlier study of Surrealist mapping, see: “Off the Map: Surrealism’s Uncharted Territories”, in: Elza Adamowicz (ed.), Surrealism: Crossings / Frontiers, Oxford 2006, 196–216.

74 

 Elza Adamowicz

fixity and inviolability of frontiers, a sensitive issue in an interwar Europe ferociously defending national and colonial borders (see fig. 4). The Surrealist map is a modern mappa mundi with its mix of history, myth and imagination. It can be read as a model of Surrealist disorientation or dépaysement, a strategy which depends for its effect on its distance from the familiar territory (pays). Above all it materialises the decentring processes characteristic of Surrealism, foregrounding privileged sites for the Surrealist imagination, as they were charted in the fields of myth, history, politics, aesthetics: countries of the revolution (whence the generous proportions given Russia or Mexico); islands whose peoples had developed an aesthetic alien to European norms in a shift from Greek statue to Oceanic mask as figurative model (Easter Island, New Guinea). Foremost among these sites was Mexico. For Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Mexico functioned as the “magnetic mirror of surrealism”, both attracting and reflecting the Surrealists’ revolutionary aspirations.3 In contrast to the Surrealist world map, the roughly textured surface of Max Ernst’s Europe after the Rain, dated 1933, suggests the contours of a relief map, with its mountains, rivers and seas. Yet orthodox maps are unmade here too: the borders of Europe’s nations are absent, and the formlessness of matter replaces clearly demarcated contour lines and frontiers (for this work Ernst retrieved plywood panels covered in paint and plaster which had been used for walls during the filming of L’Âge d’or at the Billancourt studios.) Ernst collapses boundaries by working at the limits of pictorial (readymade) and cartographic (relief map) codes. 1933 was the year of Hitler’s rise to power, and the map can be interpreted as an evocation of the political upheavals in Europe, whose frontiers were being disputed. Ernst’s map therefore contrasts, through its messiness, with the Surrealist map of the world.

Surrealism and Revolution Breton’s repeated injunction to “transform the world” (Marx) and “change life” (Rimbaud) testify to Surrealism’s revolutionary programme, understood as the impulse to desire and realise alternative ways of life. Central to Surrealist practice was a belief in utopia: “At the frontiers of utopia and truth, that is at the heart of life”,  wrote Breton in 1937.4 It is some of these spaces, these maps – where the geographically locatable becomes the overtly imaginary – which this essay

3  Octavio Paz, “Poema circulatorio”, in: Estrella de tres puntos, Madrid 1996, 79. 4  André Breton, “Gradiva” [1937], in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris 1998, 672–676, here 672. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.



Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies 

 75

will explore, following Henri Lefebvre, who writes: “Change life! Change society! These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space”.5 The first thing to note is that the frontiers of Surrealism itself were in constant flux through the late 1920s and 1930s, both literally and figuratively. Beyond Paris, Breton sought the internationalisation of Surrealism – in Prague, the Canaries, London, Mexico – in a voyage from the centre to the periphery. He found however, not a terra nullius to be impregnated with Surrealism, but (particularly in England and Mexico) indigenous forms of the fantastic, which he then sought to annex for his model of Surrealism. Secondly, surreal spaces were infiltrated by the operations of desire and imagination, so that the borders between reality and dream, between precise topographies and imaginary landscapes, were permeable and constantly shifting. For Breton, surreal spaces were primarily points of passage and intersection. Thus his perception of Tenerife’s volcanic landscapes was intertwined with the memory of Max Ernst’s paintings of a primitivist paradise, while Martinique was perceived through Douanier Rousseau’s paintings of the jungles that the artist himself had never visited. It is this voyage beyond, identified with the surreal, which resonates with a concept of utopia that pushes back the boundaries of the real. This essay will examine some of the issues relating to utopia and Surrealism. Utopia will be considered not as an essentialised concept but in terms of process or quest; as a shifting space of intercultural crossings and exchanges; and more importantly as an intertextual reality. To this end the European Surrealists’ encounters with Mexico will be taken as a case study, focusing primarily on André Breton’s writings, but also with reference to Wolfgang Paalen, Antonin Artaud, Leonora Carrington and others. The argument will develop three aspects of “Mexico” as a utopian construction. Firstly it will be explored as an imaginary or fantasised space, perceived essentially through its revolutions and pre-Columbian cultures, as a screen onto which the Surrealists projected their various utopian aspirations, contrasting for instance Breton’s romanticised vision with Artaud’s mystical quest or Benjamin Péret’s anthropological approach. Secondly, it will be considered as a geographically located and historically situated country which Artaud and Breton visited in 1936 and 1938 respectively, where Paalen settled in 1940, Carrington in 1942, and where Péret lived throughout the war years. Above all, “Mexico” will be seen as an intertextual space or discursive fabrication, in line with Ernst Bloch’s discussion of utopia in terms of discourse and narration; in short it is seen as a “book-space” or “espace-livre”, to use ­Bertrand Westphal’s term in his analysis of geo-criticism, in which the principle

5  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford 1991, 59.

76 

 Elza Adamowicz

of i­ ntertextuality­is applied to space.6 In this instance “Mexico” will be shown to be constructed through intertextual processes with the aim of drawing up a fictional cartography, a mapping process rather than a map, and raising a number of questions: How do the Surrealists construct “Mexico” as a psycho-geographical space or a discursive reality? To what extent is Mexico co-extensive with the surreal? With myth? Why Mexico? For the Surrealists Mexico was above all the land of revolution (materialist, mystical or poetic): “Red land, virgin land impregnated with the most generous blood […] where the wind of liberation has not waned”, writes Breton on the opening page of “Souvenir du Mexique”.7 Surrealist fantasies of “Mexico” were both indebted to and critical of the historical utopian constructions of “Mexico”, a tradition embedded in the stereotypes of colonial discourse: ranging from Bartolomé de las Casas’ defence of the Indian (against the Spanish conquistadors’ violent exploitation of a population viewed as barbaric), through Enlightenment idealisation of the “noble savage” (against Catholic propaganda), to 19th-Century Romanticism with its mix of exoticism and occultism, as exemplified in Carl Nebel’s lithographs,8 and to 20th-Century “primitivism” and the fusion between man and nature (against the alienation of European industrialisation) as found in the murals of Diego Rivera.

Mexico as a Psycho-Geographical Space In their conception of psycho-geographical spaces the Surrealists shifted between an oppositional and a dialectical topos. They took part in the Orient/Occident debate which polarised French political and intellectual life in the 1920s. The polemical texts of the early issues of La Révolution surréaliste were underpinned by a conception of space based on a binary model (grounded in the poetry of Baudelaire or Rimbaud), opposing a devalued here and a valorised elsewhere; where West, identified with traditional French classical values of rationality and order, was opposed to East, linked with Germany, Russia and a mythical Orient,

6  Bertrand Westphal, “Pour une approche géocritique des textes”, in: Bertrand Westphal (ed.), La Géocritique mode d’emploi, Limoges 2001, 9–41, here 17. 7  André Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, in: Minotaure, 1939, no. 12–13 (May), 31–52. Reprinted in: André Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris 1998, 677–683, 949–955, here 677. All further references will be made to this edition. 8  Carl Nebel, Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la partie la plus intéressante du Mexique, Paris 1836.



Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies 

 77

which embodied the values of romanticism and revolution, encapsulating the Surrealists’ dreams, political hopes and philosophical concerns. In a polemical text of 1925, Louis Aragon passionately declared his allegiance to the “enemy” and called on the peoples of the Orient to rise up against a moribund Western world: “Western world, you are condemned to death”.9 The Other invoked by the Surrealists thus replicated the binary paradigm of colonialist discourse while inverting it. In their declarations and tracts they projected an eclectic notion of the Orient, englobing Germany, India and Egypt, and disparate figures like Attila, Tamburlaine, and the Dalai Lama, Huns, Jews and Mongols, jazz musicians and drug dealers! This space was openly acknowledged by Breton as a “pseudo-Orient”.10 It has been defined by Denis Hollier as “relatively unanchored on the map, […] undefined conceptually as it was geographically, an Orient with no self-image, no objective credentials”.11 In the 1930s this “Orient” shifted, from Asia to America, and was identified with the New World. For the Surrealists Mexico, acting as a foil to Western decadence, became the focus of their utopian aspirations. Hence, in an article published in the Mexican newspaper El Nacional in 1936, Artaud states he had come to escape European decadence and rationalism: “Rationalist culture has failed, and I have come to Mexico to look for the foundations of a magical culture which can still spring from the Indian soil”.12 A further example of this binary structure occurs in his short scenario, “La Conquête du Mexique” (The Conquest of Mexico, 1933), which stages the encounter between Cortés the Spaniard, invader, coloniser, materialist, and Moctezuma the Mexican, pacifist, spiritualist, in a confrontation between two opposing world views: the hierarchical versus the contemplative; the “tyrannical anarchy” of the coloniser opposed to the “moral harmony” of the future colonised; social injustice versus social justice and peace in a country “where the Revolution had already been carried out since its very origins”.13 He thus condemns colonial Spain in favour of a highly imaginary, simplified Aztec Mexico. Leonora Carrington would later stage a similar confrontation, but in an overtly parodic mode, in her short story, “The Invention

9  Louis Aragon, “Fragments d’une conférence”, in: La Révolution surréaliste, 1925, no. 4 (15 July), 23–25, here 25. 10  André Breton, “Légitime défense”, in: La Révolution surréaliste, 1926, no. 8 (1 December), 30–36, here 35. 11  Denis Hollier, “Surrealism and its Discontents”, in: Papers of Surrealism, 2007, no. 7 (The Use-Value of Documents), 1–16, here 4. 12  Antonin Artaud, “Lo que vine a hacer a México”, El Nacional, 5 July 1936. 13  Antonin Artaud, La Conquête du Mexique, in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5, Paris 1979, 18–24.

78 

 Elza Adamowicz

of Mole. A Play” (1957), in which Moctezuma encounters the Archbishop of Canterbury who is destined to be served up in a cauldron at the Emperor’s feast.14 The Surrealists went beyond such binary oppositions, however. In his Second manifeste du surréalisme (Second Surrealist Manifesto, 1929), Breton denounces them as these “old antinomies” of Western thought in favour of dialectical thought when he writes: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, reality and dream, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality”.15 However, when he refers to the future reconciliation of opposites, he is projecting dialectical resolution into a (utopian) future. Indeed, Surrealist practice reveals not so much the reconciliation of opposites in a leapfrogging over contradictions to fully inhabit an accomplished dialectic. Rather, Surrealist textual and visual practice are engaged in the dialectical process itself, focusing on potential and embodied in the notion of crossings or fluid interchanges, a form of “communicating vessels”, between the real and the surreal, the topographical and the imaginary. As in Bloch’s utopian model of the “Not-Yet-Become”, a world in flux, coming into being, Surrealist utopia is a process rather than a place, a travelling towards rather than an arrival.16 The Surrealist rhetorical and pictorial strategies of assemblage and collage – the practice of juxtaposing disparate images or words – allow the reader or viewer to confront this difference without synthesis. Such a strategy is exemplified in Surrealist exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s, which displayed art objects with a cavalier disregard for frontiers. For example, in the exhibition Yves Tanguy et objets d’Amérique, held at the Paris Galerie Surréaliste in 1927, Surrealist paintings were displayed alongside Mayan, Northwest Coast and Hopi Katchina objects, from the Surrealists’ private collections. Such exhibitions materialised the dismantling of categories, presenting a configuration of disjunctive objects. These disruptive practices subverted established aesthetic hierarchies (between oil painting and ethnographic object, between European and non-European art), provoking the disorientation or loss of bearings of the viewer and exciting the imagination. In his preface to that exhibition, Breton’s evocation of Tanguy’s paintings is itself mediated through reference to the legend of the drowned city of Ys in Brit-

14  Leonora Carrington, “The Invention of Mole, A Play”, in: The Seventh Horse, and Other Tales, New York 1988. 15  André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)”, in: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor 1972, 3–47, here 14. 16  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Stephen Plaice, Neville Plaice and Paul Knight, Oxford 1986, 12.



Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies 

 79

tany (Tanguy was Breton) as well as to Mexico’s ancient Mayan cities, by metonymic association with the ethnographic exhibits: At an equal distance from those ancient cities of Mexico forever hidden from sight no doubt by impenetrable forests, giant corridors of dishevelled lianas, impossible butterflies opening and closing on their thousand-stepped stone stairways, at an equal distance from these cities and from “Ys” whose lost key he has found, located one night in the coral gardens […] I am eager to join Yves Tanguy in the place he has discovered.17

An initial reading might suggest that the references to the Mayan temples and the legendary city of Ys serve to substantiate – to give verbal substance to – Surrealist pictorial representation, linking the unknown (the terra incognita of surreal pictorial spaces) to a cultural known, here to clichéd images of the exotic. However, temples and jungles are not actually represented in Tanguy’s paintings, and a closer reading of Breton’s text reveals that the referential function of these images is doubly displaced, if not dissolved. The ancient Mayan cities are engulfed by impenetrable jungle, while the legendary city of Ys is lost beneath the sea, hence both are invisible (“forever hidden from sight by impenetrable forests”) and implausible (“impossible butterflies”). These imagined spaces function less as metaphorical analogues to Tanguy’s landscapes than as indexical signs of otherness. Indeed, the end of the text confirms that we are confronted not by the legendary or the topographical, but by a purely mental space, when Breton writes of Tanguy’s paintings as granting the viewer “the first non-legendary glimpse over a vast stretch of the mental world still at its beginnings”.18 These beginnings evoke the movement towards mentioned earlier rather than the full inhabiting of a space. In this perspective, it is helpful to consider Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the surreal as a space of constant dis-placement. Quoting Jules Monnerot, he writes: “Surrealism […] is constantly focused on a blind reaching towards something else [un tâtonnement vers autre chose], a feeling of an other presence, but ‘elsewhere’ does not refer to a spiritual or temporal domain: elsewhere is nowhere; it is not the beyond; it means that existence is never where it is”.19 Echoing the closing words of Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) from 1924, “L’existence est ailleurs” (“Existence is elsewhere”) – which in their turn echo the poet Rimbaud’s statement “La vraie vie est absente. Nous ne sommes pas au monde” (“Real life is absent. We are not of this world”)

17  André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris 1965, 43–46, here 43. 18  Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 46. 19  Maurice Blanchot, “Réflexions sur le surréalisme”, in: La Part du feu, Paris 1949, 90–102, here 97.

80 

 Elza Adamowicz

– ­Blanchot defends a non-hegelian concept of the image as a figure of possibility, where resolution is always deferred. He argues that the surreal is less a space beyond reality (l’au-delà) than an exploratory movement towards alterity, that is, a potential space, desired as opposed to possessed. This is what is suggested in Breton’s text when he declares that Tanguy’s pictorial spaces are pointed to rather than fully inhabited: the crossing is imminent, but the distance is never reduced, as in the topos of desire or of the exotic, whose object is always just out of reach. Pictorial space, resisting precise mapping strategies, is indeed a no-where, a no-space, a u-topia, characterised by latency. A similar view is expressed in a later text on Tanguy, where Breton writes: “With Tanguy, we are entering for the first time a world of complete latency”.20 This latency can only be evoked through rhetorical slippages – whence the interstitial function of “at an equal distance” or the proliferation of literary references. “Mexico” thus functions here as metaphor, evoking both a poetic presence and an irreducible distance, serving to label an imagined territory.

The Surrealists in Mexico In 1938 Breton was sent by the propaganda services of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on an official visit to Mexico to give a series of lectures. “Columbus had to have set out with a boatload of madmen in order to discover America”, wrote Breton in his “Manifeste du surréalisme” 1924, using the colonial metaphor of the “discovery” of the New World to express the artist’s exploration of the unconscious.21 Like Columbus – not Cortés, as some critics have implied – whose imagination was fed by Ptolemy’s map, the empty sections of which were filled with hypotheses and imaginings, Breton’s own imagination had actually been filled with a fantasised Mexico since childhood: “Over there, the eyes of all the children of Europe, including the child I once was, preceded me with their thousand magical fires”.22 Topographical space, far from being an ontological given, is thus always already mapped discursively. The encounter with the new image, the unknown territory, the curious object – whether geographically or mentally distant – is appropriated for a discursive practice indifferent to topographical and temporal frontiers. When he sailed to Mexico with Jacqueline Lamba on 18 April

20  André Breton, “Ce que Tanguy voile et recèle”, in: Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 176–181, here 178. 21  Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)”, 5–6 [trans. modified]. 22  Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 141.



Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies 

 81

1938, Breton’s “horizon of expectation” was already saturated. His evocation of the country was filtered through memories of his childhood reading, in particular Gabriel Ferry’s popular Costal l’Indien (1856), which recounts the heroic myths of the 19th-Century Mexican revolution. He also recalled cinematic images from Eizenshtein’s Que Viva Mexico! (1931) and Jack Conway’s Viva Villa (1934), as well as Douanier Rousseau’s paintings of imaginary jungles. In an interview held shortly after his arrival (May 1938) he claimed there was a total match between the “Mexico” he had dreamed and the reality of the country: “I dreamed of Mexico and I am in Mexico: moving from one to the other happened without the slightest effort”.23 He would later declare that the reality of Mexico had even gone beyond his expectations. Yet he was to find the real Mexico rather more complex than this highly mediated vision, the fragments of images or clichés he had brought in his luggage. Breton and Jacqueline Lamba stayed first with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in their San Angel home. During his stay, Breton met Lev Trotskii through Rivera. With Rivera, Kahlo and Trotskii he travelled across Mexico, to Patzcuaro, Cuernavaca, Toluca; he climbed the pyramid of Xochicalco, went fishing for axolotls with Trotskii, bought pre-Columbian objects in the villages with Rivera, and stole ex-votos from the walls of village churches. It seems that Breton was not quite liberated from colonial habits! While he was relatively well received by the press, which published interviews, articles on Surrealism and translations of Surrealist texts during his stay, he was less warmly welcomed by Embassy officials, and the Mexican Communist Party was resolutely hostile. Although Breton expressed his wholehearted engagement not only with Mexico’s Precontact past but also with its revolutionary present, he appeared to show little awareness of the political and social reality of contemporary Mexico. There are practically no references in his texts and interviews to contemporary Mexican social and political matters, such as the recent attempted coup d’état against President Cárdenas or the resignation of the university president. He does not mention the fact that the lecture series planned had to be cut short because of social unrest. Indeed, after his lecture at the Universidad Nacional de México, articles in the press denounced Surrealism as an “ivory tower”. Breton viewed Mexico in 1938 essentially in primitivist terms, a country where men lived in harmony with nature, free of capitalist influence, a position contradicted by Mexico’s real postcolonial and capitalist situation. As Louise Tythacott concludes: “for all their radical intent, many Surrealists remained locked within the framework of early 20th-Century Eurocentric ­primitivist­refer-

23  “Diálogo con André Breton”, Universidad de México, 29 (June 1938).

82 

 Elza Adamowicz

ences”.24 If contemporary issues are disregarded, it is because “Mexico” functioned as a largely imaginary Other to a Europe where revolution had failed, capitalism triumphed, fascism was advancing and war threatening. The process was not inevitable, however, since Artaud, on the contrary, was initially disillusioned with Mexico: he condemned the limitations of the Mexican revolution as inspired by Marxism, considered dialectical materialism as essentially European. Failing to find in Mexico City the fantasised vision of “Mexico” he was pursuing, he soon left the capital for the land of the Tarahumarac in northern Mexico.

Breton and Politics Breton’s idealisation, or blindness, can largely be explained by the fact that he looked to Mexico to re-energise the Surrealist spirit in both political and poetic spheres. Breton had broken with the French Communist Party at the “Conference in Defence of Culture” in 1935, and faced with the collapse of the Communist utopia with the spread of Stalinism, he sought new political directions and as a result moved closer to Trotskyist groups. Consequently, during his stay in Mexico, he worked with Trotskii and Rivera on the manifesto “Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant” (“For an Independent Revolutionary Art”, first published under Breton and Rivera’s name in Partisan Review in 1939). This was the key text of Breton’s utopian project. In their manifesto they sought to elaborate a common programme in spite of their differences: Trotskii the materialist, whose interest lay primarily in economics, versus Breton the romantic revolutionary whose passion was art. Central to the manifesto was the idea that the freedom of artistic production was to be an integral part of the broader theory of social transformation.25 Breton appears to have been closer to the muralist Diego Rivera than to Trotskii himself, at least during his stay in Mexico. Rivera’s monumental murals illustrate Mexico’s national history, celebrating its Precontact past and evoking the vision of a new society. He idealised Aztec society as a form of utopia destroyed by colonialism, glossing over Aztec militarism and violence. In one of his murals in Mexico City’s National Palace, for example, he opposes revolution and conquest in the figures of Zapata (in the upper part of the image, holding a banner “Tierra y Libertad”, standing among revolutionaries from various epochs) and Cortés (in

24  Louisa Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, London 2003, 13. 25  See: Robin Adèle Greeley, “For An Independent Revolutionary Art: Breton, Trotsky and Cárdenas’s Mexico”, in: Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (eds), Surrealism, Politics and Culture, London 2003, 204–225.



Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies 

 83

the lower part, among the Spanish conquerors killing, plundering, exploiting, converting the indigenous population). In the centre of the image, the eagle with a snake in its beak illustrates the myth of the founding of the Aztec capital. For Breton, Rivera’s murals, unparalleled in Europe, continued the struggle for an independent Mexico and beyond Mexico the struggle for the freedom of mankind. Rivera’s promotion of popular art would find an echo in Breton. However, Breton’s enthusiasm is based not so much on a political reading of Rivera’s murals, as on situating them “at the most critical point where life is equated with vision, where there is no longer any gap between the imaginary and the real”.26 Rivera’s works are thus retrieved from propaganda and given an orthodox Surrealist interpretation. Consequently, when Rivera, having quarrelled with Trotskii, left the Fourth International in January 1939, Breton excised the section on Rivera from his text “Souvenir du Mexique”, and illustrated his text not with Rivera’s murals but with the artist’s landscapes, less politically problematic, more assimilable to Surrealism. Rivera’s gouache Les Vases communicants (1938) was used as a poster for the exhibition “Mexique” curated by Breton in Paris 1939. A similar displacement from a political to a Surrealist reading is evidenced in Breton’s presentation of Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated, 1934), which is interpreted not in political terms, but in relation to Aztec ritual sacrifices, as well as (rather bizarrely) to Baudelaire’s “style éternel”, in terms of a timelessness transcending politics.27 When reproduced in the special Mexican issue of Minotaure (1939), the photograph was framed by the shot of a grave with a flowering cactus and the shot of a man dreaming, further decontextualising it from its original political significance as a record of anti-capitalist struggle, and situating it squarely within a Surrealist rhetoric of juxtaposition of opposites.

Dis-Placements Breton had gone to Mexico intent on finding in the New World a utopian response to a Europe on the decline. He did not find utopia, he forged it, in both meanings of the term: he created an imaginary Mexico by displacing, disregarding what he saw, as I have illustrated briefly in relation to Rivera or Alvarez Bravo, re-interpreting Mexican realities in the light of Surrealist processes and fantasies. Breton’s

26  Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, 951. 27  André Breton, “Mexique”, in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, Paris 1992, 1232–1237, here 1236.

84 

 Elza Adamowicz

idiosyncratic interpretations of Mexican realities range from Aztec goddesses to contemporary artists, Coatlicue to Kahlo. He did not escape the exotic mode, particularly in his evocation of Kahlo, whom he compares to an Aztec Colima statuette, and transforms into a magical being, “adorned like a legendary princess, with enchanted fingertips, in the trail of light of the quetzal bird which flies off scattering opals among the stones”.28 When he exhibited Kahlo’s paintings in the “Mexique” exhibition in 1939, he refers to them as “a ribbon around a bomb”, and claimed that Frida “blossomed into pure surreality”, drawing her into the orbit of Surrealist creatures such as Nadja, claiming that her painting Lo que el agua me dio (What the Water Gave Me) illustrated a sentence once pronounced by Nadja: “I am the thought on the bath in a room without mirrors”.29 Yet the details in the painting – the empty Tetuana dress, the cactuses, flowers, the Mexican volcano and skyscraper – which Breton chooses to ignore, demand the acknowledgement of an autobiographical factor. This appropriation of her for Surrealism angered Kahlo who declared: “I never knew I was a Surrealist until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was”. She considered Breton arrogant and pompous, and the Surrealists over-intellectual, referring to them as: “Shit and only shit is what they are”.30 Breton was particularly sensitive to examples of the co-existence of opposites in Mexican culture, perceived in the light of the Surrealist juxtaposition of disparate elements: for example the merging of the Aztec past and post-revolutionary present as found in Rivera and the Indigenist movement; or the reconciliation between life and death central to Aztec culture; or again, Jose Guadalupe Posada’s satirical engravings or calaveras, in which Breton saw an example of Surrealist humour noir or black humour.31 Above all, Breton’s fabrication of Mexico was mediated through Surrealist artists and poets. Tanguy’s paintings, as discussed above, were first seen in terms of Mexican landscapes and monuments. Now Mexico itself is perceived through Tanguy’s paintings. For example, the monumental staircases, disintegrating walls and theatrical trompe-l’oeil effects characteristic of the colonial baroque decor of the ruined palace of Guadalajara are described in terms which recall Tanguy’s paintings: “We had to cross a crazy courtyard and climb up veritable dream stairs… [The] monumental staircases deploy their terrasses […] with faded green balustrades […]. Its mouldings […] deceptive as you draw closer like theatre

28  Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 143. 29  Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 144. 30  Frida Kahlo, letter to Nickolas Muray (16 February 1939), quoted in: Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson (eds), Frida Kahlo, London 2005, 195. 31  André Breton, “Paratonnere”, in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 871.



Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies 

 85

mirrors, painted in shaded tones to look like deep waters, still waters”.32 From this theatrical décor emerge ghostlike apparitions, including an elegant man singing at the top of his voice, associated by Breton with a painting by El Greco. Breton’s perception is also filtered through poetic references. For example, the memory of Mexico is likened to an amorous encounter, in a reference to Rimbaud’s poetry: “The impression left of these places has been transformed into a mix of sun and flesh, imagination and lover’s uncertainty”, echoing Rimbaud’s poem “Soleil et chair”, an erotic fantasy of a primitive paradise.33 Indeed “Mexico” is systematically infused with the erotic, evoked as a utopia of desire. 19th-Century photographs of nude female figures, bought in an antiques shop in Mexico City, illustrate his essay “Souvenir du Mexique”. In the ruined palace referred to above, Breton is fascinated by the vision of an adolescent girl, naked under a white evening dress in tatters, with a broom and a smile, “a smile of the dawn of the world [un sourire de lever du monde]”.34 One last example: in his preface to the 1939 “Mexique” exhibition in Paris, Breton refers to Mexico as a female body: “Her ‘immense body’ [“son immense corps”, another quotation from Rimbaud], were it the most beautiful in the world, eludes you as soon as it is about to be touched”.35 Sometimes Breton’s stubborn appropriation of Mexico as surreal can take on absurd proportions. Henri Béhar recalls an anecdote about Breton who, on hearing some doggerel lines by a Mexican poet, Adalberto Navarro Sanchez – “A l’air vert je sortis / et dans le vert il m’expliqua / que l’air est vert / comme la perruche” – is said to have exclaimed: “C’est cela le surréalisme!”36 If so, then he is seeing Surrealism everywhere, to the point of losing his critical faculties. One is thus forced to acknowledge that Breton constructed Mexico in the light of his Surrealist enterprise, absorbing it within the parameters of the surreal. Yet I would argue that this appropriative movement is counter-balanced by a centrifugal movement, where Mexico is linked to a broader, universal context. During their discussions, Trotskii reproached Breton for keeping “a little window open onto the beyond [une petite fenêtre ouverte sur l’au-delà]”, a position strongly denied by Breton, who claimed to reject all forms of transcendence.37 Yet ­Trotskii’s­ remark seems appropriate when we consider Breton’s account of Mexico. He is

32  Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, 680–681. 33  Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, 951. 34  Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, 682. 35  Breton, “Mexique”, 1232. 36  Henri Béhar, “Le Mexique revisité”, in: Mélusine, 1999, no. 19 (Mexique, miroir magique), 9–21, here 15. 37  André Breton, “Visite à Léon Trotsky”, in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris 1999, 692–704, here 702.

86 

 Elza Adamowicz

constantly looking beside and beyond the Mexican people, its landscapes or monuments, in a text full of lateral movements, poetic associations, and intertextual allusions. For example, in mid-description of the palace at Guadalajara, his text is interrupted by a footnote at a point where Breton admits to the difficulty of finding adequate words to relate his experience. In a sudden relocation, he quotes a letter he has just received which describes another strange building, the Madman’s Tower [la tour du Fou] in Provence, not far from de Sade’s castle at Lacoste, a 19th-Century folly with false battlements and a false ruined cloister.38 Breton refers in his text to “the obscure necessity of such interactions”, and the slippage from Mexico to Provence suggests less an analogical than a metonymic link between two proto-surreal architectural follies, in a hybrid topography which exemplifies Blanchot’s ever-elusive elsewhere as a series of displacements, between geographical, verbal and pictorial spaces. Like the Passage de l’Opéra for Aragon, Breton’s Mexico is thus more a passage than a place, a dynamic space where signs intersect and converge momentarily then continue to circulate, a movement towards rather than a comfortable inhabiting. Breton goes beyond Mexico itself again when he claims that Rivera, thanks to his “gigantic atlas forever open on the walls of the buildings of Mexico City, Cuernavaca and Chapingo”, has linked Mexico and the universe, “beyond the destiny of Mexico itself, rising to an ever higher consciousness of the progress of the universe”.39 Breton reaches beyond Rivera’s murals, and the actual frontiers and politics of Mexico, revealing a mental space dissociated from historical reality, which for Breton merged with the spaces of the unconscious: “Part of my mental landscape – and by extension, I believe, of Surrealism’s mental landscape – is manifestly mapped out by Mexico […] Mexican roads plunge into the very zones where automatic writing basks and lingers”.40 In this perspective Mexico is re-envisaged as part of a gigantic world map, a geological map, charting a single submerged continent of the unconscious, which emerges at a few elective sites. A similar slippage is present in Breton’s text on the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo: he argues that Tamayo’s paintings embody the coincidence of opposites and underlines the associations with ancient Zapotec themes, an “eternal Mexico”,41 less a geographical or political space than a mental space identified with the dimensions of the universe, fed by Zapotec mythology and based on the principle of universal analogy.

38  Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, 680. 39  Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, 950. 40  Breton, “Souvenir du Mexique”, 952. 41  Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 233.



Surrealism’s Utopian Cartographies 

 87

A similar expansion of space from a geographical to a mental entity is found in the work of Wolfgang Paalen who settled in Mexico in 1940. In his introduction to the Amerindian issue of his journal Dyn, he calls for a fusion between modern art and the art of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania, through the idea of “universal osmosis” which would abolish temporal and spatial frontiers, thus erasing difference and creating a “world-consciousness”.42 In Paalen’s Mexico City studio, objects from various cultures were displayed side by side, such as a Cycladic statue alongside the stone statue of an Aztec corn goddess. Paalen, aptly named by Breton “a man at a vast crossroads”, rejected the supposedly “zero degree of observation” in favour of a continuity between what is perceived and what is remembered, in the image of a “level crossing [passage à niveau] between what can be seen and imagined”, the level crossing underscoring the levelling process of a horizontal rather than vertical view of culture.43 Such horizontal intermingling of spaces rather than vertical appropriation is evident in the work of Péret, Carrington or Artaud, in an often playful intertextual mode. For example, in his Air Mexicain written in 1949 on his return from Mexico (published in 1952 with four lithograph illustrations by Tamayo) Péret combines the Aztec theme of the serpent-god Quetzalcoatl with a Surrealist rhetoric; Carrington, commissioned to paint a mural for the newly created Mexican Anthropological Museum in 1964, titled El mundo magico de los Mayas, presents a seamless configuration of Celtic and Mayan images; and Artaud conflates Mayan mythology with esoteric traditions, Eastern religions, kabbalistic and alchemical traditions in a similar vein, his position informed by the writings of René Guénon, for whom all religions are linked by an underlying principle. In Paalen’s concept of universal osmosis, Artaud’s texts, Péret’s poem or Carrington’s mural, hierarchical cultural relations are replaced by horizontal ones, in a process whereby Aztec myths and Surrealist dreams, Celtic and Mayan, merge and mingle their characteristics, effecting constant exchanges between what rationality strives to keep apart. Hence “Mexico” is for the Surrealists an Orient of the mind, and their respective itineraries through “Mexico” reveal the productive confusion between real and visionary modes of perception, and the trajectories of their own subjectivities, the circuits and short-circuits of their desires. The Surrealists confirmed the vision of Mexico they had arrived with: Artaud (a new concept of man), Breton (the land of indigenous revolution), Carrington (a universal mythology). In this perspective, the moment of discovery – of a landscape, a painting, a palace – was above all a moment of recovery, revelation is

42  Wolfgang Paalen, “Introduction”, in: Dyn, 1943, no. 4–5. 43  Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 138.

88 

 Elza Adamowicz

experienced as recognition, since each new encounter can be layered upon an earlier memory trace or existential, literary or artistic image, in a process where knowing (connaître) is equated with recognising (reconnaître): “To see or hear is nothing. To recognise (or not to recognize) is all”.44 Recognition is expressed through intertextuality in the multiple associations generated by the experience of the new yet always already “known”, in the crossings between the topographical and the imaginary. Yet, far from this trajectory of recognition being simply a journey back, a form of regression, it is also a voyage out, extending the bounds of the mind ever further.

Conclusion Surrealism goes beyond traditional views of Mexico as a clichéd model for utopia. It is constructed through sophisticated intertextual processes, a rejection of hierarchies, the layering of multiple spaces, and resistance to closure. Topographical spaces are interwoven with pictorial or imagined realities to create a network of encounters, allusions and exchanges merging diverse experiences and territories, both an external reality to discover and an inner reality to uncover, a Columbus of the mind. This essay has explored how “Mexico” was not only a fantasised space nourished by the ancient myths and revolutionary legends of Breton’s childhood reading or the adult Artaud’s reading of the Popul Vuh, but also an indexical sign for the slippery charting of an unlocatable elsewhere in their writings, a place which is a no-place, off the map, a mapping process or a discursive practice. On the ever-shifting frontiers of Surrealism, before and after the voyage to Mexico, external necessity was constantly remapped in terms of inner reality and future possibilities, both political and poetic. Europe becomes a wart at the edge of the landmass of Asia or a magma of matter, Brittany is next door to Mexico. Above all, like Columbus, for Breton and his boatload of madmen, charting the spaces of Mexico was exploring the unknown yet already known, a utopian space constantly shaped by and shaping their fantasies, their dreams and desires.

44  Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 44.

Erik Bachman

Utopian Failure and Function in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen In Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (The Specificity of the Aesthetic), his massive but incomplete attempt to offer a fully systematised account of aesthetics that would be consistent with Aristotle, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Georg Lukács significantly recasts aesthetics as ultimately a matter of behavior and comportment. Essentially comprised neither of a satisfactory absorption of a rounded experience unfolding over the course of an encounter with a work of art nor a remote disinterested judgment as to that work’s beauty or artistic qualities, aesthetics in late Lukács exists instead to evoke what he calls in Record of a Life: the deepest truth of Marxism: the humanization of man as the content of the process of history which realizes itself – in a myriad of varieties – in each individual human life. It follows that each individual – regardless of whether he is conscious of this or not – is an active factor in the overall process whose product he also is. Progress towards species being in individual life represents the true convergence of two real but inseparable paths of development.1

Accordingly, aesthetics in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen ends up comprising a training ground for understanding what social action might mean, for turning atomised, alienated individuals into human beings who, in encountering a world that is adequate to them in art, are thereby both moved and informed to act in the real world on behalf of newly fostered interests that exceed nation, class, race, or tribe. Mimetic representations in art, to the issues of which the first volume of Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen devotes so much attention, are thus capable of calling forth action in their recipients, albeit in widely mediated ways. According to this Bildungseffekt, there is a form of movedness in the work of art that represents a kind of action in the subject, and after the return to the obligations and concerns of everyday life, this action in the subject has the potential to develop into an action of the subject, into an ethics as it were. This mimetic communication between art object and its recipient, between the perspective of species-being evocatively disclosed by art and those standpoints peculiar to a given individual, helps form subjects capable of acting in a more consciously aware way in a much broader sphere of life such that they do not participate in species-being so much

1  Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. István Eörsi, London 1983, 169.

90 

 Erik Bachman

as species-being inheres in their very actions and being. Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen thus offers us an amply ramified account not only of the anthropological genesis of art and other so-called modal reflections of reality (science, the everyday, ethics, religion, magic) but also of what happens in the beforehand, during, and afterwards of a properly aesthetic encounter with a genuine work of art so that the humanist reform of socialist democracy that Lukács’ later works urge on might be credibly something more than just empty sloganeering.2 It would seem, then, that at root Lukács’ late writings on aesthetics conspicuously foreground the utopian function of art as the anticipatory “education of desire” that we commonly associate with figures in the Marxist utopian tradition like Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse. As described by Ruth Levitas, this education of desire is “part of the process of allowing the abstract elements of utopia to be gradually replaced by the concrete, allowing anticipation to dominate compensation. Utopia does not express desire, but enables people to work towards an understanding of what is necessary for human fulfilment, a broadening, deepening and raising of aspirations in terms quite different from those of their everyday life”.3 Despite the apparent congruence here between this Marxist utopian education of desire and the expressly pedagogical functions of Lukács’ late aesthetics, however, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen reliably evinces an ambivalent attitude towards utopia, which is neither a matter of content nor form for Lukács in that work but rather of artistic failure on the one hand and of extrinsic function on the other. That is to say, even when it is not a sign that a work is failing to be art, the utopian nevertheless remains something beyond the realm of what is at stake or of interest in art as art. At worst, the utopian is failed art, at best it is outside art or (if you prefer) it is no-place in art. Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen thus initially characterises as “utopian” the failure to convey or interpret the immanent universal human ethical appeals made by all art worthy of the name. For Lukács, this utopian failure becomes manifest in both the production and the reception of art. In the second volume of Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, he states: It is an emotional utopia of rarefied artists to dream that there could only be genuine and great works of art. Such a demand would be utopian even for the creative work of the single greatest artist. […] If art (and not just an individual, albeit ever so great, artist) is to act as the vital factor of human society, then it must alight from that society’s immediate needs,

2  For an example of such a call for the humanist reform of socialist democracy, see: Georg Lukács, The Process of Democratization, trans. Susanne Bernhardt and Norman Levine, Albany 1991. 3  Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, Bern 2010, 141.



Utopian Failure and Function in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen 

 91

and even when it raises these needs to the unlikely level of the human in relatively few works – art only actually achieving itself here – this does not mean that such actualizations of the aesthetic, which alone are authentic, are directly possible without real mediations, that a socio-historical condition of mankind could be thinkable in which these most profound species-needs of mankind would realize themselves exclusively as actual, complete fulfillments.4

Just as the legitimately great artist can still fail to create art altogether, so too can those who are receptive to art fail to be adequate to the challenges to thought, behaviour, and standpoint that a given art object calls forth: Neither in the subjective nor in the objective sense is the own world of art something utopian, something that would transcendentally point beyond man and his world. As we have shown, it is the own world of man in the subjective as well as in the objective sense, and in such a way that the highest concrete possibilities of man and world stand before him in the sensuously immediate actualization of his best efforts in a way that is real and profoundly his own. Even when art – in poetry or music, for example – apparently brings a world of ought face to face with man, this ought assumes in it the form of a fulfilled being, and the person undergoing the second immediacy of the work can enter into communication with it as with his own world. Only in the “afterwards” of the effect does the ought-character emerge again; but even here the great works of art – regardless of whether or not their content entails an ought – move closer together once more: even the most idyllic song or the simplest still-life expresses an ought in a certain sense: it is addressed to everyday man with the prompt to likewise bring about that unity and elevation that appears realized in the work. It is the ought of any fulfilled life.5

Perhaps surprisingly, then, as Ágnes Heller pointed out some time ago, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (History and Class Consciousness) and Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen thus end up asking the same question: “how can one attain a true and correct consciousness in an alienated, reified society?”6 In contrast to the messianic answer offered in the earlier work, however, the one provided in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen is literally more down to earth and ready to hand. As Heller puts it, “Some entity has to be found that already represents in itself the unity of individual and species and provides that, through its adoption, it will

4  Georg Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 12, Neuwied am Rhein 1963, 560–561. All quotes from both volumes of Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen are my own and come from my translation of The Specificity of the Aesthetic, forthcoming in Brill’s Lukács Library series, of which I am also co-editor. 5  Georg Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, Neuwied am Rhein 1963, 511–512. 6  Ágnes Heller, “Lukács’ Later Philosophy”, in: Ágnes Heller (ed.), Lukács Revalued, Oxford 1983, 177–190, here 184.

92 

 Erik Bachman

give to all the possibility of rising to true, defetishized consciousness. This entity, according to Lukács, is art itself”.7 Moreover, whereas Lukács’ early writings on aesthetics view as tragic “the gap between fetishistic everyday life and the defetishized work of art”, his late aesthetics regards such a gap with what Heller calls “naive optimism”,8 an optimism borne out of a more complicated account of the everyday and art’s interrelationship with it, which is a point to which I will shortly be returning. Yet this binding together of individual and species-being in art objects that evoke the imperative that the everyday person change his or her life can also be described as a utopian function (rather than a utopian failure) of art, so long as “utopian” here is understood to denote something along the lines of an Ernst Bloch-like futurity or anticipation of better life. In the first volume of Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, Lukács accordingly describes how: in grasping the relationship between individual and species-being consciousness […] the latter is never given in a subjectively immediate way or at most is given in an anticipatorily utopian way. […] For the overwhelming majority of arts, art forms, and art works, it is not possible to present the perspective of the future in a form other than that of an implied, more or less visualized direction of movement within the present that is being shaped.9

It is passages such as this that lead Fredric Jameson in a forthcoming article on Lukács’ aesthetics to describe the Lukácsian work of art as ultimately utopian. Jameson writes: Indeed, the notion of species being does not seem to me to have to carry with it stereotypical humanist overtones of universality at all. It is rather to be intimately related to the conception of the proletarian standpoint in History and Class Consciousness, which is universal precisely because it has nothing and is nothing. This anonymity of consciousness is a true Kantian Interesselosigkeit in the sense in which it has no class interests to fulfill: it needs neither to hold onto to what it has or to have more, since it has nothing in the first place: and this is the sense in which its possibilities and potentialities are unconstrained and immeasurable. […] The work of art in its Utopian fulfillment does not enrich us with a matchless variety of new experiences: rather, its Erlebnis strips us of the private property of our own and allows us to glimpse the possibility of a subjectivity without privilege and without hierarchy.10

7  Heller, “Lukács’ Later Philosophy”, 184. 8  Heller, “Lukács’ Later Philosophy”, 187. 9  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 585–586. 10  Fredric Jameson, “Early Lukács, Aesthetics of Politics?”, to be published in: Historical Materialism, n.p.



Utopian Failure and Function in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen 

 93

Jameson is certainly correct to call attention to the utopian dimensions of such a convergence of individual consciousness and species-being consciousness in Lukács’ work of art, but he curiously omits to apply the methodology he developed at length in Archaeologies of the Future, whereby the utopian and anti-utopian elements of a given text or object are to be dialectically unfolded. This is an all the more unusual omission insofar as Lukács, in the course of admitting such a utopian function of art, immediately proceeds to refuse to grant the validity of utopia as an intrinsically aesthetic category because when we describe such a binding together of individual and species-being as utopian, we are not using words or concepts proper to art, which in turn leads Lukács to sketch out the ramifications of the ways in which art can be both utopian and un-utopian or even anti-utopian all at once. That is to say, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen already overtly stages its own proto-Jamesonian unpacking of the dialectical interrelationships of the utopian and the anti- or un-utopian. As Lukács himself puts it, “it belongs to the essence of art to not be utopian”,11 because the future in art is always immanently rooted in the present, in the everyday. If it were not, then the work would be overly conceptual and abstractly anticipatory in terms of content and thus would not be art but journalism or science or philosophy, each of which can be progressive intellectual forces in history if they pursue the path taken by the human species, but none of which are art. Lukács is thus able to commend major utopian thinkers from More to Fourier to Marx and Engels to Lenin even as he stresses the extraneousness of these utopian programs and functions to art.12 Whenever art with an explicitly utopian character comes into being and indeed proves to be a work of art, Lukács ends up describing it in terms of Schiller’s account of sentimental and naïve poetry, insofar as this utopian work of art remains rooted in “the yearning of a subject for” utopia, and is thus “sentimental” in the Schillerian sense.13 Thus, Lukács identifies a third utopian element here (a utopian impulse, as it were) that would appear to be the motive force behind ascribing utopian functions to art in the first place, though again this utopian impulse (like the utopian function itself) is extra-aesthetic in his account. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this argument is that it goes on expressly to deny the existence of such a thing as utopian form. In contrast with Jameson, there is no such thing as utopian form in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, and what is of actual artistic interest in a given work of art called “utopian” is not

11  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 586. 12  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 586–587. 13  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 587–588.

94 

 Erik Bachman

what Jameson calls its “representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality”.14 More relevant for aesthetics and art, according to late Lukács, is how such a comportment gets variously modalised because utopia as such is not a form, is not a formal category, but is instead merely a material for other properly literary forms: The elegiac, idyllic, and satirical are the dispositive forms with the help of which the state of affairs intended here can be composed; whereby it is of course by no means asserted that these specific contents exhaust the whole ambit of these dispositions. However, they permit a figuration in which the not-yet-existing and still subjective reality of the human species can let an important aspect of its being-for-us attain expression precisely because the ultimate truth of such representations – even when they are not markedly lyrical in character but immediately evoke instead a detached object-world – is nevertheless situated in the subject.15

Thus the utopias serially depicted in Gulliver’s Travels are said to be the raw material for satire, and on this count Thomas More’s foundational Utopia is denied as art and instead described as a journalistic-scientific communication of knowledge in a popular mode.16 Given this insistence that art be both utopian and anti-utopian all at once, that it anticipate a state of being that no-one can immediately experience by relying on the immanent matter supplied by the everyday present moment and the other currently existing modal reflections of reality, Lukács himself openly poses the question, “where [then] is there room for the figuration of the problems of the human species?”17 This room for manoeuvre is found in what gets evoked by art, in the transformation of group affiliations by a given work of art into affects whose ensuing conflicts with each other in a given person become passional: As the effectively existing relationships between people form each individual so deeply that they are not to be thought away out of their concrete being-just-so, what emerges in life itself is that dialectic that art then mimetically evokes: the ramifications of his being formed by family, class, nation, etc. (ramifications that are operative in the individual) are never simply influences from without, nor are they even “layers” within his personality; instead, they are affects that are essentially congeneric to each other (though these affects admittedly differ in quality, intensity, etc. depending on who the individual is). In each person, the conflicts evoked by this constellation turn into the inner conflicts of his own passions.

14  Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, London 2005, xii. 15  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 588–589. 16  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 831. 17  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 589.



Utopian Failure and Function in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen 

 95

This emergent situation in life is not only faithfully reflected by aesthetic mimesis but also enhanced and intensified [by it].18

This thus yields the unification of individual and species-being in a way that is immanent to the present (no future projection transcending the present is necessary). Accordingly, the real “utopian” essence of art is said to be not utopia as such but rather pathos, defined by Lukács (by way of Hegel) as “an inherently justified power over the heart, an essential content of rationality and freedom of will”.19 According to Lukács, then: no work of art is utopian because with its means it can only reflect that which exists; the not-yet-existing, that which is to come, that which is to be actualized appears in it only in so far as it is present in that which exists itself as the capillary groundwork for the future, as forerunner, as desire and longing, as rejection of precisely that which exists, as perspective, etc. At the same time, however, each work of art is utopian in comparison to the empirical suchness of the reality it reflects, but utopian in the literal sense as portrayal of something that is always and never there. While it raises every human ambition, every feeling, every relationship to society and nature to their own completeness immanently existing in them, rooted deep within them, without infringing upon their reality (indeed, it is precisely this reality which it develops), it confronts man with an exemplar in the shaped likeness of reality. In the genuine work of art, the completion that is only achieved in life and ethical praxis by way of exception appears as the “natural” existence of people. As we have emphasized, however, not completion in an abstractly universal sense but rather as the completion of the current hic et nunc of man and his environment that is being presented, as the completion of his particularity.20

The extrinsic utopian function that Lukács discerns in art is thus rendered utopian and anti-utopian simultaneously because it expresses a possibility that is always present but not always recognised, which distinguishes his conception of utopia from Ernst Bloch insofar as he seems to discount the distinction Bloch draws between that which is possible (katà tò dynatón) and that which may yet become possible (dynámei ón).21 In Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, there is only that which is possible, and the task of art is to evocatively direct attention to and mobilise people around its presence in the here and now. What thus distinguishes Lukács’ late utopian formulations from those of Bloch is the same thing that distinguishes Die Theorie des Romans (The Theory of the Novel) from Geist

18  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 589–590. 19  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 11, 591. 20  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 12, 238. 21  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, Cambridge, MA 1996, vol. 1, 235–242.

96 

 Erik Bachman

der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia): in short, the priority of art (of the autonomous work of art as art) in the former and of the open potentialities of the future that are constantly bleeding into or otherwise inflecting things that can no longer be kept apart in their unprocessed purity in the latter.22 Nevertheless, art’s expressly utopian potential in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen would thus seem to be its capacity to evoke a human totality out of the scattered reified fragments that make up the life-world of the everyday, to turn these fragments into felt communities capable of becoming passional commitments to changing that which is evoked in art into what may yet be in life. However, given the equal weight Lukács puts on negative assessments of “utopia” as codeword for failure, the unexpressed utopian potential of art is that of failing to do any of these high-sounding things because no self-contained work of art worthy of the name can immediately bridge this gap between art and life and still exist as such, which is an insight that those historical avant-gardes (most notably Dada and Surrealism) which attacked the sovereignty of the category of the autonomous work of art themselves recognised and exploited in their efforts to do to life what formerly could only be conceivably mediated by art. The utopian function of art is thus to permanently and evocatively guide life because it is powerless to directly change it, whereas the utopian failure of art is to irrevocably become it. The utopian function of art premises the possibility of presently determining the future on the continuing autonomy of the closed world of the work of art, whereas the utopian failure of art posits its chiliastic future on art’s becoming undifferentiated from present-day life. In sum, utopian art fails when it takes art’s utopian function too literally and ceases to be art at all. By contrast, art lives up to its utopian function of educating the desires of its recipients when such a function ceases to be utopian, when such an education attends more modestly but no less importantly to the task of transition, not from an absolutely sinful present to a more perfectly just future, but rather from the man-made-whole (der Menschen ganz) by art to the whole man (der ganze Mensch) of the everyday, from the experiential processes evoked and the possibilities opened up by a particular work of art to the tasks, demands, and behaviours of daily life that are all momentarily suspended in the formative encounters with that work of art. In Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, inculcating the whole man of the everyday with the attitudes and comportments evoked by art is the non-utopian way of creating the new man out of a broadening, deepening, and raising of aspirations in terms that coincide with (rather than close themselves off to) the long, drawnout social experiences that do indeed endure in everyday life: “This is one of the

22  See: Sándor Radnóti, “Lukács and Bloch”, in: Heller (ed.), Lukács Revalued, 63–74, here 71.



Utopian Failure and Function in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen 

 97

most important effects art has on the everyday life of men: the elevation of their personal culture, their propagated and deepened receptivity to everything that life can contribute to the enrichment of the human species by means of individual development”.23 There is nothing utopian about the convergence of species-being and individual, Lukács insists, just as there is nothing utopian about the tardy formation of art in general out of magical and religious rituals, just as there is nothing utopian about the millennia-long development of mimetic rhythm, symmetry, and proportion out of the sluggish accumulation of labour experiences in man’s pre- and early history – in short, there is nothing utopian about aesthetics at all, so long as it and all of these things that make it up arise out of everyday life and return into everyday life. In other words, there is nothing utopian about aesthetics and art so long as they end up being habit-forming rather than everywhere and nowhere all at once.

23  Lukács, “Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen”, in: Georg Lukács Werke, vol. 12, 157.

Barrett Watten

Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia From Leningrad to Occupy Concrete utopia precisely does not derive from any pregiven goal of the historical process; the shape of the utopian is a product of new valuations of justice, freedom, happiness, and so on, which are forged in processes of political struggle and interpretive conflicts. By the same token, hermeneutical “recovery” of the heritage of utopia has no sure ground of meaning or foothold in truth from which we could then glean the valid significations and discard the ideological shell of a particular work. […] The utopian power of poetry can only lie in its concrete connections, as a language practice, with its relevant social contexts rather than in its capacity either to separate itself from those contexts or to set itself above them. – John Brenkman, “The Concrete Utopia of Poetry”.1

Language poets have made dramatic claims for the “challenge” that Language poetry presents to contemporary culture, arguing for the contribution “oppositional” poetry makes to the reader’s freedom and to social justice. At the same time, Language poetry has understood itself to be itself something like a culture – a “provisional institution” that grounds “an alternative system of valuation”. […] Language poets produce poetry that is precisely equivalent to language, where language is considered as a kind of creatural knowledge or potential; therefore Language poets tend to treat the objects of their art – poems – as epiphenomenal evidence of a constitutively human capacity for free and creative agency that is the real object of their interest. – Oren Izenberg, “Language Poetry and Collective Life”.2

Language writing has a differential, both concrete and critical, relationship to the horizon of utopia – which, we should remember, is a “nonplace”, an alternative time and space that is only momently (or eventally) possible as lived experience.3 “Language” itself offers an expansive and holistic medium for poetry as a ground for combinatorial fantasy and potential agency that simultaneously invokes

1  John Brenkman, Culture and Domination, Ithaca, NY 1987, 105–106, 109. 2  Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life, Princeton, NJ 2011, 140, 142. 3  This essay was presented at EAM 4 in Helsinki, August 2014; and at the University of Michigan, February 2015, sponsored by the Poetry and Poetics Workshop and Interdisciplinary Marxist Working Group. Thanks to Gillian White; to Lyn Hejinian for her unpublished paper; and to Brian Ang for comments on the present version of the essay.

100 

 Barrett Watten

radical particularity, material opacity, spatial alterity, and temporal deferral; “language” in poetry is a poetic nonsite that may be powerfully transformative, if not ultimately utopian, in its radical potential. In this paper, I will chart the relationship of Language writing to the horizon of utopia at four specific moments: 1) in its development of poetic practice in radical formal terms, as a social formation, and as a collective practice (seen in terms of the material history of its publications and performances); 2) with the occasion of four Language writers’ participation in a conference on avant-garde poetics in Leningrad, in the former Soviet Union at the end of “Perestroika” (1989), and our subsequent multiauthored account, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991); 3) with the completion of the multiauthored The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography by ten Language writers who met in San Francisco in the 70s (published in 2006–2010); and 4) after the performance and reception of The Grand Piano in a series of readings in the Bay Area during the Occupy movement of 2011, testifying to the convergence of certain tendencies of the Occupy movement with avant-garde poetries such as Language writing. The moment of convergence of Language writing with Oakland Occupy poets, and their poetic contribution to a radical democratic, anticapitalist politics, is an exemplary instance of concrete utopia.

Moment I: Language Writing Language writing is a critical intervention of radical form that opens up a space for agency and reflection and is generative of new possibilities, seen through the medium of language.4 Language writing has been generative in several senses: in its forms of radical textuality; in its expanding networks and effects on generations of writers; of theoretical discussions in poetics; and even on reflection on its name itself. Language writing is located at a kind of definitional nexus or chiasmus that may be organized around two sets of interpretive poles. First, Language writing’s radical forms of poetic experiment may seem autonomous but depended on the constitution of a social formation of writing communities, to begin with in San Francisco and New York; radical form and social formation conjoin in its development. Second, Language writing critically revised a prior

4  By 2015, Language writing has accumulated a large bibliography, on both individual authors and the movement as a whole; for a brief version, see: Barrett Watten, “Language Writing”, in Walter Kalaidjian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, Cambridge 2015, 234–247.



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 101

literary tradition but did so at the intersection of multiple artistic, cultural, and political imperatives of the moment of its formation, the 1970s: not merely overturning a precedent style, it was constituted at a moment of historical crisis. That crisis, broadly figured, was the crisis of capitalism that led to the consolidation of neoliberal political economy after 1973, and it is a crisis that has continued, as lived experience for emerging writers and intellectuals, through the global financial meltdowns after 2008. To further extend the politics of Language writing toward the horizon of utopia, I turn to the two critical moments in radical poetics above. Located at the intersection of several strands of Critical Theory (Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse), John Brenkman’s formulation of concrete utopia, in Culture and Domination (1987), refuses both historical materialist and critical idealist accounts. Following Bloch, he sees utopian possibilities as “latent […] in the experiences of freedom and self-organization which social groups and classes possess, intermittently and fragmentarily, in their everyday existence, political practices, myths, and artistic endeavors”.5 Utopia is not a permanently congealed wish that underpins a failed state, as we would experience in Leningrad in 1989; it is more like the subterranean bar of the Composer’s Union where we held forth in endless talk. If Marcuse, on the other hand sees the work of art as negatively articulating “another reason, another sensibility, which def[ies] the rationality and sensibility […] in dominant social institutions”,6 Brenkman wants to show how “the social dialectic of art does not arise from the conflict between a divided reality and a unified work, but rather takes the form of conflicts within the work”.7 A romantic negativity does not account for the work’s constitution of an alternative order: our international summer school in Leningrad would thus not simply be an oppositional moment, and we should look to the way the work we produced from it takes up specific tasks of revaluation of lived experience in its own construction. This task of revaluation would diverge, as well, from Adorno’s notion of autonomous form as criticizing society per se, which Brenkman claims “merely transfers his own dualism of ‘art’ and ‘society’ into his conception of language” as critical alternative.8 At the same time, Brenkman would refuse the formal autonomy that Adorno saw as poetry’s immanent critique, seeing his lyric “monad” as but another construction of an individual/social dyad. To Brenkman’s call for a reading of poetry as “a material-social practice that organizes actual social

5  Brenkman, Culture and Domination, 104. 6  Brenkman [quoting Marcuse], Culture and Domination, 105. 7  Brenkman, Culture and Domination, 108. 8  Brenkman, Culture and Domination, 120.

102 

 Barrett Watten

relations”,9 one could point to the relation of the material dimensions of Language writing – its social networks, readings series, textual collaboration, and publication projects – and its transformation of specific values within poetic language. Language writing’s textuality, specifically its intertextuality, would be a better model for mediation between the literary and social; for Leningrad, our utopian horizon would then be the exchanges of the conference itself. That “the utopian power of poetry can only lie in its concrete connections”10 supports Language writing as immanent critique, not of society as totality, but of myriad values that society makes us live as “damaged life” – its foregrounding of radical particularity is not merely an avant-garde formalism but a negotiation of values. Brenkman’s formulation aligns with the Left reception of Language writing in the period, where oppositional cultures, utopian alternatives, and political economy were all in play. Over two decades later, Oren Izenberg’s account of Language writing in Being Numerous (2011) adds an important (and new) linguistic turn to the baseline account of material intervention into the lifeworld. On the one hand, Language writing does construct a “contrary commonwealth” based on its texts, networks, publications, and theory – its social reproduction, as an alternative culture, is the complement to its radical forms. Language writing sees itself as “something like a culture”, constructing a counterhegemonic “alternative system of valorization”.11 But Izenberg goes one step farther in taking language seriously as the basis for its material critique: it is the generative capacity of language to exceed its material limits, thus implying an infinite rather than finite horizon of expectation, one not bounded by either material givens or their critical modification, that gives Language writing its utopian politics (at the same time rendering more abstract the transformation of values in its radical particularity). Language writing’s use of “language” per se would thus be not referential or textualizing or even materially concretizing but generative: “epiphenomenal evidence of a constitutively human capacity for free and creative agency that is the real object of their interest”.12 Izenberg thus moves from the structuralist/materialist framework for language common to Marxist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, where language is “only differences” across a finite lexicon and the precedence of the signifier over the signified is the primary politics of the turn to language, toward a Chomskyan generative grammar and its notion of linguistic competence. Language in this model

9  Brenkman, Culture and Domination, 120. 10  Brenkman, Culture and Domination, 109. 11  Izenberg, Being Numerous, 140. 12  Izenberg, Being Numerous, 142.



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 103

Fig. 5 (left): Michael Davidson et al., Leningrad, front cover. Cover photo: author. Fig. 6 (right): Logo of the four authors of Leningrad.

is a grammatical algorithm performed on a lexicon that may generate infinite possibilities of statement: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is one result. While several Language writers were cognizant of generative grammar in their formative period, skepticism about Chomsky’s claims to linguistic autonomy and the Cartesian subject limited the influence of his work.13 As well, Chomsky’s thinking on politics as a form of rational competence was seen as untenable given the high degree of irrationalism in state behavior, then as now. The primary threads of the multifaceted and overdetermined turn to language in the period included structuralism, neopragmatism and post-analytic philosophy, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. Introducing generative grammar into the poetics of Language writing, thus, comes as something of a shock, but with a significant benefit for seeing how the infinite productivity of language and a politics of radical freedom may conjoin. Not confining language to material signification, after Izenberg, opens a new horizon for the utopian possibility of Language writing that I will explore in the next three moments.

13  There is a complex history to Language writing’s relation to linguistics; writers on the West Coast were very familiar with the critique of Chomsky associated with Generative Semantics and, later, cognitive linguistics, and George Lakoff was a frequent participant in readings and other art events in the period. For Lakoff’s contribution to language-centered poetics, see: George Lakoff, “Continuous Reframing”, in: Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten (eds), A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998, Middletown, CT 2013, 111–118.

104 

 Barrett Watten

Moment II: Leningrad August 2014 was 25 years to the month that four Language writers – Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and I – traveled from California via Helsinki and on to Leningrad, “hero city” of the Soviet Union at the precise moment of its undoing. Immediately on our return, we collaborated on Leningrad, a conceptually organized, multi-authored account of our experiences (see fig. 5). Silliman, in his introduction to Leningrad, describes the event as occurring “during the brief window in world history between the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc”.14 If there ever were a concrete utopia to be understood as “a pregiven goal of the historical process”, it was the Soviet Union, whose repressed history, both in the East and West, would congeal a utopian kernel that it was our task, in part, to recover in the meeting of Language writing and Soviet avant-garde poetry. The more significant utopian moment, however, was the opening of our avant-garde conference itself, whose dynamic of unfolding, suspended within the catastrophe of the Cold War, would be reflected in the formal construction of our nonnarrative history. Leningrad was organized ateleologically, with no beginning, middle, or end but rather a modular conceptual grid that distributed the sections of the four authors, accompanied by a Soviet-chic logo that tagged their sections (see fig. 6). In a critical dialogue on this event by two of its participants, I theorized the nonnarrativity of avant-garde writing as historical (in my essay “Nonnarrative and the Construction of History”), while Silliman took up the collective form of authorship we had achieved in his “The Task of the Collaborator”.15 We both interrogate the paratactic, modular, and distributed form of the work, but to different ends: mine to relocate Language writing in the disrupted history from which it emerged; Silliman to think through the stakes of collective authorship, which he accessed through two early style-checker programs called RightWriter and Corporate Voice. In a prescient application of humanities computing, Silliman attempts to show how the four distinct styles – and by extension persons – of Leningrad’s four authors tend toward a common center, one that levels expressive extremes toward grammatical means. It is here that Izenberg would find the utopian index in Leningrad – not in

14  Ron Silliman, in: Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union, San Francisco 1991, 8. Quoted in: Izenberg, Being Numerous, 143. 15  Barrett Watten, “Nonnarrative and the Construction of History”, in: The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics, Middletown, CT 2003, 197–237; Ron Silliman, “Task of the Collaborator: Watten’s Leningrad”, in: Aerial, 8, 1995, 141–168.



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 105

its critical account of the end of the Soviet Union, nor even in the formation of an oppositional “contrary commonwealth” in the conference itself, but in language per se as enabling an infinitely generated human capacity: “Language poets are Language poets in just this sense – they intend their poems not as sentences representing propositions, but as exemplifications of the species-specific creative competence to freely produce and to recognize new sentences as sentences in a language”.16 What is suggestive is the notion of the infinite productivity of language within constraints of syntax as a linguistic model and aesthetic/political goal for the works of Language writing. The royal road to collectivity becomes the combinatorial capacity of Language writing, not the priority of either form or content; in contrast to its avant-garde progeny, Conceptual writing, Language writing insists that the horizon of meaning remain open, rather than subordinating it to a procedure or rule. To test Izenberg’s theory of generativity in Leningrad, we may return to the text itself, seen through the optic of Silliman’s style-checking experiment. It is evident even without that lens that the text is highly paratactic, in form and content: four sections of four authors each, without beginning, middle, or end; often written in the modular style of the New Sentence; and reflecting on the myriad of detail and reflection that impressed itself on us: And then I wrote – more disjunct phrases to fill up a notebook. Ivanov had met Tarkovsky and spoke with him about the problem of filming a dream: “Dreams in the cinema have to be clear as what in the cinema are not dreams”. This is because “the film director makes all the things that death makes of life – the way death makes sense of it”. I dream that I live in a communal flat called “The Poetry Project” with Carla and Asa and many others. For the next speaker, Abram Yusfin, “the form of the work is a kind of hologram, and all these holograms organize a mathematical space. This explains how different artists of different epochs might meet in their creativity while they have never met each other”. (George Lakoff on the phone momentarily interrupts this). “We need to find these holograms. Community is what we are dealing with, not one man or one work of art”. And then Yulia Latinina stands forth: “The Stalinist epoch could not admit to an abstract person. We must realize those mechanisms that build a man”. One of her folkloric examples: “The axe is floating in the river / And my sweet man is building the Volga Don Channel!” When Anya was interrupted by a man who didn’t like her translating out loud for me, she said (with objective rigor), “Ya rabotayu” (I’m working). According to Vadim Baronov, “Every text has the feature of a double object­

16  Izenberg, Being Numerous, 162. Contra my colleagues, including Silliman, I find Izenberg’s chapter to be one of the most compelling accounts of Language writing written yet by a critic outside the movement. It is, however, both suggestive and somewhat arbitrary in its reliance on a Chomskyan theory of generative grammar – separated, as ever, from semantics, performance, and context – as responsible for a “species-specific” identification of person as the task of Language writing.

106 

 Barrett Watten

ivity.­It is not only the object of a universal space but the object of our speech. This double objectivity can be overcome and united into one in speech”. (This noise outside the window interferes). (Playing chess in a dream, the machine always wins).17

The content of this passage – recording the wild proliferation of ideologies and poetics we encountered among the Soviet avant-garde – intersects with the form of paratactic inquiry. We are recording situations, toward the goal of representing our experience and reflecting on it critically, a mediation of congealed Soviet history that points toward a concrete utopia. In each sentence, a version of ideological or poetic displacement is readable against its utopian kernel of desire, fantasy, and wish. The outer horizon of these poetic utterances is a theory of language: one that rejects objective grounds and seeks correspondence with a universe of abstract forms. The intersection of language-centered technique and Soviet poetics becomes a transvaluation of values, obtained through the material occasion of our interaction, toward a larger horizon of transnational poetic community. At the same time, the pragmatic grounding of our assumptions about representation finds the Soviet’s rampant idealism a bit strange. It is not exactly skepticism that results, but an accession to another level of perception. If what we recorded in Leningrad was accurate as material life and as language, the disparity is tragic, in the hope of transnational solidarity, and confirming, in terms of our own methods. Utopia is questioned and deferred through the language writing of Leningrad, while the methods of Language writing are sustained. While I viewed this continuity as historical, in nonnarrating a historical event that exceeds or fails narration, Silliman saw it as heuristic: a paradigm for organizing knowledge, akin to but distinct from an act of translation – a cross-cultural, multi-languaged poetics of convergence and divergence. The hyperformalist use of style-checking software, then, worked to disclose the congealed kernel, not of the Soviets’ utopian fantasy, but of our linguistic method. Working at the level of sentence construction, word frequency, and readability, Silliman finds (using crude but effective means) “statistical evidence of the power of collaboration, a superpersonal account of the loss of control each author must experience during the course of a collaborative project”.18 Measuring frequency of word usage, on the other hand, he remarks a divergence in what he terms “bricks”, elemental concepts or keywords that recur throughout the text. As a first result, Silliman lists all those words for each author that appear five or more times (see fig. 7), noting that the proper names Leningrad and Arkadii appear most frequently on all lists, while proper names predominate in nearly every list – except my own, which is much less personified. Subtracting

17  Davidson et al., Leningrad, 59–60. 18  Davidson et al., Leningrad, 153.



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

MD

LH

RS

6 Barrett

15 Arkadii

10 Arkadii

10 Leningrad

6 Leningrad

9 Zina

9 airport

10 Russians

5 Arkadii

8 Leningrad

9 Leningrad

9 poetic

5 bus

7 context

6 Lenin

8 enormous

5 Dmitrii

6 feminism

6 Michael

8 Lenin

5 drawing

5 crowded

6 Nevsky

5 Arkadii

5 Petersburg

5 currency

6 palace

5 consciousness

5 fence

6 tea

5 identical

5 mud

6 Zhdanov

5 Neva

5 bus

 107

BW

5 giant 5 Viktor

MD

LH

RS

BW

‧ bus

7 context

9 airport

9 poetic

‧ drawing

6 feminism

6 palace

8 enormous

‧ fence

5 crowded

6 tea

5 consciousness

‧ mud

5 currency

5 bus

5 identical

5 giant Fig. 7 (above): Word frequency chart, in: Silliman, “Task of the Collaborator”, 154. Fig. 8 (below): Edited word frequency chart, in: Silliman, “Task of the Collaborator”, 155.

the proper names then reveals a second list of keywords (see fig. 8); a deeper design shows forth in the lexical nodes each author returns to over the course of our paratactic text. In my sections, the convergence is both critical and interpretive, if not utopian: poetic, enormous, consciousness, and identical are the conceptual underpinnings for more contingent observations: The clouds in Dovzhenko’s Aerograd, enormous counterpoint to puny biplanes plying their historic mission to the new Soviet Far East […] Somewhere in the middle there is a slag heap of enormous proportions near which the people go to swim. […] In some of the stations enormous metal doors separate the people from trains. […] The enormous red tile image of Mayakovsky in the metro that bears his name […]19

19  Davidson et al., Leningrad, 58, 70, 71, 80.

108 

 Barrett Watten

Fig. 9: Armantrout et al., Grand Piano 10, front cover.

The recurrent use of such keywords is a structural underpinning that holds the variousness of our observations together, Silliman notes. But they are also devices that disclose meanings in the welter of events we experienced, conceptual algorithms that generate sentences. What these sentences disclose, in turn, is the capacious vastness of Soviet “language, consciousness, society” (the three keywords used as rubrics for our conference). It is here the utopian critiques of Brenkman and Izenberg begin to merge: on the one hand, with Brenkman, our writing paratactically engages the language and values we encountered, mutually transforming both: utopia is the concrete possibility of such a transformation. On the other, after Izenberg, the algorithmic use of our language-centered procedures discloses the utopian kernel of Soviet ideology: an enormous poetic identity between consciousness and language. The form of Leningrad keeps generating paratactic combinations that eliminate individual authors and even national literatures, toward the expansive horizon of a common poetic core imagined as a language-yet-to-come that could unite us as a collectivity.

Moment III: The Grand Piano Discussion of my third moment will be brief: from 1998 to 2010, ten West Coast Language writers collaborated on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 109

Autobiography, San Francisco 1975–1980.20 The initial occasion of our project was an invitation to contribute to a festschrift in honor of Lyn Hejinian; Leningrad was the original model for our project, in its distributed authorship and serial form but also in its foregrounding of social formation.21 The structure of the work drew, also, from Leningrad’s example: ten authors in ten volumes, organized in a matrix so that no author occupies the same spot in the order more than once. The cover design of the published volumes borrowed their motif from Soviet constructivism (from a 1931 engineering manual, designed by Varvara Stepanova; see fig. 9). During the period of its writing, the “Grand Piano” comprised a virtual community of writers in the 00s, paralleling the initial occasion of their meeting, organizing, writing, and performing in the 70s. The horizon of utopia may be critically assessed along our two contrasting accounts: on the one hand, The Grand Piano is a paratactic critique of the values of a writing community undertaken at a later date, merging material differences of time, history, space, and experience. On the other, The Grand Piano is an algorithmic procedure that expands lived experience toward a horizon of recombinant possibility, generating a manifold of interpretive potential. The latter reading particularly inspired the several public performances we presented of our project as it was being written and published.22 Our collectivity is being paratactically combined and rearranged in these performances, using recursive, generative performance strategies. At the two Bay Area readings (Berkeley and San Francisco, November 2011), a major convergence between Language writing and Occupy took place, suggesting new horizons of utopia for a new generation of poets who merge experimental poetics and collective action.23

20 Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten, The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–1980, 10 vols, Detroit 2006–2010. 21  Participants agreed that the project should not focus on an individual author, hence the origin of our project. The volume on Hejinian’s work is due to appear as Aerial 10 in 2015. 22  These included a three-person reading (Benson, Robinson, Watten) at the Poetry of the 70s conference (2008); a seven-person reading in Detroit (Benson, Harryman, Hejinian, Mandel, Pearson, Robinson, Watten; 2008); a six-person reading in Los Angeles (minus Mandel and Benson, plus Armantrout; 2010); two seven-person readings in the Bay Area (plus Mandel); an eight-person reading in New York (minus Armantrout, plus Benson and Perelman); and a three-person reading in Sydney (Harryman, Hejinian, Watten; 2014). 23  For more on The Grand Piano, see its website: www.thegrandpiano.org.

110 

 Barrett Watten

Moment IV: Occupy The Occupy movement, as an exemplary upsurge of popular protest to neoliberal state politics and economic dispossession after the 2008 economic collapse and bailout of financial institutions that caused it, created a new vocabulary of resistance and a range of strategies, in organization, time, and space (see figs 10 and 11). Starting with the occupation of Zucotti Park on September 17, 2011, the movement surged in the fall of 2011 and reemerged sporadically over the next year, while its transformation of oppositional politics has continued on multiple fronts. Occupy was at its origins multi-authorial rather than hierarchical, with its radical democratic methods of decision-making and spontaneous action identical to its political content. Its merger of political form and content generated manifold versions of its basic paradigm, going viral as it reproduced itself in multiple locations across the United States and the world. In my thumbnail version of Occupy, I am already identifying the two critical threads I have been developing for Language writing: the concrete utopia of a site-specific, time-based transformation of dominant values, as form and content of oppositional culture; and the generative possibility of new combinations, based on a core grammar of relations and adapting a lexicon of particular and abstract terms. I will seek out parallels between the formal methods of Language writing, seen as one poetic tendency among many associated with Occupy, and the strategies, tactics, and vocabularies it has continued to develop. Between poetry, political theory, cultural transformation, and activism, a number of individual poets, publication projects, and counter-cultural institutions have developed that point to a necessary relationship between experimental poetics and radical agency, in and around various Occupy locations. It is important that each site of Occupy has its specific stakes – both local/ particular and general/theoretical – and the interaction between poetry and politics indicates this. On the one hand, poetry at Occupy Wall Street took the form of a populist inclusiveness, with open mics for readings, a library of over 5,500 books in Zucotti Park, and the soliciting of poems for a mass anthology, begun during the occupation, that raised funds through an Indiegogo campaign but was finally realized as a 900 page anthology available on the internet.24 The breadth

24  “This anthology is an ongoing evolving anthology that is constantly growing. After Zucotti Park was raided it seemed pertinent to get this document online. This isn’t the entire document. It will be further updated soon. If you’d like to contribute to this please email poems to [email protected]”. Stephen Boyer and Filip Marinovich (eds), Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, New York n.d., frontispiece [available at: peopleslibrary.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/ows-poetry-anthology5.pdf].



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 111

Fig. 10 (left): Oakland Occupy demonstration, 12 November 2011. Photo: author. Fig. 11 (right): Poets at Oakland Occupy demonstration. Photo: author.

of the writing, in terms of every demographic variable possible among Occupy participants, aligns this anthology with previous productions on the Left: from the anti-Iraq War anthology edited by Sam Hamill to similar anthologies from the Vietnam Era.25 What is specific to Occupy is the increasing alignment of the materiality and plurality of its strategies and tactics with the multiple aesthetic, cultural, and political projects of its many authors. It is the multiple perspectives of participants, and their material specificity realized in textual form, that best aligns with the content of the movement, as it poetically seeks to determine its overarching form. As well, a poetry of direct address to the moment often combines with poetic indirection or even inconsequentiality; the “social command” of Occupy poetry is for a plural textuality. Radical democracy returns to the republic of letters in the autonomous production of poetry, seen as generative for the communal relations that form the movement. And as in every variant of Occupy, discourses of every sort – from hypertheoretical Marxism to window-smashing anarchism to New Age lifestyle politics – swirl around an empty center. While poetry has an important place in Occupy in its many versions, it is often a mix of popular democratic idioms that came down from the Beats in the 1950s, the street poetry of the 1960s, and the liberation movements of 1970s. At the nexus between San Francisco Bay Area poetry communities and Oakland Occupy, however, a hybrid mode of theoretical reflection on poetry and activism has developed out of the region’s deep political history. Occupy Oakland, for example, achieved the political high water mark of a one-day general strike that shut down the Port of Oakland, made possible in cooperation with a local of the ILWU (International Longshoreman’s Workers Union), which reimagined the

25  Sam Hamill (ed.), Poets Against War, New York 2003.

112 

 Barrett Watten

Fig. 12: ARMED CELL 1 (2011), front cover.

concept of the political strike as an everyday politics.26 It is important that Occupy Oakland was the third moment in a series of political uprisings in the Bay Area, beginning with street protests of the killing of a young black man, Oscar Grant, on public transit in 2009, and continuing through the demonstrations at University of California campuses, protesting cutbacks and tuition hikes.27 Lyn Hejinian was a public spokesperson for and organizer of the Berkeley protests; volume ten of The Grand Piano documents the details of the 2009–2010 movement, siting her contribution to our collective poetics toward the horizon of real-time activism.28 It is equally the decades-long radicalization of Bay Area poetry that led it to develop a principled relation to Occupy politics, marked by its construction of ad hoc social networks as much as “radical formal means”: the privileging of house readings over institutional programs; the proliferation of microscopic presses and online zines in addition to established small presses; the conjunction of writings in poetics with theoretical politics; and the development of The Public School and later The Omni, alternative educational sites that decenter and pluralize public education.29 While the Bay Area has its populist poetry – open mic readings were a regular feature of the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza – the

26  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Oakland; ­http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Oak­­l­­­ and­_­General_ Strike. 27  On the killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III, see the 2013 film Fruitvale Station. 28  Lyn Hejinian, “Amor Fati”, in: Armantrout et al., The Grand Piano, vol. 10, 57–102. 29  From The Public School’s website (thepublicschool.org): “The Public School is a school with no curriculum. It is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything”.



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 113

enthusiastic mixing of poets with crowds at demonstrations also had a heuristic element, leading to theoretical reflection on the relation of poetry to collectivity, the commune, material practice, opposition, public speech, and experimental writing. A proliferation of younger and mid-career poets has emerged with Occupy Oakland and/or has anticipated its goals, including Jasper Bernes, Brandon Brown, David Buuck, Joshua Clover, Rob Halpern, Sara Larsen, David Lau, Juliana Spahr, Wendy Trevino, and Alli Warren. Strategies and tactics abound in this community, a number of which developed at the 95 Cent Skool and Durruti Free Skool (the pre-Occupy predecessors of The Public School); at the 21 Grand reading series and house readings; and at Small Press Traffic and poetry venues. I will follow the development of a hyperreflexive radical poetics, aimed toward communal practice and the reappropriation of social resources as well as aesthetic goals, in ARMED CELL, edited by Brian Ang, a poet who continues the radical formalism of Language writing in the post-Occupy moment. Contrasted to the public and populist aims of the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, Ang’s journal is the quintessence of micropolitics. Published in a print edition of 100 and online .pdf, ARMED CELL is often timed to be distributed at readings or other events; print copies disappear forthwith (see fig. 12).30 To begin with, one must ask a question of the journal’s title, which is not reflected in its content; while a militant experimentalism combines with social outrage, there are no calls to specific acts of violence – a refinement of methodology, both political and poetic, is the journal’s announced goal. In an editorial note to early volumes, Ang sees its aims as simultaneously present-tense activist, theoretical, and “prepolitical” in preparing poetry for revolution, in these terms: ARMED CELL seeks to publish what is urgent and necessary in poetry and poetics. It insists on militancy “working for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety” (Alain Badiou) to confront the notion of there being at present “too much anti-capitalism” (Slavoj Žižek) and not enough direct action against “capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process dominating world history today)” (Giorgio Agamben). ARMED CELL seeks relationship with those engaged in research and practice with this matrix of concerns, in order to be, like Lenin’s pre-revolution withdrawal to study Hegel, a site for the study necessary for executing political actions.31

30  All issues of ARMED CELL are available as .pdf downloads at: armedcell.blogspot.com; three chapbooks by Ang (Paradise Now, Communism, and Pre-Symbolic) are likewise available as .pdf downloads at: ang-books.blogspot.com. 31  ARMED CELL 2, verso; repeated in nos 3 and 4.

114 

 Barrett Watten

With an MA in creative writing from UC Davis, Ang could be working on his PhD at this moment, but he is not going that route – a radicalization that follows the dismantling of the university system, and its denial of education as a public good to students like Ang. ARMED CELL is thus, first and foremost, a blueprint for the survival of a community of organic intellectuals who will give their talents to the coming insurrection, outside the university system, even as the event of these politics has always already arrived and been deferred. There is thus no call for a return to a vanguard materialist party as would follow Lenin’s study of Hegel. A theoretical framework mixed with radical formalism – Language writing, Conceptual writing, Flarf appropriation, essays in poetics, and hybrid forms – characterizes the mix of the journal, a plurality that maps the social constitution of Occupy and its poetic cadre. What is distinctive in Ang’s project, however, is the use of this social constitution and poetic pluralism as a theoretical object of transformation through radical experimental means. The transvaluation of values central to Language writing, in textual form, and Occupy, in direct action, combine in experimental forms that are seen not only as art, but as blueprints for action. There are many theoretical threads and formal strategies in the mix of ARMED CELL; I will follow two of them, tied to our theoretical models. First would be the material construction of concrete utopia, offering a critical alternative to dominant values, seen in the first poem published in the journal, “Communism Today” by Santa Cruz poet David Lau: Call-in request line binding force cut back, fought with Mozart and the percussion great called Non-Los Angeles. They came around the building with our comrades in front of them as shields. Fuck Dave Kliger. Which of these anarchist faggots stole my SIM card? See if the janitor has the key to open these doors. He’s the person we need everything. The telos today closer to undead, insurrectionary Velazquezes incapable of enduring independent labor monitors – wild Mike is straight up drugs. Sri Lankan and



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 115

subjective confusions adopted that language as in Balzac when rude boys had rivers to cross. A snort of laughter to knot en El Encanto Sanitarium near the freeway river flowing 100,000 stanzas, let Placitas bloom 1,000 at a time quickly into inauspicious jobs. Occupy everything, including Humanities32

The poem is a kind of sprung collage of relevant and peripheral data, some of it centered on events of the 2009 university protests and others obscure in their implications, a kind of Flarf mix of experiential materials. Both strata are politically as well as aesthetically important, in insisting on the irreducible materiality of the language and events of the present, and as introjecting a combinatorial vastness of information, language, and culture that is also political; hence the references to Mozart, reggae, Sri Lanka, and Balzac as well as janitors and IT staff. The antagonist hailing of “fuck Dave Kliger”, unknown to many readers of the poem, stands for the general rebelliousness of cultural jamming and information appropriating. As politics, this is evidently a negation of dominant culture that insists that we “Occupy everything”, including language, poetry, and the “Humanities”. On the surface of everything or nothing, a poetic counter-community is constructed as both negative toward restrictions of meaning and possibility, “quickly into inauspicious jobs”, and positive toward its own formal capacity. The central question of the poem, then, is the relation of negative materials to positive freedom, what one experiences of the alienated lifeworld versus a poetic capacity to reconstitute it. The title, “Communism Today”, is precisely this relationship between deferral and construction. In a detailed reading, reminiscent of the efforts of Language writers like Kit Robinson, Silliman, and myself to “read out” the congealed references of their materially opaque poetry, Brian Ang expands the social horizons Lau condenses in the poem.33 “‘Communism Today’ refers to the events of the California university protests between October 15 and December 11, 2009. The protests began on September 24, the first day of classes at most University of California campuses,

32  David Lau, “Communism Today”, in: ARMED CELL 1, 2011, n.p. Reprinted in: Bad Opposites, Oakland 2012, 6–8. 33  For book-length example of such “reading out”, see: Ron Silliman, Under Albany, Cromer, Norfolk 2004.

116 

 Barrett Watten

with a faculty-organized UC system-wide walkout”.34 While Ang locates numerous details of the political moment, made materially opaque and thus critically latent, the references of the poem expand beyond the campus protests to global media references. “Fuck Dave Kliger” refers to “the title of a communiqué released on October 16” after the Executive Vice Chancellor had criticized the occupations “by emphasizing cleanup cuts”, covering up the relation between tuition hikes to construction bonds and bond ratings disclosed only days earlier. The reference to Sri Lanka, on the other hand, refers to “British Sri Lankan musician M.I.A.” who “adopted that language of diminished autonomy and subcultural slang, modulated to a British Tamil specificity” in her 2007 album Kala, likely danced to at one of the “Electro Communist” dance parties held at Santa Cruz at the time. A complex palimptext is thus built up on traces of linguistic decontextualization and recombination, a negative critique that strips the particularity of the campus events toward a more encompassing horizon: “Occupy everything, even Humanities”. Ang sees the poem as manifesting an anticipatory wish that would become concrete in the Occupy movement: “One month later [after publication], the start of the Occupy movement transformed ‘Communism Today’s obscure student slogan […] preserved in its emergence, into popular social significance”. The futurity of poetry lies in its ability to transform the traces of material events into “struggles to come”. Lau’s poem, and Ang’s reading, remain within the horizon of concrete utopia, albeit displaced toward an anticipated but unrealized future. The future of Occupy did arrive, in the forms of concrete and transformative events, expanding on the poetics of its possibility. Ang’s own writing extends a formalist poetics informed by that transformation that radicalizes future possibility as present actuality: in a series of four poems from his 2011 chapbook Communism, Ang samples theoretical memes from political theory as language-centered critique: inaesthetics of truth-value before silence-speech which subtracts from their alternation a crushing victory for democracy unthinkable by terror-virtue nothing but takes and editing mathematical correspondence

34  Brian Ang, “Post-Crisis Poetics: David Lau’s ‘Communism Today’”, in: ARMED CELL 5, 2013, n.p.



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 117

imperial democratic phraseology atoms by degreesof existence […]

In an endnote to the volume, Ang shows how the four poems, composed by means of seemingly arbitrary juxtaposition, can be unpacked at the level of event: “‘Inaesthetics’, ‘Parallax’, ‘Exception’, and ‘Dialectic’ are constructed to stack atop each other and resonate dimensionally. Read the first stanzas of each in order, then the second stanzas, etc. This collective form is called ‘Late Dialectics’”. The reader thus performs the poem as an algorithm that expands out into collective meaning making; Ang further demonstrates this possibility using a text-generating program on his blog site, which will compose poems from 2–160 lines (or 1–80 two-line stanzas) based on the lexicon of “Late Dialectics”. He further deploys this method in “Theory Arsenal”, a text-generating program that writes a poem of 1–300 lines, on demand, based on the 60 numbered five-line stanzas of his earlier work, “Free Sets”: an insulated minority has lost its function love a threat to order unconditionally freedom precondition scientific intervention time space according mode of production transcendental within experimentation linguae35

In these experiments, Ang uses computing algorithms, based in lexicons established by cutting up and recombining theoretical and poetic texts, as well as his own poetry, as a futural methodology. Language writing’s generative capacity, cited toward a horizon of infinite combination in Izenberg’s account, is imitated by a machinic process of decontextualization and recombination. “So a method is glimpsed, by the way”: a futural communism of constructivist, rather than expressivist, poetics as a form of radical freedom.36 In Ang’s work, as with other Occupy poets, concrete utopia is not only negatively critical; it is futurally operative as a here-and-now method that creates a politics out of the multiplicity and plurality of discrepant political beliefs, sited toward a horizon of collective transformation. Language writing, as interpreted through the events of Occupy and its attending poets, evolves into a method of making radical democracy: confirmed at the intersection of two generational moments.

35  Brian Ang, “Free Sets” and “Theory Arsenal”, available at: theoryarsenal.blogspot.com. 36  The citation quotes Larry Eigner’s afterword to: Barrett Watten (ed.), Country/Harbor/Quiet/ Act/Around: Selected Prose, San Francisco 1978.

118 

 Barrett Watten

Moment V: Combinatorial Politics Like the politics unleashed by Occupy, this essay is still incomplete, yet to be completed. As it develops, I will return to the proliferation of poetry at the various Occupy sites, both to confirm the importance of a poetics of “combinatorial materialism” and to extend the analysis of my first two examples by alternative concerns more prominent or visible in other poets.37 At the center of my discussion will be the tension between Brenkman’s notion of poetry as value-transforming, a concrete intervention to transform specific local matters of experience, ideology, labor, and value; and a “transvaluation of all values” that may be accessed through Izenberg’s purely linguistic formalism. This tension can be restated in other terms: as we approach more closely the material condition of values to be transformed in a given historical situation, we accede to an ontology and a determinism that cancels out the ideality of their transvaluation; as we approach the horizon of totality, on the other hand, the transformation of material values takes on a more abstract, relational aspect of the transvaluation of all values. I see the tendency toward a concrete, material practice in the work of Sara Larsen, in her collection All Revolutions Are Fabulous (2014), who “materializes the subject” as both gendered and contingent, and whose larger horizon of activity includes practical organizing at The Public School. The tendency toward value-transforming ideality, on the other hand, may be found in the work of Jasper Bernes, in his chapbook We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015) – supported by theoretical writings such as “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect” (2014). The concept of revolution in Occupy – as distinct from recent moments such as Tahrir Square or anti-austerity Greece – oscillates between an extreme localism of material conditions (such that every local Occupy movement, from Zucotti Park to Chicago to Ypsilanti to Oakland could be seen as substantially different) and a utopian horizon that must be preserved in abstract generality, or the movement fails: “We are the 99%”. The disparate roles that poets play in comprehending, articulating, participating in, and critically extending the values of Occupy are not simply confined to their formal decisions, however concrete or combinatorial.38 In Occupy, there is not a “subject of history”, or, better put, the subject of history is as much in process and in construction as the movement itself.

37  For Oakland Occupy, see: David Buuck (ed.), “Reports from Oakland”, in: Tripwire 8, 2014, 81–138. Of particular interest will be the influence of poets, some of whom migrated from Oakland, on Occupy Ypsilanti (Michigan), as represented by the anonymously edited Water Street Reader (Ypsilanti, MI 2014). 38  Works of Occupy poets bearing on this discussion include: David Buuck and Juliana Spahr,



Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia 

 119

My final aim will be to show that the center of the Occupy movement necessitates a poetics, one that is not simply represented by poets themselves. Rather, the spontaneity of decision making, the refusal of hierarchical structures, the advocacy of a general “transvaluation of values” without specifying concrete political goals, the temporal and spatial forms of the movement, and finally its self-understanding as an exemplary or symbolic act as much as practical action – all bear the hallmarks of a constructivist poetics in which there are no prior givens or certain grounds. The politics of Occupy, at the same time, is activist and spontaneous; what it accomplished starts with concrete demonstrations of possibility and resistance and extends from their interpretation toward further action. In developing my essay, I will take up current debates on Occupy in several registers: whether the spontaneity, ephemerality, and scale of Occupy constitute a specific politics (for example, anarchism) or indeed any politics at all, and how a serious consideration of its poetics may account for them.39 Also crucial to consider will be the controversies over sexual misconduct in the poetry community, and the outrage over the racial politics of certain conceptualist performance and media art after the killing of Michael Brown, and other black men, in 2014–2015. Poetics does not merely reflect contemporary politics; rather it anticipates them, participates in them, and constitutes them through the continuing possibility of interpreting them. How the responses to recent events aligns with my case for an open and combinatory poetics remains to be seen.

An Army of Lovers, San Francisco 2013; Joshua Clover, Red Epic, Oakland 2015; Stephen Collis, Dispatches from the Occupation: A History of Change, Vancouver 2012; and many published and yet unpublished. 39  There is a burgeoning literature on Occupy. The diverse positions I will take up will include: W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt and Michael Taussig, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience, Chicago 2013; David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London 2013; Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen and the editors of n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and The New Inquiry (eds), Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, London 2011; ephemeral chapbooks such as Who Is Oakland?; online discussions, and so on.

Rationalism and Redemption

Fae Brauer

Magnetic Modernism František Kupka’s Mesmeric Abstraction and Anarcho-Cosmic Utopia Introduced to Spiritualism around the age of fourteen when apprenticed as a master saddler in Eastern Bohemia, František Kupka was also inducted into animal magnetism while working as a “successful medium” in both Prague and Vienna in Spiritualist séances.1 So successful was Kupka that he was able to earn his living as a medium sufficiently to pay for his art classes at both the Prague and Viennese Academies and to support his study of alchemy, astrology and Theosophy.2 Adept at going into trances, Kupka was able to perform as a conduit of “psychic energy” purportedly passing between the world of living humans and those of the dead or of spirits. He also seems to have been aware of the ways in which animal magnetism could be used to heal the body, particularly through the attachment of magnets to it and the stretching out of hands above the body to direct magnetic fluid in “passes” in order for “emanation” − a term often used by Kupka − to be discharged. While his experiences as a medium were intensified by Kupka’s exposure to Buddhists, Spiritualists and Theosophists in Vienna and Paris, his knowledge of magnetism was able to grow in new dimensions when he came into contact with the intensive investigations of its power over the body and unconscious mind conducted by neurologists, scientists and parapsychologists in Paris at the fin-de-siècle. By the time that Kupka arrived in Paris, far from animal magnetism having long abated, as is so often assumed, the opposite had ensued. Not only was it flourishing at Salpêtrière, Bicêtre, Hôtel Dieu and the Charité, but it was also practiced by the physician and parapsychologist, Hippolyte Baraduc; the astronomer and psychic researcher, Camille Flammarion; the physician who founded the Nancy Suggestion School, Auguste Liébeault, and such parapsychologists as Colonel Albert de Rochas and Émile Magnin. Given its extensive practice

1  František Kupka, 1871–1956: A Retrospective, New York 1975, 8. See also: Ludmila Vachtová, Frank Kupka: Pioneer of Abstract Art, New York 1968, 15. Vachtová points out that it was the saddle master in Dobruška, Josef Šiška, who introduced Kupka to Alois Studnička, the director of the School for Crafts at Jaroměř. After taking private lessons with Studnička, Kupka entered the Prague School of Fine Arts. 2  Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 15.

124 

 Fae Brauer

alongside the burgeoning of electromagnetism, radioactivity and Flammarion’s “cosmic magnetism”, this period has been aptly called neo-magnetism. As it thrived, neo-­magnetism intersected with Spiritualism, mediumism, Theosophy, Neo-Lamarckian Transformism, Bergsonian vitalism and the new sciences of electromagnetism, radioactivity and X-rays in their utopian aspirations for corporeal regeneration and superconsciousness. It also intercepted with Kupka’s identity as a Buddhist, Theosophist and medium, as well as an Anarcho-Communist who endorsed Reclus’ and Kropotkin’s theories of a decentralised political economy, based on mutual aid and Neo-Lamarckian evolutionism, and who pursued a dialectical art praxis based on “propaganda of the deed”. Once Kupka’s experiences as an Anarcho-Communist and medium coalesced with his experiments with magnetism, particularly hypnotism, his knowledge of electromagnetism, radioactivity and X-rays, and a realisation of their relationship to “superconsciousness”, a transformation in Kupka’s praxis ensued. No longer did Kupka produce didactic imagery designed to expose the injustices of industrial capitalism and colonial imperialism. No longer did he produce naturalist painting. Consolidating his artistic position as a medium and as a scientist, Kupka deployed the arts of magnetism to create abstract paintings able to mesmerise the beholder. At the same time, he predicted that art would be replaced altogether by the artist as a medium able to engage directly in magnetic communion with the beholder, as Kupka illustrated in his Fantaisie physiologique (Physiological Fantasy; see fig. 20). Following the magnetic hypnotism of such renowned performers as Lina and Magdeleine G., Kupka conjectured that this new art could facilitate the liberation of what Jules Bois called “the superconscious mind” that entailed, according to Bois, the awakening of a higher consciousness in terms of creativity, genius, inspiration, intuition, clairvoyance and heroism.3 It might also facilitate, following Madame Helena P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, integration with one’s karma, extrasensory perception and the attainment of a metaphysical evolution able to transcend the limitation of the senses into a state she called “superconsciousness”.4 In so doing, magnetic modernism, as manifested by Kupka’s mesmeric abstractions, seemed able to convey far more directly and emotively than didactic or naturalist art, an Anarcho-Communist utopia and an Anarcho-cosmic one. How this happened is the subject of this article.

3  The subject of the PhD in Psychology undertaken by Bois at the Sorbonne was the superconscious mind. At the École de Psychologie of the Sorbonne, Bois was professor of the “superconscious”, see: Jules Bois, “A New Psychoanalysis: The Superconscious”, Catholic World, 119, 1924, 582‒583. 4  Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. 1, London 1888, 424–444.



Magnetic Modernism  

 125

Buddhism, Theosophy, Séances and Clairvoyants By the time Kupka arrived in Paris in 1894, settling there permanently from 1895, Spiritualism and the transcendent role of the medium were being extensively explored in symbolist literature and theatre, as well as through spirit photography and automatic drawings, as illustrated by those executed by James Tissot.5 Mediumistic activity and creativity flourished, as demonstrated by the amount of attention the medium, Hélène Smith (Elise-Cathérine Müller), attracted with her spirit travels to 14th-Century India and to Mars, particularly amongst Spiritualist communities.6 So popular had séances become that they were not just publicly promoted as spectacular forms of entertainment but relished as private social events that had become a meeting point for the “educated classes”, as pointed out by Max Nordau in his book, Entartung (Degeneration, 1892): France is about to become the promised land of believers in ghosts. I am not now thinking […] of the fine ladies who at all times have ensured excellent incomes to clairvoyants and fortune-tellers, but only of the male representatives of the educated classes. Dozens of Spiritualist circles count their numbers in the thousands. In numerous drawing-rooms of the best society, the dead are called up.7

Their popularity was boosted by the large number of high-profile scientists who investigated, as Nancy Fodor succinctly surmises, “the various physical phenomena commonly called spiritualist […] with an attempt to discover their causes and general laws”.8 In 1882 when the Society for Psychical Research was established, it counted amongst its presidents William Crookes, Camille Flammarion and Henri Bergson. Despite Crookes’ invention of the radiometer and his discovery of the element thallium, he had a public “love affair” with the spirit photographs of Katie King.9 So highly esteemed was mediumistic art that spirit photography, like the ectoplasm photographed when emanating from mediums, was regarded

5  Serena Keshavjee, “The Enactment of the Supernatural in French Symbolist Culture”, in: Jennifer Fisher (ed.), Technologies of Intuition, Toronto 2006, 31–43. 6 Allison Morehead, “Symbolism, Mediumship, and the ‘Study of the Soul that has Constituted Itself as a Positivist Science’”, in: Serena Keshavjee (ed.), The Visual Culture of Science and Art in Fin-de-Siècle France, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne, 34, 2009, no. 1, 77‒85. 7  Max Nordau, Degeneration, London 1895, 216. The intense interest in Spiritualism in Western Europe at this time was also chronicled by Arthur Conan Doyle, who was “Président d’Honneur de la Fédération Spirite Internationale”. See: Arthur Conan Doyle, History of Spiritualism, London 1926. 8  Nancy Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, London 1974 [1933], 351. 9  James Coates, Photographing the Invisible, New York 1973, xi.

126 

 Fae Brauer

by these scientists as directed by psychic forces and analogous to what Bergson called “l’élan vital”, “the vital force”.10 Since Kupka is known to have continued his work as a medium in Paris, he would have been familiar with these manifestations.11 As a medium, he considered himself capable of splitting his consciousness during séances between “inner visions” and observing the world from outside through his so-called “second sight” – a clairvoyant vision that purportedly enabled him to transcend the earth and survey the cosmos.12 His performances as a medium with clairvoyant vision were propelled in Paris by his close engagement with the writings of Madame Blavatsky and with the Theosophical Society established there in 1881.13 They were also complemented by his practice of meditation and immersion in Tantric Buddhism,14 as manifest in his paintings, La Voie du silence (The Path of Silence), Méditation, Âme du lotus (Soul of the Lotus) and L’Origine de la vie (or Les Nénuphars – The Origin of Life; see col. fig. 1). While the lotus is connected to a fœtus in a chain of circles to signify, following Tantric Buddhism, the evolution of life on earth,15 the Buddhist symbolism of the lotus flower and lily pond in L’Origine de la vie correlates to the Indian iconography of sacred sexuality that Kupka would have encountered at the Musée Guimet.16 While the lotus flower was a universal symbol for Blavatsky, the “boundless” circles that punctuate this painting may signify, following The

10  Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, Paris 1941 [1907]; Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, New York 1998 [1911]. 11  Roger Lipsey, The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art, New York 2004, 99. Lipsey indicates that Kupka continued to serve as a medium throughout his life. Czech scholar, Ludmila Vachtová considers this consistent with the long sectarian history of Eastern Bohemia where séances were part of the way of life. Vachtová also points out that the strains of his mediumship led to nervous breakdowns. 12  Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon, Modern Art: A Critical Introduction, London 2005 [2000], 57. 13  Theosophical periodical culture also flourished in Paris at this time, as exemplified by the monthly Le Lotus bleu and the bi-monthly Theosophical Annals. See: Mark S. Morrisson, “The Periodical Culture of the Occult Revival: Esoteric Wisdom, Modernity and Counter-Public Spheres”, Journal of Modern Literature, 31, 2008, no. 2 (Winter), 1–22. 14  Colonel Olcott’s The Buddhist Catechism was published in Paris in 1891, as Le Catéchisme bouddhique; Olcott was President of the Theosophist Society. See also: Léon Rosny, La Morale du Bouddhisme, Paris 1891. 15  Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1910–1914, Berkeley 1979, 97. 16  Chelsea Ann Jones, The Role of Buddhism, Theosophy, and Science in František Kupka’s Search for the Immaterial through 1909, Austin 2012 [M.A. Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin], 21.



Magnetic Modernism  

 127

Secret Doctrine, “ever-eternal nature, sexless and infinite”.17 The lotus flowers and the fœtus, as Margaret Rowell has observed, may also be correlated to Blavatsky’s conception of the human subject in the microcosm and macrocosm in Isis Unveiled: “Man is a little world – a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fœtus, he is suspended by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi”.18 From its emergence in these paintings until Amorpha, fugue en deux coleurs (Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours), the circle then signified the need for the terrestrial body in the microcosm and the astral body in the macrocosm to exist in harmony with one another. This harmony could be reached in the eighth and final stage of yoga meditation when a utopian state of cosmic consciousness could be felt, particularly a feeling of oneness with nature and the solar universe. At the same time, these paintings also signal the inadequacy of comprehending this invisible and immaterial reality through the tools of positivist materialism. As Édouard Schuré lamented in Les Grands Initiés: “As a result of materialism, positivism, and skepticism, men of the present time have reached a false conception of truth and progress”.19 Within the “occulture” of Buddhism, meditation and Theosophy, Kupka’s facility for clairvoyance vision enabling him to see beyond the confines of positivist materialism was esteemed, particularly with such publications as Charles W. Leadbeater’s Clairvoyance. In this treatise, Leadbeater defined clairvoyance as “the power to see what is hidden from ordinary physical sight”.20 He considered how inanimate objects became transparent with clairvoyant vision: “The most striking change in the appearance of inanimate objects by the acquisition of this faculty is that most of them become almost transparent, owing to the difference in wave-length of some of the vibrations to which the man has now become susceptible”.21 This was captured in the diagram by Claude Bragdon in which the clairvoyant is pictured

17  Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. 1, 4. Quoted in: Ann Davis, The Logic of ­Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting 1920–1940, Toronto 1992, 102. 18  H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled. A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, London and New York 1877, 212. Quoted in: Margit Rowell, “Chronology”, in: František Kupka, 1871–1957, 80–304, here 86. 19  Édouard Schuré, Les Grands Initiés: Esquisse de l’histoire secrète des religions: Rama, Krishna, Hermès, Moïse, Orphée, Pythagore, Platon, Jésus, Paris 1921 [1889], vii. 20  Charles W. Leadbeater, Clairvoyance, London 1903 [1899], 5. A French translation of the work appeared in 1903. 21  Leadbeater, Clairvoyance, 30–32.

128 

 Fae Brauer

Fig. 13: Claude Bragdon, “Man as Seen by Clairvoyant (4D Vision) and by Ordinary Human Sight”, in: A Primer of Higher Space (the Fourth Dimension), Rochester and New York 1913, plate 19. Public Domain.

as seeing not just inside the human body but beyond it to its auras and its fourth dimensionality (see fig. 13). In enabling human subjects to view invisible worlds, as well as to sense and to feel them through vibrations penetrating what he called “a vast sea of air and ether”, Leadbeater compared the importance of clairvoyancy to the discovery of the X-ray.22 Yet the obsession in Parisian circles with clairvoyance and what the Nobel prize-winning physiologist, Charles Richet, amongst others, called “second sight” had also been ignited, according to Richet by animal magnetism and somnambulism. As Richet explained: From the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the discoveries of Mesmer and Puységur in animal magnetism and somnambulism, certain somnambulists in France, Germany and England afforded many examples of second sight, a phenomenon that we have called lucidity.23

Although the relationship of Kupka to the scientific cultures of magnetism remains relatively unexplored, by the time that Kupka had settled in Paris, magnetic hypnosis had become more prevalent than ever. While traceable to Mesmer and Puységur, as Richet indicates, it was used by Jean-Martin Charcot and his

22  Leadbeater, Clairvoyance, 8. 23  Charles Richet, Our Sixth Sense, trans. Fred Rothwell, London 1926, 21.



Magnetic Modernism  

 129

Charcoterie at Salpêtrière, particularly with magnets, metallic plates and coloured disks to generate emotional transference and polarisation. It was also used by Jules Bernard Luys at La Charité Hospital and in Nancy by Hippolyte Bernheim to demonstrate that imagistic suggestion and transference, particularly of visual material, was the normal property of the brain. In fact, so prevalent had animal magnetism, electromagnetism and cosmic magnetism become in France by the fin-de-siècle when Kupka began to live in Paris that this period has been aptly dubbed one of neo-mesmerism, if not neo-magnetism.24

Neo-Mesmerism, Magnetic Energies and Somnambulism Drawing upon Newton’s theory of gravity and his explanation of the movement of tides, Mesmer had explored the impact of gravitational forces upon the movement of fluids through the human and animal body.25 By attaching magnets to the body and by using his hands to direct fluid through the body, Mesmer had discerned that the magnetic poles were as active on the planet as they were upon Homo sapiens, as signified by the immense number of plus and minus signs in Hector Durville’s 1890 diagram to show how the magnetic poles punctuated the human body (see fig. 14). Immensely popular, Mesmer’s practice was nevertheless condemned by a commission drawn from the French Academies of Medicine and Science.26 Undeterred, the Jardin des Plantes naturalist working alongside Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, J.P.F. Deleuze, assembled his Histoire critique

24  For “neo-mesmerism”, see: Anne Harrington, “Metals and Magnets in Medicine: Hysteria, Hypnosis and Medical Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris”, in: Psychological Medicine, 18, 1988, no. 1 (February), 21–38. For “neo-magnetism”, see: Gordon Djurdjevic, “‘Like attracts like’: Some Notions Regarding Sympathy, Animal Magnetism and Electromagnetism in Esoteric Scientific Discourse”, in: Sound Thinking Symposium, Surrey, BC 2012. See also: Fred Kaplan, “‘The Mesmeric Mania’: The Early Victorians and Animal Magnetism”, in: Journal of History of Ideas, 35, 1974, 691–702. 25  See: Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Cambridge, MA 1968. 26  The Report from the Royal Society of Science was signed on 11 August 1874 by seven scientists that included Benjamin Franklin. The Royal Society of Medicine Report tabled five days later, corroborated this report that the effects produced by Mesmer could be explained by “imitation and imagination”. However it has been pointed out that this report was not unanimous, Laurent de Jussieu publishing a separate report vindicating Mesmer. See: Alfred Binet and Charles Féré, Animal Magnetism, London 1888 [2nd ed.] – Reprint: Adamant Media Corporation 2005, 25–26.

130 

 Fae Brauer

Fig. 14: Hector Durville, “Schéma de la polarité du corps humain”, in: Pour devenir Magnétiseur, Paris 1890. Photograph by the author.

du magnétisme animal (Critical History of Animal Magnetism) and the booklet Introduction pratique sur le magnétisme animal (Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism).27 His detailed descriptions of the magnetiser’s techniques, used to manipulate universal fluids, stimulate animal heat and establish a magnetic relationship between magnetiser and magnetised, became the touchstone for all subsequent practices in France, including those used by Rochas and Magnin.28 Stressing the significance of touch as a means of transmitting energy from one body to another, Deleuze recommended that the magnetiser touch the thumbs, arms, shoulders, stomach and legs in “passes” at least five or six times, before raising them to the head.29 With their fingers separated from one another and slightly bent, he also recommended that magnetisers keep their hands at a distance from the body from which emanation could be discharged, so that the

27  J.P.F. Deleuze, Histoire critique du magnétisme animal, Paris 1813; J.P.F. Deleuze, Introduction pratique sur le magnétisme animal, suivie d’une lettre écrite à l’auteur par un médecin étranger, Paris 1819; Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, trans. Thomas C. Hartshorn, New York 1884. 28  See: Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment. See also: Richard Burkhardt, The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology, Cambridge, MA. 1977, 65–69. Burkhardt mentions Lamarck’s investigation of the subtle fluids in the earth and metereology in relation to changes within the animal’s body. 29  J.P.F. Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism.



Magnetic Modernism  

 131

magnetised subject could feel heat escaping from the magnetiser’s fingers often signalled by bright light. As he explained, this was a means of spreading the magnetic fluid throughout the body and inducing magnetic somnambulism, which was subsequently termed hypnotism.30 By the 1820s, this technique was being applied in Parisian hospitals, particularly at the Hôtel Dieu, Bicêtre, Charité and Salpêtrière. Compounded by James Braid’s experiments in phreno-hypnotism, in 1845 the Journal du magnétisme was launched and the question of animal magnetism was reopened by the Academy of Medicine, although this time it was not disputed.31 By 1866 the founder of the École de Nancy, Auguste Liébeault, had deployed animal magnetism successfully for ten years before writing his treatise on it.32 After closely studying Liébeault’s methods, from 1882 Hippolyte Bernheim applied them to patients at the Hôpital de Nancy.33 Yet as early as 1877, prompted by Richet and Victor Burq, Charcot had been experimenting in the neurology clinic at Salpêtrière with magnetism and the physiological affects of metallic plates and magnets, particularly on transference and polarisation.34 Far from shying away from this contentious practice when vying for membership of the Academy of Medicine, in 1882 he devoted a paper to it, entitled Sur les divers états nerveux déterminés par l’hypnotisation chez les hystériques (On the Various Nervous States Determined by Hypnotisation in Hysterics).35 After identifying the three successive states of hypnotism as lethargy, catalepsy and somnambulism, Charcot pointed out that during the second state of catalepsy induced by fixation upon bright light, it was possible to transfer patients’ symptoms from one side of their bodies to the other through the use of magnets.36

30  “The technique entailed holding a bright object above the forehead, about 12 inches from the eyes until the pupils began to dilate. The magnetizer is then instructed to move two fingers from his free hand from the object towards the eyes until they automatically close”. J.P.F. Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, 120. 31  James Braid, Neurypnology or The Rationale of nervous sleep considered in relation with animal magnetism, London and Edinburgh 1843. 32  Auguste Liébeault, Du sommeil et des états analogues, considérés surtout au point de vue de l’action du moral sur le physique, Paris 1866; Auguste Liébeault, De la suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et dans l’état de veille, Paris 1878. 33  H. Bernheim, De la suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et dans l’état de veille, Paris 1884. See also: Henri F. Ellenberger, Histoire de la découverte de l’inconscient, Paris 1994 [1974], 119–121. 34  Judith Pintar and Stephen Jay Lynn, Hypnosis: A Brief History, London 2008, 81–84. 35  Jean-Martin Charcot, “Sur les divers états nerveux déterminés par l’hypnotisation chez les hystériques”, in: Comptes-rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, 94, 1882, 403–405. 36  Charcot, “Sur les divers états nerveux”, 404–405.

132 

 Fae Brauer

Magnets were able to polarise perceptions and emotions, he explained, so that complementary colours could be perceived and antithetical emotions experienced, laughter swiftly giving way to anger and depression.37 Such a dominant role did animal magnetism come to play at Salpêtrière that the renowned magnetist, Marquis de Puyfontaine, was invited to Salpêtrière’s neurology clinic to teach interns this technique. It was under his direction that their first experiments were carried out, the three stages identified by Charcot being equivalent to those defined by Puyfontaine and other magnetists. This close relationship spawned between hypnotism and animal magnetism at Salpêtrière was highlighted by two of Charcot’s followers, Alfred Binet and Charles Féré. To contextualise Charcot’s modern method of hypnotism within the history of animal magnetism, in 1887 Binet and Féré published Le magnétisme animal in which they declared: The history of animal magnetism has shown that if, up to late years, the existence of nervous sleep, and of various phenomena allied with it has been doubted, it is chiefly because the experimenters wanted method […]. The method which led to the revival of hypnotism may be summed up in these words: the production of material symptoms, which give […] an anatomical demonstration of the reality of a special state of the nervous system […]. A revolution has taken place […]. It is to Charcot that the honour must be assigned of having been the first to enter on this course […]. The researches of the Salpêtrière School served as a point of departure for a fresh scientific movement, which continues up to the present day.38

By the 1889 Congress of Physiological Psychology at the Exposition universelle presided over by Charcot, one of four sections was devoted to hypnotism in which a diversity of research into magnetism was revealed. From his research at La Charité Hospital, Jules Bernard Luys reported that due to the electro­ magnetic polarity of the body not only was it possible to transfer emotions but also illnesses using magnets, a patient’s diseased “emanations” being drawn out of their body by a magnet and into the body of the magnetiser.39 With Gérard Encausse, better known to occultists as Papus, he also reported on the iron crown they had devised as a conducting medium to absorb and store morbid thought patterns and psychotic delusions of patients, which could be transferred to other

37  Charcot, “Sur les divers états nerveux”, 405. In Binet’s and Féré’s Animal Magnetism, the English translation of Charcot’s observation reads: “Hallucinations of the colour red could, for example, be turned into green while fear of snakes could be transformed into love”. 38  Binet and Féré, Animal Magnetism, 85–86. 39  J.B. Luys, “Action psychique des aimants, des courants électro-magnétiques, et des courants électriques continus”, in: Revue d’Hypnologie théorique et pratique, 1890, 74–83, 107–112.



Magnetic Modernism  

 133

patients.40 So convinced was Papus of the success of these experiments that in 1893, he formed an École de Magnétisme in Paris with Durville. At the same time at Salpêtrière, the physician and parapsychologist Hippolyte Baraduc experimented with capturing the magnetic fields and psychic energy created by hands impressed on a photographic plate and invented a biometer, based upon the magnetometer, to measure the psychic energy emitted by bodies.41 With Louis Darget, he also endeavoured to photograph thoughts and dreams, which Bois described as “images of the soul, photographs of thoughts emotions and dreams”.42 At the same time a creative dimension was also recognised to arise from magnetism. As Binet and Féré surmised: These facts show that a somnambulist is far from being […] an unconscious automaton, devoid of judgment, reason and intellectual curiosity. On the contrary, his memory is perfect, his intelligence is active and his imagination is highly excited. Instances have been given of subjects who could, during somnambulism, perform intellectual feats of which they were incapable in the waking state.43

An avid student of these new sciences, Kupka was not just aware of their experiments with magnetic hypnosis and transference but was inspired to conduct them himself. He was also aware of the ways in which Bois and Albert de Rochas had taken them one step further to explore these “intellectual feats” in relation to l’art inconscient and the possibility of superconsciousness. The attainment of superconsciousness was seminal to the political position that Kupka actively occupied in Paris as an Anarcho-Communist.

40  J.B. Luys and G. Encausse, Du transfert à distance à l’aide d’une couronne de fer aimanté d’états névropathiques variés, d’un sujet à l’état de veille sur un sujet à l’état hypnotique, Clermont, Oise 1891. 41  Hippolyte Baraduc, La Force vitale, notre corps vitale fluidique, sa formule biométrique, Paris 1893. 42  Hippolyte Baraduc, L’Âme Humaine: Ses Mouvements, ses Lumières, et l’Iconographie de l’Invisible Fluidique, Paris 1896; Jules Bois, Le Monde invisible, Paris [1890], 380. See also: Serena Keshavjee, “Science and the Visual Culture of Spiritualism: Camille Flammarion and the Symbolists in fin-de-siècle France”, in: Aries, 13, 2013, 37–69. 43  Binet and Féré, Animal Magnetism, 147.

134 

 Fae Brauer

“Propaganda of the Deed”, Neo-Lamarckian Evolutionism and Anarcho-Communist Utopia Following the application of the Anarcho-Communist concept of “propaganda of the deed” to art, “réveiller la conscience populaire en sommeil”, Kropotkin had called upon artists to take a defiant stand in order to spark the conscience of humanity and engender revolt.44 “Narrate for us in your vivid style or in your fervent pictures the titanic struggle of the masses against their oppressors; inflame young hearts with the beautiful breath of revolution that inspired our ancestors”, he wrote. “Show the people the ugliness of contemporary life and make them see the cause of this ugliness. Tell us what a rational life would have been had it not been blocked at each step by the ineptness and ignominies of the present order”.45 Yet to activate this shift of consciousness and social change Kropotkin, like Jean Grave and Reclus, did not consider that anarchist artists should only produce an art of direct propaganda. Instead they recognised the need for artists to reveal at the same time an Anarcho-Communist utopia of free association and to evoke what it would feel like to exist in it, Grave insisting that since art was the supreme manifestation of individualism, the artist should not just be an activist but be granted perfect freedom to create his concept of the beautiful.46 By being able to reveal on the one hand, the present oppression and on the other, to signal Anarcho-Communist utopia, Kropotkin considered that a dialectical art praxis could mediate this transformation. Following his call, dialectical art praxes had been vigorously pursued by such Anarcho-Communist artists, as I have argued elsewhere, as Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce and Henri Rousseau.47 From formation of the French Radical Republic, Kupka pursued this dialectical art praxis in which he produced two distinct forms of art: He exposed false consciousness in one while illuminating an Anarcho-Communist naturist utopia in the other.

44  Pietr Kropotkin, Paroles d’un révolté, Paris 1885 [Geneva 1879], 65; Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel, trans. George Woodcock, Montreal 1992, 81. 45  Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel, 1992, 13. See: Eugenia W. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium 1885–1898, New Haven 1961, 157. 46  Dana Ward, “Anarchist Culture on the Cusp of the Twentieth Century”, in: Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo and Nathan J. Jun (eds), Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to ­Anarchist Studies, Newcastle 2013, 107–122, here 117–119. 47  Fae Brauer, “Contesting ‘Le Corps Militaire’: Antimilitarism, Pacifism, Anarcho-Communism and ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau’s La Guerre”,  in: RIHA Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art,  48, 2012 (July, special issue: New Directions in Neo­Impressionism, ed. Anne Dymond and Tania Woloshyn), 1–60.



Magnetic Modernism  

 135

Well before enrolling at the Sorbonne in 1905 to study the Physics of electromagnetism, Kupka had pursued the Anarcho-Communism of Kropotkin’s “propaganda of the deed”.48 By putting his pen, paintbrush and burin at the service of the revolution, Kupka became what both Anarcho-Communists and Marxist Communists called “a comrade in arms”.49 Well versed in the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Kupka’s cartoons for L’Assiette au Beurre, L’Anarchie, Les Temps Nouveaux and Cocorico focused upon exposing estrangement, exploitation and false consciousness. Following Georg Simmel’s theory of money and Marx on profit, the capitalist is invariably pictured by Kupka with his belly bloated with money while the worker is inscribed as penniless and powerless.50 That the worker had no choice but to labour for the capitalist is signalled by numerous cartoons by Kupka, one of which shows cannons directed at the worker surrounding the belly-bloated capitalist heightened by such ironic titles as “Liberté”.51 While the worker is pictured by Kupka in this cartoon in the palm of the capitalist’s hand, in his parody of Civilisation, the worker is manacled to and crucified by the wheels and turbines of industrialisation.52 With the Boer War revealed as having being fueled by an international band of capitalists, the very issue of peace in 1904 after the Herero tribe uprising in Namibia, is revealed as being manipulated by Jewish-capitalists consorting with Kaiser Wilhelm II, as signified by the pipe of peace being smoked with the Kaiser’s crown on the lid.53 After the German army’s genocidal obliteration of the Herero and Nama people, Kupka then indicated how

48  One of the first to formulate “propaganda of the deed” was Mikhail Bakunin. In his “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” in 1870, Bakunin stated that “we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda”. In 1887, Kropotkin pointed out in Le Révolté that “a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite”. For the development of this theory in collaboration with Reclus on its relation to art, see: Marie Fleming, “‘Propaganda by the Deed’: Terrorism and Anarchist Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe”, in: Terrorism, 4, 1980, 1–4, 1–23. 49  For Kropotkin’s and Reclus’ perception of themselves as “comrades-in-arms”, particularly as “comrades armed with pens”, see: Dana Ward, “Alchemy in Clarens: Kropotkin and Reclus, 1877–1881”, in: Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl (eds), New Perspectives on Anarchism, Plymouth 2010, 209–226, here 218. 50  Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, London 1978 [1900]. See: František Kupka, “L’Argent”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1902, no. 41 (11 January), cover illustration. 51  František Kupka, “Liberté”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1902, no. 41 (11 January), 647. 52  František Kupka, “Civilisation”, in: Les Temps Nouveaux, 1906, 2. 53  František Kupka, “La Bande internationale des capitalistes”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1901, no. 37 (15 November), centre-spread; František Kupka, “La Paix”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1904, no. 177 (20 August), front cover.

136 

 Fae Brauer

Fig. 15: František Kupka, Rhythme de l’histoire – Vague, “Divisions et rythme de l’histoire” (Členění a rytmus dějin), 1905, black and white lithograph illustration, in: Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, Paris 1905–1908, vol. 1, 354. Photograph by the author.

peace seemed as fictional as a theatre performance, as signified by his cartoon of Punch pushing the theatre curtain over the massacre behind it.54 Abhorring the corruption and hypocrisy of Catholicism, by no means was this religion spared, especially in the year of separation of church and state. To show that priests were just as avarice as capitalists, Kupka caricatured them as praying for money to be fed to them in mouthfuls and exhorting their congregations to be as self-sacrificing as Jesus while concealing their pots of money − despite their Franciscan vow of poverty.55 Even Fraternité is depicted by Kupka as having been sullied by capitalism: the laws written by the people are shown as having been guided by the hand of Money, with Money only throwing a yoke to a family man

54  František Kupka, “La Seule!”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1904, no. 177 (20 August), 4. 55  František Kupka, “Réligions!”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1904, no. 169 (7 May), front cover; see also page 2: “Dieu de Vatican”.



Magnetic Modernism  

 137

desperate for work so that he can join the human toil of pulling Money’s rich chariot (see col. fig. 2).56 As allegories of enslavement and perversion of the natural order, these cartoons show how the aspiration of families to live in harmony with nature − for which Kupka and his fellow Anarcho-Communists strove − was constantly thwarted by a capitalist political economy. Only in his final cartoon for L’Argent (see col. fig. 2) does Kupka reveal justice and Science triumphing as signified by the new dawn glowing beyond Humanitas and the people mutually aiding one another in their support of medicine, humanitarian knowledge and extended families.57 Yet Kupka shows that this can only happen once Marianne as Athena has ­pinioned the bloody head of Money to her shield. While these cartoons for Anarchist journals, particularly L’Assiette au Beurre, were his prime vehicle for demolishing the capitalist political economy and the inequalities that he perceived it yielded, Kupka’s aspirations for an Anarchist sociological, ecological and cosmological utopia were most clearly imaged in his illustrations for the five volume treatise by Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Man and the Earth).58 In his historical and social geography of the earth, Reclus focused upon such Neo-Lamarckian factors as soil condition, climate and what he called “ambiance” to explore the interrelationship between environmental changes and the evolution of species, particularly their consciousness within nature. As Reclus surmised in his preface, “Man is nature becoming conscious of itself”.59 In order for communal society to be able to evolve, Reclus investigated how it had lived in harmony with nature and embraced not only mutual aid and voluntary egalitarianism but also the greater family of animals.60 The knowledge able to propel this evolution lay, he found, in science, specifically the study of the natural and human worlds for the purpose of furthering the brotherhood of mankind. This integral education, as he called it, would help prepare people for a classless society free from racism, colonialism and superstition, particularly Catholicism, which Reclus considered had only compounded the bourgeois order. In providing an antithetical narrative to that of the Biblical Genesis, his environmentalist geography was instrumental to integral education and consistent with Anarcho-Communist “propaganda by the deed”, as were Kupka’s images for it.

56  František Kupka, “Fraternité”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1902, no. 41 (11 January), 649. 57  František Kupka, “L’Argent”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1902, no. 41 (11 January), back cover. 58  Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, Paris 1905–1908. 59  Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, vol. 1, i. 60  Fae Brauer, “Becoming Simian: Devolution as Evolution in Transformist Modernism”, in: Fae Brauer and Serena Keshavjee (eds), Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture, Newcastle 2015, 127–156.

138 

 Fae Brauer

In his vision of the history of humanity, Kupka illustrated the flow of time as organic with generations of Homo sapiens sweeping through the universe in progressive movement towards an ultimate harmonious unity. In his Rhythme de l’histoire – Vague (Rhythm of History – Wave; see fig. 15), the flow of time is represented by an undulating wave, which is consistent with electromagnetic waves as well as the oscillations scientifically theorised in thermal energy and Reclus’ conception of historical time, as Kupka explained: From the beginning of recorded time, the amplitude of the oscillations has never ceased to grow and the thousands of small local rhythms have gradually merged in a more ample rhythm: the more general oscillations of nations succeed the tiny movements of the life of cities, then comes the great world-wide oscillation which makes the entire earth and its people vibrate in a single movement.61

Yet to illustrate time in between the beginning and endpoint of human culture, Kupka deployed a vast cosmic arc (see fig. 16). Through the dynamic swirl in Progrès, an ape with a rock as a tool becomes connected with a contemporary worker who offers his hand to the spectator to join him in a utopian future, the swirl also appearing as a rainbow encircling the Second Socialist International

Fig. 16 (left): František Kupka, “Progrès”, 1905–1908, black and white litograph illustration, in: Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, vol. 6, 501. Photograph by the author. Fig. 17 (right): František Kupka, “Progrès”, 1905–1908, black and white lithograph illustration, in: Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, vol. 6, 541. Photograph by the author.

61  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, as translated and quoted by Patricia Leighten in: The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris, Chicago 2013, 166.



Magnetic Modernism  

 139

formed in Paris in 1889. Studded with stars and planets sweeping across the nightsky, the cosmic arc is one of the first images in the book to illustrate the preface of Reclus’ mammoth project in front of which a figure like Reclus s­ crutinises the planet. Reappearing in the image of Religion, this cosmic arc re-emerges as the last image of the book (see fig. 17). In the chapter entitled Progrès it signifies a new dawn in which man, woman and children could live free of clothing, unperturbed by conflict and the destructive forces of capitalism, in harmony with the earth and with one another. While capturing the Anarchist utopia of a society in harmony with nature and the universe envisioned by Reclus and Kropotkin, Kupka’s image also embraces the Theosophical concept of cosmological and universal harmony, particularly as the family in the foreground − just like man depicted by Kupka on this book cover − all look towards the galaxies as if heralding a cosmic generation and a cosmic Utopia. Once he infused his studies of cosmology with the vibratory power of magnetic emanations, Kupka’s celestial arc became a dominant motif in his mesmeric abstractions. By satirising the conditions of exploitation in his Anarcho-Communist illustrations and cartoons, alongside the brutal colonial abuse and decimation of indigenous people, Kupka’s didactic art was designed to awaken his fellow workers to their oppression in order to liberate them from the yoke of industrial capitalism and colonial imperialism. At the same time his illustrations for L’Homme et la Terre, like his paintings of women and girls nude in nature, particularly the wild joy expressed in Epona-ballade: Les Joies (Ballad of Epona: The Joys), as well as his painting of a male meditating nude in nature, Méditation (Meditation: When Mountain and Valleys Are One), all offer a glimpse of a Utopia that appears Anarcho-Communist, Neo-Lamarckian, Spiritualist and Buddhist. These two parts of his dialectic art praxis were then designed to synthesise in the workers’ quest for an Anarcho-Communist utopia in which their families could live harmoniously in nature and evolve to a higher being within joyous mutually cooperative communities, as epitomised by Kupka’s final illustration for Reclus’ L’Homme et la Terre (see fig. 17). Yet once Kupka began to study the new sciences, particularly electromagnetism, and to explore the magnetic dimensions of “unconscious art”, no longer did he pursue this dialectic. Instead he concentrated upon creating images of Anarcho-cosmic utopias from which workers could feel liberated from the rationalist positivist restraints and corporeal constraints of the Radical Republic and achieve an “ethereal vision” of their position within the cosmos viewed from a great distance and so close that they could realise how they existed

140 

 Fae Brauer

in worlds within worlds.62 These Anarcho-cosmic utopias were also designed to engender superconsciousness, as Bois and Blavatsky defined it, and individual empowerment. Spurred on by the experiments with magnetic hypnosis and l’art inconscient by Rochas and Magnin, “magnetic waves”, rather than didactic messages were designed to be emitted from his “mesmeric abstractions”, in his words just “like those of an hypnotiser”.63

Magnetic Hypnosis, l’artiste inconscient and Superconsciousness As the nexus between the unconscious and creativity was increasingly explored in the neurological and occult sciences, particularly in parapsychology, so the instances of artists and mediums endeavouring to create in somnambulant, mesmerised or mediumistic states became increasingly prevalent, as illustrated by the paintings reportedly produced during hypnotic trances by the medium Hélène Smith, including her portrait with her guardian angel.64 In an article entitled “Mediumism and Art” accompanied by a reproduction of Rousseau’s The Snake Charmer, his paintings were identified with mediumism.65 They were also compared with Smith’s, particularly his 1899 double portrait of himself and his lover, Joséphine, entitled Le Passé et le présent (not exhibited until 1907 as Pensée philosophique) in which the heads of Rousseau’s first wife and Joséphine’s first husband hover like ghosts in clouds above them. “It’s a little bit spiritualist, isn’t it?” Rousseau admitted to Arsène Alexandre.66 As Bois explained in his 1897 article, “L’Esthétique des esprits et celle des symbolistes”, as mediumism provided a way of exteriorising the interior, mediumistic art was not pathological but creative with a definable aesthetic that arose from an absence of control over the

62  Meecham and Sheldon, Modern Art, 56. 63  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 229. The book was originally published in Prague under the title Tvoření v umění výtvarném in 1923. 64 This is reproduced in: Morehead, “Symbolism, Mediumship, and the Study of the Soul”, 78. 65 “Le Mediumnisme et L’Art, La Vie mystérieuse, 69, 10 November 1911, 1. 66 Arsène Alexandre, “La Vie et l’œuvre d’Henri Rousseau, peintre et ancien employé de l’Octroi”, in: Comœdia, 19 March 1910 ‒ quoted in: Pascal Rousseau, “The Magic of Images: Hallucination and Magnetic Reverie in the Work of Henri Rousseau”, in: Frances Morres and Christopher Green, Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, London 2005, 190‒205, here 194.



Magnetic Modernism  

 141

will.67 Yet from his research conducted with Rochas, Bois recognised that magnetism could also do so with “normal subjects”. By publication of Les États profonds de l’hypnose (Profound States of Hypnosis) in 1892,68 Rochas was recognised as one of France’s leading parapsychologist and the magnetist most committed to the concept of fluide magnétique, as divulged in his open letter to Bois: The facts prove the existence of diverse emanations from nature generally encompassed by the name of magnetic fluid, and they accord with theories by Orientals, ancient Greek philosophers and the first fathers of the church on the fluid body or soul acting as an intermediary between the spirit and the body.69

Struck by the profound emotions unleashed at La Charité by Luys’ use of magnets and magnetism, as well as the differences in “acute sensibilities” disclosed by Pierre Janet’s somnambulist studies, Rochas explored how magnetisers could unleash the “supernatural faculties” of relatively “sane subjects”.70 In his treatise, Les Fluides des Magnétiseurs (The Fluid of Magnetisers), Rochas explained how the magnetic fluid inducted by magnetism was able to act directly upon the nervous system.71 So powerful was this magnetic fluid that he compared it to an electric current or electromagnet able to charge the nervous system into unleashing a “superior form of being” with heightened sight, taste, hearing and touch, as signified by the rays emanating from the left and right eyes, ears, mouth and hands in Rochas’ diagram (see col. fig. 3).72 Given that the electro­magnetic polarisation of the body was premised upon the North and South Pole having opposite properties, if not antithetical psychologies, these rays of super-sensibility were coloured by Rochas either red or blue, according to their polar correspondence, and likened to flames.73

67 Jules Bois, “L’Esthétique des esprits et celle des symbolistes”, in: Revue des Revues, 20, 1897 (January‒March), 405‒420. 68  Lt.-Colonel de Rochas d’Aiglun, Les États profonds de l’hypnose, Paris 1892. 69  A. de Rochas, Les Frontières de la Science, 2e série. Lettre ouverte à M. Jules Bois, vol. 2, Paris 1904, 26. 70  Rochas, Les États profonds de l’hypnose, 94. 71  Lt.-Colonel de Rochas d’Aiglun, Les Fluides des Magnétiseurs, précis des expériences du baron de Reichenbach sur ses propriétés physiques et physiologiques, classées et annotées par le lieutenant-colonel de Rochas d’Aiglun, Paris 1891. 72  Rochas d’Aiglun, Les Fluides des Magnétiseurs, 93. 73  Sophie Lachapelle, Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metaphysics in France, 1853–1931, Baltimore 2011, 56.

142 

 Fae Brauer

Fig. 18: “Mademoiselle Lina’ performing, during magnetic hypnosis, Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre”, in: Albert de Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, 1900, part 3: Les Suggestions musicales. Action de la Musique sur les Animaux. Photograph by the author.

Following his friend, Richet’s theory of the “sixth sense” in psychophysiological states of telepathy, Rochas considered that when externalised sensibility became heightened in magnetised subjects, they could not just experience thought at a distance but also stimuli. This meant that when a certain spot was pinched or pricked away from their body, pain could still be felt.74 Externalised sensibilities also enabled magnetised subjects to feel the environment, Rochas likening the luminous energy or auratic effluvia emitted by magnetised bodies to “a garment” of the extroflected inner double when the senses surpass flesh and take on spectrality.75 No clearer demonstration exists than Paul Nadar’s photograph of Rochas himself with his interior sensibility exteriorised into a fluid phantasmatic double or “astral body”. Phantasmatic doubles were also accessed by Rochas through experimental séances conducted not just at Camille Flammarion’s apartment but also in his own home where he recorded Eusapia Palladino being lifted up in her chair and carried onto a table.76

74  Lt.-Colonel de Rochas d’Aiglun, Extériorisation de la Sensibilité, Paris 1895, 211. 75  Rochas, Extériorisation de la Sensibilité, 212–214. 76  Albert de Rochas, La Lévitation, Paris 1897. This levitation was witnessed by Director of Annales des sciences psychiques, Dr Dariex. These séances were followed in 1898 by the series of well-publicised séances with the famous medium Eusapia Palladino organised by Flammarion who invited Bois, Jules Claretie, the playwright Victorien Sardou, and Charles Richet to attend.



Magnetic Modernism  

 143

Fig. 19: Fred Boissonnas, Magdeleine G. performing, during magnetic hypnosis, Chevauchée de La Walkyrie at the Acropolis, 1903, Cyanotype, taken at the Acropolis under the direction of Émile Magnin. Photograph by the author.

Fusing the art of the medium with the magnetiser and Janet’s concept of “automatisme psychologique”, Rochas hired the petit-bourgeois artist’s model, Mademoiselle Lina [de Ferkel] to investigate the “exteriorisation of sensibilities” in performances designed to embrace Bois’ concept of “l’esthétique des esprits” (see fig. 18).77 Directing the “life force fluid and radiation” of effluvia with magnets and his hands to magnetise Lina, Rochas then deployed suggestibility through poetry, plays and music. Recording their sensory impact in his book, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste (Sentiments, Music and Gesture), “for the first time”, Bois proclaimed: “hypnotism has been pressed into the service of art and a peculiarly sensitive medium. […] For the first time art is life”.78 At the same time, in his open letter to Bois, Rochas cited hypnotism and musical suggestion in art being concurrently explored by the magnetiser, Émile Magnin, on the young Magdeleine G., and photographed by Magnin’s Swiss brother-in-law, Fred ­Boissonnas (see fig. 19).79 A well-known practitioner of animal magnetism, Magnin was Professor at the École de magnétisme of Paris when Magdeleine G. was referred to him for

77  Bois, “L’Esthétique des esprits et celle des symbolistes”. 78  Albert de Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, Grenoble 1900, 19. 79  Rochas, Les Frontières de la Science, 12.

144 

 Fae Brauer

­ eadaches “with a neurasthenic origin that treatment had been unable to cure”.80 h Under magnetic hypnosis, not only did she appear to lose all hysterical symptoms but she appeared capable of reacting spontaneously to art and music. Once magnetised, this 30-year-old mother born at Archinard in Georgia and named Emma Guipet, was transformed.81 Although appearing blissfully ignorant of modern composers, dance and theatre, Magnin reported how intensely she expressed the emotion states conveyed by Chopin’s Marche Funèbre and Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, her entire body exuding empathy to fuse actor with audience.82 In private séances and in the studios of Auguste Rodin and Albert Besnard, she performed the compositions of Franz Schubert, poems of Paul Verlaine, Shakespeare’s Tempest and improvisations executed on the piano.83 Seeking to study the movement and gestures of this “artiste inconscient” in nature and in an environment that crystallised Classical culture in its supposedly “pure” state – a state in which dance and trance as personified by Terpsichore were perceived as integral to everyday life – Magnin travelled with Magdeleine G. and Boissonnas to the Acropolis.84 Spurred on by Boissonnas’ photographs of the Parthenon taken from 1900, including its frieze; Horace and Ovid’s descriptions of Dionysian maenads dancing ecstatically and tirelessly under magnetic hypnosis at Bacchanales, and the theory that hypnotic suggestion had been used by Phidias and Praxiteles “to perfect their sculpture”, Magnin aimed to recapture this source of magnetism in order to regenerate modern culture.85 It was on the Acropolis that Magdeleine was then magnetised by Magnin and photographed performing for his book, L’Art et l’Hypnose (see fig. 19), her silhouette appearing like a Greek vase figure on its cover. Once magnetised, “inhibitions were cast aside”, concluded Alfred Kerr; “her innermost being seemed to be turned inside out. She is […] utterly emancipated”.86 The same observations were made of Lina

80  Émile Magnin, L’Art et l’Hypnose. Interprétation plastique d’œuvres littéraires et musicales, Geneva 1906, 1–2. See also: Émile Magnin, Devant le mystère de la névrose. De la guérison de cas réputés incurables, Paris 1920. 81  See: Céline Eidenbenz, “L’hypnose au Parthénon. Les photographies de Magdeleine G. par Fred Boissonnas”, in: Études photographiques, 2011, no. 28 (November), 200–237. 82  Magnin, L’Art et l’Hypnose, 9. 83  Magnin, L’Art et l’Hypnose, 9–10. 84  Magnin, L’Art et l’Hypnose, 182. See also: Jacqueline Carroy, Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie. L’invention de sujets, Paris 1991, here 96. 85  Magnin, L’Art et l’Hypnose, 392. 86  Alfred Kerr [Alfred Kempner], “Magdeleine G.” [8 February 1905], Gesammelte Schriften. Das neue Drama, vol. 5: Das Mimenreich, Berlin 1917, 486.



Magnetic Modernism  

 145

when extemporising scenes, striking poses and performing dances under Rochas’ magnetic hypnosis. Referring to the passionate gestures depicted by Le Brun, Lavater and Duchenne de Bologne, Rochas maintained that hypnotism confirmed most of their ideas of the unconscious.87 This was demonstrated by his photographs of the arm and hand gestures, body movement and intense facial expressions of the hypnotised Lina while performing poetry and plays. Yet while Rochas closely scrutinised the impact of visual and verbal suggestion upon Lina’s gestures, he considered that music carried the additional vibratory force of magnetism, a phenomenon he had observed affecting animals as much as humans.88 Musical sensations and vibrations seemed able to jolt all her nerve fibres and sensibilities, Rochas claimed, penetrating her unconscious sensibilities far more directly as epitomised by her dancing of Extase and her dramatic performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre (see fig. 18).89 However when asked her impressions afterwards, all she could offer were such vague responses as: “This is gay or sad; it makes me either want to dance or to cry”.90 Lina’s “ordinary personality and everyday soul was pleasant, kindly but in no way remarkable”, explained Bois. Under the spell of animal magnetism, he explained how it transformed: Once swept by the hypnotic influence, a second personality awoke in her subconscious, profound, very old, for her ancestors must have created it; very new, for she had all the charm of youth, all the surprises, all the divine inexperience of instinct. […] But her control of judgment and will had vanished. This genius did not know what she did. […] Awake, she was but moderately fond of music and poetry. She could not dance. In trance − such is the term used − she executed the most difficult steps of Europe and Asia. She gave expression to every form of beauty and of horror, to every sentiment and every passion, now tragédienne, now comédienne. Presentations that would have called for long practice on the part of the most experienced artists she executed spontaneously, without effort or hesitation.91

Drawing upon the theory of associative correspondences, Rochas considered how her reflexes from audio sensations were triggered by other sensory organs “not of

87  Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, 19–48. 88  Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, 126. 89  Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, 163–164. 90  Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, 264. 91  Jules Bois, “Lina, in Hypnotic Sleep, Rivals Dance of Bacchantes: Remarkable Case Reported from Paris by Scientist Fulfills Wagner’s Conditions”, The New York Times, 1 September 1907, 3. With a double personae subject such as Lina, said Bois to Rochas, “one is able to absorb a panorama of nations, customs, sentiments and emotions admirably rendered by gesture”.

146 

 Fae Brauer

thought nor of the intervention of will”.92 Magnetic hypnosis had purportedly led to an “exteriorisation of sensibility”.93 While Bois maintained that this unleashing of the unconscious could lead to l’art inconscient, both Bois and Rochas concluded that it could release the “supernatural faculties” to generate superconsciousness.94 The performances of Lina and Magdeleine G. then seemed to prove unequivocally the existence of a higher consciousness of creativity, genius, inspiration and intuition, as well as a super sense of reason and morality.

Electromagnetic Waves, Luminous Vibrations and Magnetic Modernism By the time that Kupka enrolled at the Sorbonne to study the physics of electromagnetism, the potency of imagistic suggestion and transference had been well established alongside the vibratory power of magnetic emanations to unleash the unconscious and unlock creativity. Following Charcot’s and Bernheim’s experiments with coloured disks and signs demonstrating how the affective powers of visual suggestion far exceeded verbal commands in achieving magnetic states, Bernheim’s colleague, Paul Souriau, had endeavoured to theorise how the affective power of a work of art could capture beholders in a “state of hypnosis and ecstasy”. Due to the affective power of suggestion triggered by an artwork, Souriau explained in his book, La Suggestion dans l’Art (Suggestion in Art), how beholders could reach the productive layers of the unconscious where “new combinations of images are possible”.95 At this point, Souriau envisaged that “a scene of hypnotic sleep will engage through a simple imitative phenomenon, a reflex of suggestibility that propels the gaze into an ecstatic relationship with the image”.96 The unconscious power that Souriau attributed to art seemed to be only reinforced by new explorations of magnetic theories stretching back to Braid that fluidic radiation could emanate from an artwork and transform it into “a living magnetic or electromagnetic field for the viewer”.97

92  Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, 181. 93  Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste, 202; see also chapter four: “Action de la musique sur le corps astral”, 259–270. 94  See: Colonel Albert de Rochas, “The Regression of Memory: Case of Mayo”, The Annals of Psychical Science, 2, 1905 (July), 1–52. 95 Paul Souriau, La Suggestion dans l’Art, Paris 1893 [1909], 2. 96 Souriau, La Suggestion dans l’Art, 2. 97 Stanislaus Stückgold, “Henri Rousseau”, in: Der Sturm, 1913 ‒ quoted in: Rousseau, “The Magic of Images”, 201.



Magnetic Modernism  

 147

Rather than performing as a magnetiser, Kupka began to explore how magnetism could be performed by painting. “The accomplishments of science, exercise an undeniable influence upon artists”, he explained, “many of whom become, knowingly or unwittingly, followers of the latest thinkers”.98 Kupka then expounded on the impact of these new sciences upon communication: “Through its progress […] it is possible to believe in the possibility of new forms of communication hitherto unknown, let’s say a more direct communication that would imitate the way that magnetic waves are emitted by hypnotisers”.99 This interconnection of magnetism with art and superconscious creativity proved instrumental for Kupka’s cultural politics as an Anarcho-Communist who endorsed Reclus’ and Pëtr Kropotkin’s theories and who also aspired to an Anarcho-cosmic utopia in which workers would comprehend planetary interrelations and the interconnections of the universe. Aware that magnetic fields and electromagnetism played a key role in the dynamics and evolution of protoplanetary disks, Kupka had explored the movement of balls and disks in his figurative paintings. To correlate the cyclical movement of life with that of the planets, as conceived by Blavatsky,100 in Le Premier Pas (The First Step) two overlapping white disks are circumscribed by an arc of smaller disks with faint halos around them to suggest the cyclical movements of a solar system in which planets turn on their own axes. Following L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) in which Bergson described the evolution of life and consciousness as “an immense wave which, spreading from a centre, spreads outwards”, in Printemps cosmique (Cosmic Spring) and Création, Kupka created an illusion of waves and crystalline arcs which turn in an indefinable space and forms that seem to melt into a centre of lava and fungi.101 Recasting Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments with seven spinning disks of prismatic colour to produce white light, Kupka painted four main disks in his Disques de Newton: Étude pour la Fugue en deux couleurs (Disques of Newton: Study for Fugue in Two Colours) with the white disk in the foreground indicating that when spinning fast enough, this is what the disks produce. In his second version, he conveyed spinning rings of colour able to produce the sensations of white light. Yet from his study of electromagnetism, Kupka appeared not to be merely exploring the sensations of primordial light but the electromagnetic waves within the visible spectrum and the ways in which material orbiting around a central

98  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 43. 99  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 229. 100  Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. 2, 634–640 (chapter 16: “Cyclical Evolution and Karma”). 101  Bergson, Creative Evolution, 266.

148 

 Fae Brauer

Fig. 20: František Kupka, Fantaisie Physiologique 1923, illustration, in: Tvoření v umění výtvarném (La Création dans les Arts Plastiques), Prague 1923, Art Bohemia. Photograph by the author.

body causes material in the disk to spiral inwards toward the centre producing magnetic field lines, while emitting electromagnetic radiation and vibrations. “The vital energy of rays in nature is the same energy that lives inside us all”, Kupka explained, “always manifest by the rapport between different vibrations and, hence, different colours; the effect of one is in some way multiplied by the others”.102 To avoid confusing impressions and uncomfortable sensations, Kupka also considered the need for these vibrations from coloured planes to be of the same frequency, as represented by complementaries and the juxtaposition of warm and cool colours epitomised by the Carmen reds and Cobalt blues in Notre Dame. When Kupka’s two white disks seem to reappear in Amorpha Fugue en deux couleurs, they appear to be metallic and, following his analogy, able to vibrate with specific sounds (see col. fig. 4). “Moving from lights to darks, each colour scale produces a composite impression, where distinct vibrations are juxtaposed”, he explained: “It is a game of cymbals, where the metallic disks […] each vibrate and generate a specific sound”.103 Yet with his colours reduced to the primaries, red and blue, they act like the contrapuntal composition in a fugue, as signalled by his title. “I believe I can find something between sight and hearing”, Kupka explained, “and I can produce a fugue in colours as Bach has

102  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 141. 103  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 179.



Magnetic Modernism  

 149

done in music”.104 When the fast vibrations emanating from the reds synchronise with the slow vibrations from the blues, Kupka considered they emitted electro­ magnetic waves of violet light to the spectator and luminous vibrations comparable to the rose windows in Notre Dame.105 “In other words, once one was able to master the luminosity, with the right vibrations”, Kupka explained, “its light was able to sing”.106 The sweeping linear movements of dilation and contraction comprised what Kupka called its “cosmic rhythm” which, with the vibrations emanating from its colours, constituted its cosmic symphony.107 Life-size, this seven foot square painting was then composed to absorb and engulf the beholder in its symphonic emissions with the force of magnetic hypnosis. Committed not just to the evolution of consciousness, but its revolution into superconsciousness, Kupka regarded this painting, like his following mesmeric abstractions, as paving a pathway to a dematerialised, magnetic artistic communion. In his book planned on “telepathy, psychopathy and psychomatrocity”, Kupka demonstrated awareness of Edwin Houston’s telepathic theory of thought waves and Annie Besant and Leadbeater’s theory in Thought Forms that music and colour could emit vibrations able to transmit emotions and ideas.108 “The mind has the capacity to intercept waves which another sends into space”, he explained.109 This cognitive transference would be, in his words, “a more direct communication, which would draw upon the mediation of magnetic waves by hypnotisers”.110 From this perspective, Kupka then considered how artistic creation could be reconceived as the telepathic and telegraphic reception and emission of electromagnetic waves between the artist and beholder, without the need for a tangible art object to be produced, as captured by his woodcut, Fantaisie physiologique, included in the 1923 Czech publication of his treatise, in which the artist is reconfigured as an X-ray receptor without an artwork (see fig. 20). As Kupka explained his vision:

104  František Kupka, 1871–1956, 184. 105  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 154. 106  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 154. 107  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 199. 108  Edwin Houston, “Radiation cérébrale”, in: Rochas, Extériorisation de la Sensibilité, 201– 202. Quoted in: Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space”, in: Bruce Clarke and Linda D. Henderson (eds), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, Stanford 2002, 126–149, here 142. 109  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 229. 110  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 229.

150 

 Fae Brauer

Taking progress into account […] we would have grounds to believe in the possibility of new means of new communication, unknown to date, let’s say a more direct communication that could make use of the path of magnetic waves employed by hypnotists […]. We will be able to expect the invention of an X-ray capable of reading the most subtle activity, presently invisible or unclear, both of the exterior world and of the soul of the artist. It would settle whether magnetism can replace painting. The communion would be absolute, art useless, the universe decipherable at will. And the artist would be, in the strictest sense of the word, a medium.111

As Philippe Dagen surmises: “He postulated that magnetism would be able to replace painting. Communication would be complete, art unnecessary”.112 In drawing upon his knowledge of electromagnetism and X-rays, his experiences of magnetism and mediumism, as well as his position as an Anarcho-Communist, Kupka then envisaged what art would be like when the future artist deployed the arts of magnetism as a medium: We shall be able to expect the invention of an X-graphics, capable of revealing the subtlest of events, presently invisible or dimly lit, as much from the outside world as from the soul of the artist. In perfecting more and more the technical means at their disposal, artists will probably one day succeed in sharing with the spectator the richness of their subjective life without being constrained by the laborious need of making a painting or sculpture. For their part, the spectators will no longer have to make their eyes work [given] the understanding established without any need of material mediation. The elimination of traditional means will facilitate the task for art lovers as much as for the artist.113

Once the artist was reconceived as both a medium and a magnetiser, a receptor and an emitter of elecromagnetic signals, Kupka considered that thought, emotions and emanations beyond corporeal boundaries could be directly transmitted to others, particularly in a trance-like state. This could, in turn, mediate the liberation of what Bois called “the superconscious mind” and what Blavatsky identified as a metaphysical evolution able to transcend the limitation of the senses.114 Hence the so-called “cosmic rhythm” created by Kupka’s disks, waves and crystalline arcs in his illustrations for L’Homme et la Terre and in his mesmeric abstractions, alongside his “cosmic symphony” of colours, were composed to engulf the beholder in their vibratory emissions and absorb them with the force of magnetic hypnosis. In conceiving of his paintings as “living magnetic or electromagnetic fields” able to generate vibrations of thought and emotion in the beholder while

111  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 229. 112  Philippe Dagen, “Préface”, in: Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 11–37, here 36. 113  Kupka, La Création dans les Arts plastiques, 229. 114  Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. 1, 424–444.



Magnetic Modernism  

 151

acting as forms of magnetic hypnosis, Kupka vested his “magnetic modernism” with utopian performativity capable of infiltrating consciousness. In subliminally infiltrating consciousness, without the spectator ever being aware of it, Kupka’s “magnetic modernism” may then have been deemed far more efficacious than didactic cartoons or representational painting in generating superconsciousness of an Anarcho-Communist and an Anarcho-cosmic utopia.

Cathy L. Jrade

Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics The poetic journey of Juan Gelman was defined by the utopian pursuit of a better world, the fight against injustice, and the search for meaning in the face of seemingly insurmountable forces and personal despair. His work reflects his life-long effort to find a language that captures his commitment to the needs and desires of those around him as well as his passion for poetry. Gelman’s engagement with both the world and the word is tied both to the major cultural tendencies and political events of his day and to a vision honed by the most immediate and pressing personal realities. He was born in 1930 in the Buenos Aires district of Villa Crespo, an area known for the presence of tango, tenements, and a large number of immigrants, and died in exile in Mexico City in 2014. His family were poor Ukrainian Jews, and he was the youngest of three children and the only one born in Argentina. The Argentine Jewish community as a whole suffered acute anti-Semitism and economic inequality. These factors together with a scarcity of rabbinic talent led to a secularisation of Jewish identity and to an emphasis on social activism as an alternative expression of Judaic commitment.1 In this context, Gelman developed a life-long commitment to fighting injustice, a commitment that led him to identify himself as a Marxist. He, nevertheless, broke with the Argentine Communist Party in 1964 and eventually worked in collaboration with the various militant alliances active in Argentina. Under the threat of death at the hands of the Argentine Anti-Communist Association, Gelman went into exile in Europe in 1976 at the age of 46.2 That same year, Jorge Rafael Videla carried out the coup d’état that led to the violent and repressive Argentine military dictatorship under which Gelman’s son and pregnant daughter-in-law were abducted and killed. They were among the first of the victims of what has been called the most brutal regime in the country’s history.3 While the number of dead cannot be accurately determined, it has been

1  Robert Weisbrot, The Jews of Argentina: From the Inquisition to Perón, Philadelphia 1979, 4. 2  Between 1971 and 1973, Gelman was active in the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias), which bore the stamp of Che Guevara’s push for armed intervention. In 1973, Perón returned to Argentina in a climate of growing violence. In 1975, after Gelman was threatened by the Triple A, the Montoneros asked him to leave the country, and he settled for a while in Rome, working as a reporter for the Inter Press Service. See: Geneviève Fabry, Las formas del vacío: la escritura del duelo en la poesía de Juan Gelman, Amsterdam 2008, 14. 3  Liria Evangelista, Voices of the Survivors: Testimony, Mourning, and Memory in Post-­Dictatorship Argentina, 1983–1995, trans. Renzo Llorente, New York 1998, xix.

154 

 Cathy L. Jrade

estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 people, including hundreds of elderly and children, were secretly abducted, tortured, and killed by the Argentine military during the 1970s and early 1980s.4 The collections written after these events, during the second half of his life, reflect the overwhelming pain of exile, of the death of comrades, and of the loss of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, who had been born in captivity and given to a Uruguayan family that sympathised with the dictatorial regime. The change in Gelman’s perspective and poetry is evident in all the artistic choices he makes. For this reason, many critics have opted to study the early and late collections independently.5 Here, however, I seek to highlight through the examination of poems from the pre- and post-exile periods the continuity that defines his poetic decisions, especially Gelman’s ongoing ethical engagement in pursuit of utopian goals. Of particular note is how his first collection, Violín y otras cuestiones (Violin and Other Questions), published in 1956 at the age of 26, reveals how the young poet struggles to balance the diverse elements he wishes to address and how, at the same time, he comes to formulate the poetic vision that becomes the foundation of his writing. The grace, vitality, and socio-political insights that define Gelman’s verse are evident from the start. In his prologue to Gelman’s first collection, Raúl González Tuñón emphasises its rich and lively lyricism and its sensitivity to social realities (I, 12).6 However, as Gelman confesses in his verse, he is uncertain how best to proceed. These doubts are played out throughout the volume, beginning with the first poem, “Epitafio”, which opens with images from the past that no longer exist but seem to have defined the poet and his goals: A bird lived within me. A flower traveled in my blood. My heart was a violin. I made the effort or I did not make the effort. But at times

4  Skidmore and Smith mention 10,000 killed or “disappeared” (Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, New York 2005, 101). Rock, discussing the aftermath of Argentina’s dirty war, quotes General Ramón J. Camps as admitting responsibility for the kidnapping and death of 5,000 people, who were later buried in unmarked graves (David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War and Alfonsín, London 1987, 393). 5  The collections that have been repeatedly singled out for study are Citas y comentarios, Com/ posiciones, Dibaxu, Hacia el sur, La junta luz, and Salarios del impío. 6  All the references to Gelman’s work come from the two-volume Poesía reunida: 1956–2010, Barcelona 2012. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.



Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics 

 155

they chose me. Also Spring, joined hands, and felicity made me happy. I say that man should be so!7

There was no distance between the singing bird and poet or the beauty of the flower and the blood that flowed through his veins. His heart was a violin capable of creating scores or rendering those of his predecessors into melody. Wanting to or not, he became one with these elements; they chose him. With these few words, he announces a theme that will reappear throughout his works, that, despite how difficult it is to write, he feels he has no choice but to be a poet. In his engagement with mellifluous elements, he finds the pleasure of springtime, love, and “lo feliz”, happiness in its most abstract. In this setting, defined by Fabry as innocence,8 the poet formulates his mission: “I say that man should be so [happy]”. This innocent vision, however, is shattered by the next three and final lines which also explain the title of the poem: “(Here lies a bird./ A flower./ A violin)”.9 Each element is set off in a separate verse as in an individual coffin tightly nailed and buried between parentheses. This death of innocence is the demise of the naïve assumption that the beauty of language can bring joy and put both poet and reader in touch with transcendent sources of insight and inspiration. In other words, “Epitafio” plays out the confrontation with the “death” of established poetic solutions and the void between the language and rhythms of nature and the poem itself, artistic dilemmas that are inherent to all modern verse.10 The music and beauty of the world that coursed through the poet’s veins stop flowing. The old order has died, the translatable universe has been silenced, and the poet is left in a dark, brooding, modern landscape, which appears in the second poem of the volume:

7  “Un pájaro vivía en mí./ Una flor viajaba en mi sangre./ Mi corazón era un violín.// Quise o no quise. Pero a veces/ me quisieron. También a mí/ me alegraban la primavera,/ las manos juntas, lo feliz.// ¡Digo que el hombre debe serlo!” (I, 19). 8  Fabry, Las formas del vacío, 83. 9  “(Aquí yace un pájaro./ Una flor./ Un violin)”. 10  González Echevarría lays out these features of modern poetry in his study of Martí’s “Amor de ciudad grande” (Roberto González Echevarría, “Martí y su ‘Amor de ciudad grande’: Notas hacias la poética de Versos libres”, in: Isla a Su Vuelo Fugitiva: Ensayos Críticos Sobre Literatura Hispanoamericana, Madrid 1983, 27–42, here 27–30).

156 

 Cathy L. Jrade

The twilight attacks the sad and solitary violin of my heart. The twilight installs melancholy girls on the balcony. The twilight plays on the corners a gray music. And cries at length, gently. (Do you not hear it?)11

No longer the romantic or modernista visionary, the poet becomes the victim of the thrice-repeated twilight of previously given answers. The fading light steals his poetry and distances love. The poet faces this darkness alone, without the support of inherited solutions, trying to make sense of the gray melody and soft crying that underscore the breach between innocent faith in a decipherable world and the post-Edenic cityscape of balconies, corners, and twilights that assault the spirit. The poet no longer strives to attain a vision beyond his historical context. But even as he reaches out and addresses those around him, he is left to wonder whether he is the only one to hear the crying in the fading light and to be aware of humanity’s fall, its exile from paradise, and its suffering. Also, if the others are deaf to the realities around them, are they also deaf to him and to his poetry, converting it into a solipsistic enterprise? In other words, the bracketed question expresses his concern that what he hears may not relate at all to the tears and anguish of his companions but rather it may originate with and within him. The poet thus confronts the need not only to overcome the gap between words and meaning but also to write without presenting an artistic vision that is out of touch with the realities of the world. This concern adds depth to the seemingly guileless goal stated in the initial poem: “I say that man should be happy”. Instead of a naïve innocence, it suggests a cautious reluctance to define what happiness might be for others. Coming as it does at the cusp between the before and after of paradise and exile, it indicates a reasoned reply to the void, one that is grounded in an ethical response that must constantly struggle between self and other, between representation and engagement. The poet’s focus on the breach between language and the world turns more active and activist in the next four poems of Violín y otras cuestiones. The last

11  “El crepúsculo atraca al triste y solo/ violín de mi corazón.// El crepúsculo instala muchachas melancólicas/ en el balcón.// El crepúsculo toca en las esquinas/ una música gris./ Y llora largamente,/ blandamente.// (¿No lo oís?)” (I, 19).



Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics 

 157

of these, the sixth of the collection, highlights both the poet’s disquiet and his anticipation of a solution: Touch my cheek just in case you find an old and forgotten dampness. It is from the time that I wanted to be a horse In order not to be a phantom. Touch my cheek. Let’s go, walk…12

The “before” of the primordial “forgotten dampness” refers to a time defined by a type of prelapsarian and joyful fusion between word and world. It refers to the third poem of the collection, “El caballo de la calesita” (The Horse from the Merry-Go-Round; I, 20–21), when the music of the merry-go-round and the laughter of children seemed to offer a model for poetic discourse, a model that he comes to realise is a hollow attempt to fill the void within himself. The solution that this sixth poem provides is suggested earlier by the end of the fourth, “Crepúsculo distinto” (Different Twilight). In both, the movement of men toward a better future takes over, and the poet joins in. In “Crepúsculo distinto”, they pass by, fighting for what they deserve and for a miraculous bread made of a future time, supposedly a time when miracles actually happen (“Men go by, they fight for their stature,/ for a miraculous bread of future”).13 In “Touch my cheek…”, the goal becomes a fight for goodness, happiness, and survival. Grey turns to red and the poet’s sad music is converted into action. What therefore emerges from the start of this first collection of 24 poems is the vision of a poet who defines his artist goals in relation to a profoundly ethical stance with regard to others. For this reason, Violín y otras cuestiones is split between poems about poetry and poetic examinations of individual lives, intimate details, and specific contexts. The poems swing between the joyous but burden­some tasks of writing and explorations of various social and political issues from the intense point of view of those who suffer. “Oración de un desocupado” (Prayer of an Unemployed Worker; I, 26–27) is an example of this focus. The unemployed worker proclaims the inhuman conditions that turn him into “un animal furioso”, a furious animal. The poet cedes his centrality and seeks to capture the conditions, the anger, and the despair of the other. Gelman, in an interview he gave to Lisa Rose Bradford, calls this relin-

12  “Tócame la mejilla por si encuentras/ una humedad antigua y olvidada./ Es del tiempo en que quise ser caballo/ Para no ser fantasma.// Tócame la mejilla. Vamos, anda…” (I, 22). 13  “Pasan los hombres, luchan por su estatura,/ por un pan milagroso de porvenir”.

158 

 Cathy L. Jrade

quishing an escape from self-involvement, an escape he defines as necessary to his endeavours. He goes on to state: “Intimacy of course forms part of one’s subjectivity, but subjectivity is not everything. I tried to place myself in another realm, imagine myself as others”.14 In this approach, his work reveals a sensitivity to the issues that concerned other writers and thinkers of the 20th Century, most notably Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas. Like them he seeks to recover ethics within failed philosophic, theological, and political systems by placing an emphasis on individuality and difference. Of particular note with regard to Gelman’s work is Levinas’ formulation of the “speaking face” as a way to overcome the reification of the other and to emphasise the reciprocity of encounters.15 This central metaphor emphasises the uniqueness of each face, a uniqueness which requires a response that cannot be homogenised, abstracted, suppressed or possessed.16 The other thus becomes the basis of an intersubjective ethics of “response-ability”. For Gelman, poetry, the genre that foregrounds language in its most material dimension, comes to stand in for what the “face” means for Levinas. The materiality of the world, that is, the bread, the table, the handkerchiefs, the individuals of these poems, is given weight and substance through language. The countless “faces” that take shape in Gelman’s verse offer an opportunity for an ethical response and, in turn, a utopian hope of a better, more just world. This project does not, however, remove the doubt that was raised by the “Do you not hear it?” of the second poem of Violín y otras cuestiones. The parenthetical question regarding shared perceptions underscores the poet’s concern with being locked within his own realities, both blind and deaf to his surroundings. By the end of his first volume of verse, in the poem entitled “Final”, Gelman maps out a path for poetry or, at the very least, how he hopes to balance his personal vision with those of others. In short, the poem presents a defense of poetry in the imperfect modern world. It begins with a reluctance to abandon the musicality, joy, and fantasy that contribute to the power of verse:

14  Juan Gelman, Between Words: Juan Gelman’s Public Letter, trans. Lisa Rose Bradford, San Francisco 2010, 103–105. 15  Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Between the Face and the Voice: Bakhtin Meets Levinas”, Continental Philosophy Review, 41, 2008, no. 1 (March), 43–58 – available at: http://www.link.springer. com (accessed 21 October 2014). 16  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh 1969, 33–34.



Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics 

 159

Poetry is not a bird. And it is. It is not a downy feather, the air, my shirt, no, nothing of that. And all that. Yes.17

His conclusion is that poetry is “all this” just as life is beauty and pleasure as well as injustice and suffering. Hence, poetry fuses with living and becomes the defining feature of the life of those who choose to write. “Poetry is a way of living./ Look at the people who are at your side. Do they love? Suffer? Sing? Cry?”18 This injunction pushes the poet to extend his embrace beyond his own experiences to include those around him. This focus grows stronger in the next stanza, in which the shift in form toward poetic prose is another self-reflexive gesture that points to the erosion of lyrical models. Addressing his writing self and others who aspire to be poets, he closes his first collection with a statement in which poetry becomes the fight for and on behalf of others. It is an endeavour that starts with their realities, their pieces of the world, their place in time, and their claims to happiness. Within this framework, poetry is no longer an outflowing from the poet, an expression of personal desires and feelings as it was for the Romantics and Spanish American modernists.19 The poet is not a fountain projecting fluid feelings that reverberate in accord with a decipherable universe. On the contrary, he becomes a river that carries along the countless (“innumerable”) elements that he must try to “represent” in all their diversity, inconsistency, and pain, without, at the same time, discarding joy and the other intangibles of life. One of these elements is “juan”, who is swept along in this rushing river of images. The poem, thus, questions the poet’s ability to stay afloat and to hold his own, but also urges him to fight against the multiple forces that would pull his art asunder. His poetry must embrace the chaos of modern life, the rapid flow of time and events, and the range of subjectivities. This final piece suggests that the poet cannot speak on behalf of the needs and wishes of others if he loses sight of his own poetic and political goals. Gelman’s poetics are further developed in his second volume of verse, El juego en que andamos (The Game We Are Playing), written between 1957 and

17  “La poesía no es un pájaro./ Y es./ No es un plumón, el aire, mi camisa,/ no, nada de eso. Y todo eso./ Sí” (I, 42). 18  “La poesía es una manera de vivir./ Mira a la gente que hay a tu costado. ¿Ama? ¿Sufre? ¿Canta? ¿Llora?” 19  Regarding the Romantics, see: M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, London 1971, 47. See also: Cathy L. Jrade, Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition, Austin 1983, 20.

160 

 Cathy L. Jrade

1958. No longer content to simply reach beyond himself, he begins to focus on his readers and on ways to move them beyond their immediate realities and situational limitations. These “limits” become the center of attention, appearing in the ostensibly simple poem entitled “Límites”, which is built around three questions that emphasise the enormous divide among individuals and within communities.20 The three questions challenge the authority that has divided the world and its resources, privileges, and entitlements. The poem abstracts what Neruda in “La United Fruit Co” mocks with abrasive irony, and it questions in a serious and straight-forward manner the divisions between the segments of society that get to have water and those that go thirsty, between those that breathe freely and others that must burn, and between those that are blessed with love and others that suffer hate and humiliation.21 The adverbial phrase “at some point” moves the origin of these inflexible divisions to an indeterminate moment in the past, hidden from observation. Unexamined, the allocation of rights and privileges is regarded as natural, eternal, and inalterable. The chasm between the two distinct regions prevents contact, ethical engagement, and critical exchange; it perpetuates the sense of the appropriateness of the arrangements. Within such tightly bound restrictions, the act of examining the taken-for-granted opens cracks in the seemingly impenetrable limits. These fissures usher in the possibility of hope for change. Nevertheless, hope is irreproachable only because its knees have been bloodied, because it has abandoned the passivity of submission (in prayer or to authority) and has accepted the need for action and sacrifice. In “Accidente en la construcción” (Accident on the Construction Site), also from El juego en que andamos, Gelman focuses on the lives of five workers, specifically, Roberto, José, Antonio, Juan, Esteban. Roberto, José, Antonio, Juan, Esteban under their names of bricklayer left this life. Américo, Paulino, their trowels speak, walk, stop to meditate at the edge of the darkness.

20  “¿Quién dijo alguna vez: hasta aquí la sed,/ hasta aquí el agua?// ¿Quién dijo alguna vez: hasta aquí el aire,/ hasta aquí el fuego?// ¿Quién dijo alguna vez: hasta aquí el amor,/ hasta aquí el odio?// Sólo la esperanza tiene las rodillas nítidas./ Sangran” (I, 54). 21  Pablo Neruda, “La United Fruit Co.”, in: Canto general, Barcelona 1978, 209–210.



Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics 

 161

They are already above the air, one of them finishes whistling what was begun. In silence they build their eternity: the community that does not forget.22

The five labourers are buried under the label of “albañil” (bricklayer or construction worker) as much as they are buried in their graves or under rubble at the construction site that may have resulted from the accident of the poem’s title. Unable to get out from under the manner in which they have been pigeonholed in life, they die doing what they must do. As in “Límites”, there are few options for breaking out of the categories in which they have been placed and in which they lose their identity and worth as individuals. They are simply workers, labour to be used to build the modern city. Yet the poem begins to reveal the possibility of an alternative vision, for in death, as they leave this life together, they have forged a sense of solidarity and purpose among their comrades. The accident that steals their lives opens a dark hole that demands the attention of those left behind, interrupting their daily activities and the clanking of their trowels. As the deceased float above the air, one of them “whistles what they have begun”. Their normally playful whistling is thus transformed into a spiritual call to attention that finishes the task begun with their demise. It recalls the value and uniqueness of each worker and asserts their fight against the type of reification and abstraction created within the social organisation that had buried their identities beneath the title of bricklayer. Their individuality emerges among a people that does not forget who they were or how they died, and they become transcendent figures of a heightened awareness of what can be accomplished when a people comes together in support of each other. In this way, the poem affirms the importance of class solidarity but not at the expense of the individual. It converts the accident into a memorial that unites the compassionate vision of the poet with respect for the personal dignity of the workers, achieving the goal suggested by the poem “Final” discussed earlier. Neither the poet nor the workers are swept away by a river of images. With the publication of “Arte poética” (The Art of Poetry) in Velorio del solo (Wake for the Solitary Man) in 1961, Gelman has formulated the nature of the

22  “Roberto, José, Antonio, Juan, Esteban/ bajo sus nombres de albañil/ se fueron de la vida.// Américo, Paulino, sus cucharas/ hablan, caminan, se detienen/ a meditar al borde de lo oscuro.// Ellos están encima ya del aire,/ alguno/ termina de silbar lo comenzado.// En silencio construyen/ su eternidad: el pueblo que no olvida” (I, 55).

162 

 Cathy L. Jrade

delicate balance that he has been striving to achieve from the beginning of his career. He conceives his poetry in terms of service to others, which means that he makes every effort not to erase their individuality by subsuming them to a political agenda. Instead, he seeks to include the specifics of their lives, including their pain, their tears, their loves, and their commitments. He writes: The grief of others, tears, handkerchiefs raised in greeting, promises in the middle of autumn or fire, kisses of reunion or goodbye, everything makes me work with words, with blood. I’ve never been the owner of my ashes, my poems, obscure faces write my verses like bullets firing at death.23

Here he presents a poet whose vision is so infused with the lives of others that his blood mingles with theirs. He is so caught up in their needs, desires, and suffering that he feels they take over his art. Without the life-saving force of the faces he manages to capture, Gelman considers his words to be dead letter, ash without meaning. After exile and the death of family, friends, and comrades, however, Gelman finds himself cut off physically, emotionally, and linguistically from the community that peopled his poetry, and he is forced to question all that he had done to help create a more just and caring society. His loss of loved ones and homeland leads him to the Cabala and to the Spanish mystics of the 16th Century. Though these mystical traditions would seem to have little in common with his earlier Marxist beliefs, Gelman finds within them a way back both to writing and to his aspirations for a more perfect world. In an interview that he gave to Salvador Ale in 1995, Gelman explains how exile led him to Judaism in general, and to Isaac Luria in particular. I quote the relevant sections: My in depth encounter with the Jewish and Hebrew culture happened […], when I knew exile […]. I found in it something in harmony with what was happening to me, that is to say, an exile vision of life. I found this same vision in the Hebrew poets of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, especially Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and I “translated” some

23  The English translation is from: Juan Gelman, Dark Times Filled with Light: The Selected Work of Juan Gelman, trans. Hardie St. Martin, Rochester 2012, 15. “A este oficio me obligan los dolores ajenos,/ las lágrimas, los pañuelos saludadores,/ las promesas en medio del otoño o del fuego,/ los besos del encuentro, los besos del adiós,/ todo me obliga a trabajar con las palabras, con la sangre.// Nunca fui el dueño de mis cenizas, mis versos,/ rostros oscuros los escriben como tirar contra la muerte” (I, 69).



Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics 

 163

of their texts that I collected in my book Com/posiciones […]. The Cabalists ask themselves: Is it possible that man is not exiled on Earth? And one of the Cabalists formulated an extraordinary idea, [sic] Isaac Luria, Cabalist of the sixteenth century from Safed, in Palestine, found that the first great exile is God himself because he withdraws from himself in order to give space to his creation and so is exiled from his work.24

It is not surprising that Gelman is drawn to Lurianic Cabala, for it is born of anguish and despair resulting from exile. Within the context of a world defined by evil and loss, Luria rewrites scripture and rabbinic commentary to reflect his own suffering and that of those around him, and he converts the Cabala from a non-historical quest for the secrets of the cosmos into a historical pursuit of redemption. In the briefest of terms, Luria holds that during the creation of the universe the sparks of divine light were captured by the powers of evil. For these to be set free and returned to their original place in the divine realms, believers must perform the required commandments. Each righteous deed frees a captive spark, while every sin condemns another spark to captivity. From this perspective, the messiah is not a person but the utopian result of the attainment of perfection through human effort.25 As with Luria, what attracted Gelman to the mystic poets that he “translates” in his 1985 collection, Com/posiciones, is their response to exile and loss.26 He

24  Pedro Salvador Ale, “Juan y lo judío”, 1997, http://infosalvadorale.mex.tl/221490_Entrevistaa-Juan-Gelman--Juan-y-lo-Judio.html (accessed 21 June 2015). 25  Unlike earlier Cabalists, who believed that there was an original state of perfection that must be rediscovered and reconstituted, Luria held that there was never a state of perfection. Even within the Godhead, there was an innermost crisis, which the creation of the universe and humanity was intended to resolve. Perfection, therefore, will be achieved for the first time in the future, as a result of the endeavours of all those working toward it. Unlike the Catholic mystics, Lurianic Cabala proposes that seekers of perfection should not try to unite with God, with­drawing from history. On the contrary, they should turn toward history and take part in the spiritual struggle for perfection. See: Joseph Dan, The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, New York and Oxford 2003, 33–35. 26  Swietlicki has shown that the Spanish mystic poets draw on the language of the more traditional Cabala of the Zohar, the bible of Cabalistic thought, written by Moses de León between 1280 and 1286 in Guadalajara, Spain (Catherine Swietlicki, Spanish Christian Cabala: The Works of Luis de León, Santa Teresa de Jesús, and San Juan de La Cruz, Columbia, MO 1986, 43–44, 51, 84). For Michel de Certeau, the mystics of the 16th and 17th Centuries were defined by the sense of bereavement they felt as they wrote against the backdrop of a world that appeared to be falling apart and in need of repair. The regions and/or social categories from which they came were in recession, marginalised by progress, or destroyed by war. In short, the mystics lived lives of instability, disinheritance, and exile. To make matters worse, as “new Christians” (conversos), they were deemed too attached to Jewish beliefs and were, therefore, suspect. Yet, according to de Certeau, being caught in the void between two religious traditions allowed them the ­freedom to

164 

 Cathy L. Jrade

builds a type of literary community of fellow exiles, mostly Jews and Jewish descendants from across the centuries, and “revises” their texts to reflect his own losses. Thus, little by little, Gelman begins to break out of the isolation, paralysing anguish, and silence of the trauma he endures. This joining of forces renews the empathetic camaraderie of earlier poems. The bridging of perspectives from different places and times becomes a first step toward “healing the world” (to use Luria’s phrase) and returns him to what was the bedrock of his poetics.27 The healing that Gelman begins to achieve is the conversion of the psychological and linguistic isolation of trauma into meaning and action. As Gregg Horowitz has observed, since trauma occurs at that point when the realities experienced are beyond normative, civilised behavior and, therefore, beyond the commonalities of language, the poet must find a way to reach beyond the unspeakable, melding the specificity of individual injury and the universality of meaningful communication.28 For Gelman this search to turn injuries into health and atrocities into utopian goals evolves over the span of a few years. It leads him first to “revise” and “re-imagine” the amorous metaphors and the language of Song of Songs, mystical and modern poetry, and tangos. Thus, in Comentarios (written in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Zürich, Geneva, and Calella de la Costa between 1978 and 1979) and in Citas (written in Rome in 1979), his poetry focuses on the universal themes of love, the struggle to recover it when it is lost, and the ache that reverberates when it is absent. In Carta abierta (Public or Open Letter, written in Paris and Rome in 1980), he becomes the face of suffering and despair through which he generates a specific reality that simultaneously reaches out to the other victims of state brutality and to all who find such policies abhorrent. And by Hacia el sur (Southward, written in Rome between 1981 and 1982) he emerges partially from his own realities, extending his persona and writing, as he had done in his youth, under the name of another. As he explains with regard to Julio Grecco and José Galván: “You can see that their names begin with the same initials as mine and, in posing as poets who had disappeared or died at

become major initiators of a new mode of discourse and to revise their inherited beliefs (Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis 1986, 80– 81, 84–86. 27  See: Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim, London 1965, 110. 28  Gregg M. Horowitz, “The Homeopathic Image, or, Trauma, Intimacy and Poetry”, in: Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory, 11, 2010, no. 3, 463–490, here 487.



Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics 

 165

the hands of the military dictatorship, I was talking about my own death in the deaths of so many compañeros. And of their lives within me”.29 To illustrate how Gelman’s poetics of compassion and intersubjective “response-ability” reemerges in this later period, I will focus on two poems, one from Carta abierta and the other from “Los poemas de José Galván” from Hacia el sur. In the fourth of the 25 untitled and relentlessly heart-wrenching poems that constitute Carta abierta, Gelman turns the broad sweep of history into an intimate, enclosed reality of pain and loss. This individuation reverts history’s abstractions into a material reality of a body and spirit wracked by suffering: with head hung low my burning soul dips a finger in your name/ scrawls your name on the walls of night/ amounting to nothing / solemnly bleeding/ soul to soul she watches you / enkindlering / opens her mother chest to cuddle you / shelter you / /reunite you / undie you / tiny shoes of yours taking its first steps upon the world’s sufferingblock tendering it / clarity trodden / water undone since you speak so / you crackle / burn / want / give me your nevers like a true blue boy30

As in other poems of the period, Gelman invents words, changes the gender of certain nouns, and inserts slashes that can but often do not coincide with line breaks. The irregularities of the language and the diagonal slashes mar the smooth surface of the text, forcing the startled reader to stop and stare. The altered words and grammar reflect the scarred spirit that takes shape in language and these elements come to represent the distorted “face” of the lyric voice, whose surroundings are presented with visually vibrant images. The reader imagines the bowed head, the injured finger, the words on the bloodstained walls, and the blood that flows between father and the son he tries to resurrect.

29  Gelman, Between Words, 105. 30  Translation by Lisa Rose Bradford, in: Between Words, 41. “con la cabeza gacha ardiendo mi alma/ moja un dedo en tu nombre / escribe las/ paredes de la noche con tu nombre// sirve de nada / sangra seriamente/// alma a alma te mira / se encriatura// se abre la pecho para recogerte // abrigarte / reunirte / desmorirte // zapatito de vos que pisa la/// sufridera del mundo aternurándolo // pisada claridad / agua deshecha/ que así hablás / crepitás / ardés / querés // me das tus nuncas como mesmo niño” (I, 417–418).

166 

 Cathy L. Jrade

These metaphors of suffering are made even more moving by the conversion of the adult son into a child. The years are erased and the lyric voice tries to protect the most vulnerable of creatures in ways that he could not in reality. The tiny shoe of the eighth line invokes the ever younger and more defenseless child, who is small enough to fit within the father’s “mother chest”, that is within “la pecho” of a love that is so strong it contains both maternal and paternal devotion. This re-gendered chest also suggests that the love it holds is more than physical; it belongs to both his body and soul (cuerpo and alma) and exceeds the limitations of time and space. The lyric voice thus opens himself to embrace, to shelter, and to “undie” his son, and this breaking down of the barriers of his being is also the giving of himself to others in an attempt at healing and undying. Yet there is no ultimate reunion or revival in this solution. The first two stanzas of the poem create a volatile vision of openings and enclosures, of hope and despair, of healing and destruction as the poet struggles to determine what poetry can achieve in the face of the loss of innocence and faith. In the third stanza, clarity is trod upon and muddied; the water of possible renewal undone by the child’s speaking, burning, and wanting. Yet there is an awareness that language is not bound by the physical realities that are the tools and trade of dictatorships. He alters the flow of time by affirming that the phantom son gives him his “nevers” in a pact that resurrects the future, suggesting a role for survivors as well as for poetry. The very act of crying out and putting into words the horrors of what is stolen from the victims of state violence affirms the instability of any modern poetics at the same time that it struggles to chart a course toward recovery, action, and ultimately social change. This aspiration returns in Hacia el sur, written between 1981 and 1982, in the creation of the two heteronyms that tie together the lives and deaths of his comrades with his efforts to give meaning to their actions. His introductory words to each section underscore the fight against the injustices and horrors of the military dictatorship and the reactionary forces of repression that had long dominated Argentina. The deaths of the two “authors” add moral weight to the works that Gelman claims to have saved. The “José Galván” section begins with “Más preguntas” (More Questions), which asks what gives poetry an ethical perspective commensurate to the political actions of those lost. The answer he offers coincides with the solution he tentatively mapped out in the first poem of his first collection.



Juan Gelman and the Development of a Utopian Poetics 

 167

… I am speaking in first person / and according to oscar wilde in art there is no first person/ but maiacovsky and vallejo spoke in first person/ they had their “I” full of people/ and walt whitman also / I remember when he passed through paumanok joining sparrow with his beard/ dragging little fires like a vagabond/ and that which had been born there / and also in other parts and in no part/ and living covered him in sweat and wonder/ as it did his companions who were fighting with calm and disdain/ they sought many victories/ moons to life a very good once and for all/31

The goal he gives himself is the one he finds in Mayakovskii, Whitman, and Vallejo. He aspires to reach beyond his own subjectivity by being “full of others”. While this objective resonates with the transcendental perspective of earlier poets, its emphasis is, as has been the case from the beginning of Gelman’s career, on the here and now and on his desire to speak for others and thereby to help those around him to “live fully once and for all”. With this goal, Gelman reasserts his early poetic aspirations to have his writing be an agent in the struggle to overcome repression and inequity and a force in the quest of a just future.

31  “estoy hablando en primera persona/ // y según oscar wilde en arte no hay primera persona/ / pero maiacovsky y vallejo hablaron en primera persona/ / tenían el yo lleno de gente / y walt whitman también/ / recuerdo cuando pasó por paumanok juntando gorrión con la barba / // arrastrando fueguitos como un vagabundo/ / y eso que había nacido allí/ / y también en otras partes y en ninguna parte/ / y vivir lo cubría de sudor y maravilla / // como a los compañeros/ que combatían con tranquilidad y desdén/ / buscaban muchas victorias/ / lunas para vivir de una buenísima vez/” (I, 558).

Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

Utopie und Apokalypse in der österreichischen Kulturzeitschrift Der Brenner (1910–1954) Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts begaben sich viele europäische Künstler auf die Suche nach dem ‚Neuen Menschen‘, der als „emphatisches Leitbild, in dem die ethischen Postulate des Expressionismus zusammenschießen“, fungierte und für die ‚expressionistische Generation‘ identitätsbildend wirken sollte;1 ein Sendungs­bewusstsein, das auch in der österreichisch-ungarischen k.u.k. Monarchie registriert wurde. In Tirol entfaltete der Südtiroler Schriftsteller Carl Dallago, getragen von der „ungeheure[n] Sehnsucht nach einem ursprünglicheren ­ Stand der Dinge, – ja nach seinem ursprünglichsten Stand – dem Chaos“, eine Utopie des naturnahen, ursprünglichen Menschentums.2 Das dahinter stehende Menschen­bild artikulierte er nicht als narrative Gegenwelt, sondern im predigt­ haften Verkündigungsgestus in zahlreichen Essays. Sie prägten die ersten Jahre der Kultur­zeitschrift Der Brenner, die Ludwig von Ficker als „Versuchsballon“ in Innsbruck gegründet hatte, „beunruhigt durch gewisse Unheile, die in der Luft zu liegen schienen“, wie er rückblickend feststellte.3 Das Periodikum überdauerte als einige der wenigen Kulturzeitschriften Europas beide Weltkriege.4 Im Geleitwort zum ersten Heft, das am 1. Juni 1910 erschien, legte Dallago – in Rücksprache mit dem Herausgeber, aber ohne Namensnennung – seine Über­legungen nieder. Es ging ihm um „ein Unterbringen der menschlichen Natur – ein Unterbringen von Menschentum“.5 Mit dieser Programmatik knüpfte der Brenner an Dallagos Konzept des ‚Landschaftsmenschentums‘ an, das sich an Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Millet, Walt Whitman und Giovanni Segantini orientierte und die mystische Verbindung des Menschen mit dem Schöpfer im intensiven Natur­ erlebnis propagierte.6

1  Jan Knopf, „‚Expressionismus‘. Kritische Marginalien zur neueren Forschung“, in: Bernd Hüppauf (Hrsg.), Expressionismus und Kulturkrise, Heidelberg 1983, 15–53, hier 17. 2  Carl Dallago, „Menschendämmerung“, in: Der Brenner, 2, 1911, Nr. 10, 305–315, hier 309. 3  Dankesrede [Ludwig von Fickers] nach Überreichung des goldenen Ehrenringes der Stadt Innsbruck durch Herrn Bürgermeister Dr. Franz Greiter am 14. April 1955. BA, Kopiensammlung Korrespondenz Ludwig von Ficker. 4  Die Zeitschrift Der Brenner ist online abrufbar unter: http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/brenner/ (Stand: 18.02.2015). 5  [Carl Dallago], „Geleitwort“, in: Der Brenner, 1, 1910, Nr. 1, 1. 6  Vgl. Anton Unterkircher, Ich hab gar nichts erreicht. Carl Dallago (1869–1949), Innsbruck 2013, 78–109.

170 

 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

Dallagos Utopie eines naturnahen, ursprünglichen Menschentums Was Dallago, der zwischen 1910 und 1914 zu einem der Hauptmitarbeiter des Brenner avancierte, unter dem Begriffskomplex des ‚Menschentums‘ verstand und wie er sich den Idealtypus des Menschen, der dieser leitenden Kategorie verpflichtet war, vorstellte, lässt sich aus seinen zahlreichen Essays nur indirekt erschließen, da er die messianische Hoffnung auf einen neuen, nahezu paradiesischen Zustand kaum theoretisch ausdifferenzierte. In seiner umfangreichen Korrespondenz7 mit dem Brenner-Herausgeber wird die für die ‚expressionistische Epoche‘ typische Haltung, sich im Entwurf eines neuen Menschseins und einer anderen Gemeinschaftskultur „nur der eigenen Subjektivität anzuvertrauen“, deutlicher.8 Zahlreiche Briefstellen belegen die enge Verknüpfung von Dallagos ‚Menschentum‘ mit der eigenen Person: „Und ich will nur mich geben – will ein Menschentum durchführen in dem Verschiedenerlei seiner Landschaften u. Jahreszeiten“.9 Das „eigene Menschentum – die Persönlichkeit – die eigene Wesensart“ galt als Maßstab.10 Auch für Ficker war „in Dingen der Kunst nur jenes Urteil von Belang“, das „die eigene Wahrhaftigkeit allen Rücksichten auf Konvention und formelle Korrektheit beherzt entgegensetzt“.11 Ausgehend von den Polaritäten Gefühl – Intellekt richtete Dallago seine Kritik gegen Kirche, Presse und Gesellschaft. Die Zielscheibe seiner Angriffe war vor allem das Bürgertum, und hier im Besonderen das ‚Philistertum‘, gegen das er das ‚Künstlertum‘ als die wahre Form des ‚Menschentums‘ beschwor. Den Philister, zu dem er den Pseudo-Künstler rechnete, schied er vom Künstler, an dem „die Affekte, die Bewegungen der Seele, kurz sein Menschentum“

7  Der Briefwechsel Ludwig von Fickers wird derzeit im Rahmen des vom Österreichischen Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF) geförderten Projekts „Ludwig von ­Ficker als Kulturvermittler“ (Leitung: Eberhard Sauermann; Mitarbeiter: Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter) transkribiert und digitalisiert sowie in einer Internet-Edition der Öffentlichkeit verfügbar gemacht. Mehr dazu unter: http://www.uibk.ac.at/brenner-archiv/projekte/lfickeralskulturvermittler/ (Stand: 18.02.2015). 8  Knopf, „Expressionismus“, 17. 9  Brief von Carl Dallago an Ludwig von Ficker, 12.08.1910. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Sign. 6/7–2. 10  Carl Dallago, „Laotse und ich“, in: Der Brenner, 2, 1911, Nr. 6, 161–174, hier 172. 11  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Ernst Knapp, 19.10.1911. BA, Nachlass Carl Dallago, Sign. 2/21–1.



Utopie und Apokalypse 

 171

das Werk bauten.12 Die Aufgabe des wahren Künstlers sah er darin, „Natur und Menschentum und nicht Ideen zu formen“.13 Die Negation bestehender gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse und der Versuch, aus erstarrten Konventionen auszubrechen und sich auf die Suche „nach neuen Arten des Erlebens, der Wahrnehmung und des künstlerischen Ausdrucks“ zu begeben, verbanden Dallago mit der ‚expressionistischen Generation‘.14 Im Mittel­ punkt seiner vitalistisch-ästhetischen Weltanschauung mit ihren pantheisti­schen Zügen stand „die Abwendung von der Gesellschaft und die Hinwendung zur ‚Natur‘ als Urgrund allen Seins, als ethisch-moralischer Orientierungs­punkt und als Maßstab menschlichen Handelns“.15 Er bewertete „Weltbildung“, verkörpert in Institutionen und Herrschaftsformen, als „Sündenfall der Menschen“.16 Wie viele seiner Zeitgenossen propagierte er auch eine Erneuerung des Sinnenlebens. Stark von Nietzsche geprägt, stilisierte er sich selbst im Brenner als „Suchenden und Glühenden nach Weibstum“.17 Otto Weiningers Verknüpfung von Erotik mit Schuldbewusstsein und Leibfeindlich­ keit hielt er ein auf Lustgewinn basierendes, wenn auch hierarchisch-­ konservatives Geschlechtermodell entgegen, dessen „Mann-Weib“-Dualismus die Idee des komplementären Kräfteaustausches abbildete.18 Wie auch Karl Kraus verteidigte er die Dirne gegen die „Hyänen des Stimmrechtswahns“, vor denen die Sinneslust des Mannes versage.19 Falls selbst die Dirne auf ihr Stimmrecht pochen sollte, zöge der Mann sich in die Landschaft zurück, die „immer noch da sein und mit wundervoller Zuversicht nach Menschen aussehen [wird]“, so Dallago.20

12  Carl Dallago, „Wie wir leben“, in: Der Brenner, 2, 1911, Nr. 9, 269–281, hier 276. 13  Carl Dallago, „Verfall II (Fortsetzung)“, in: Der Brenner, 2, 1911, Nr. 3, 65–74, hier 70. 14  Thomas Anz, Die expressionistische Dichterrepublik. Literarischer Geist der Utopie und seine Enttäuschung nach der Revolution von 1918, 2015, http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=12425&ausgabe=200811 (Stand: 18.02.2015). 15  Sieglinde Klettenhammer, „Das Geschlecht des ‚Brenner‘ 1910–1914“, in: Forschungsinstitut Brenner-Archiv der Universität Innsbruck (Hrsg.), Zeitmesser. 100 Jahre „Brenner“ [Begleitbuch zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung], Innsbruck 2010, 111–142, hier 111. 16  Carl Dallago, „Weltbildung und Sündenfall“, in: Der Brenner, 6. Folge, 1920, 453–478, hier 456. 17  Dallago, „Menschendämmerung“, 310. 18  Vgl. Klettenhammer, „Das Geschlecht des ‚Brenner‘ 1910–1914“, 111–142. 19  Carl Dallago, „Verfall der Geschlechter“, in: Der Brenner, 3, 1913, Nr. 18, 825–833, hier 831. 20  Dallago, „Verfall der Geschlechter“, 833.

172 

 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

Utopische Gegenkonzepte von Schuld, Leid und Erlösung Dallagos utopisches Ideal des selbstbestimmten, mit sich und der Natur in Einklang stehenden Menschen konfrontierte Ficker jedoch bald mit Søren Kierke­ gaards Konzept einer religiösen Individualität des Einzelnen, der den Sprung in den Glauben wagt und sich der göttlichen Gnade anvertraut. Zunächst ließ er ab Herbst 1912 Dallagos lustbetontes, lebensbejahendes Konzept vom schöpferischen Menschen auf Georg Trakls düstere Vorstellung „vom Dichter als eines stellvertretend für die Menschheit leidenden Individuums“, das sich seiner Sündhaftigkeit bewusst ist, prallen.21 Für Dallago hingegen stand ein „völlig reiner Mensch – eine reine Seele“ dem Begriff Sünde „in allen Geschlechtsdingen völlig verständnislos“ gegenüber.22 Seine verklärende Vorstellung von der „dionysisch-rauschhaften Verschmelzung von Mann und Frau“ stand somit in Kontrast mit Trakls hermaphroditischen Liebesutopien, die dieser im Spannungsfeld zwischen Schuld und Unschuld entspann und in einen ambivalenten heilsgeschichtlichen Erlösungskontext stellte.23 Konträr war auch das vom Gedanken an die Erbsünde geprägte Menschenbild von Karl Borromäus Heinrich, der ab 1913 im Brenner publizierte. Die Befreiung von der Geschlechtlichkeit war für ihn wünschens­wert, da der Mensch schuldig geworden sei, indem er sich im Moment der Zeugung vom Göttlichen entzweit habe. Die „Hetäre“ betrachtete er deshalb als „tragische[n] Ausdruck unseres kosmischen Leidens“.24 Dass neben der christlichen Lehre von der Erbsünde auch der Erlösungs­ gedanke einen „Hinderungsgrund für die Möglichkeit einer innerweltlichen Utopie“ bedeuten kann,25 zeigt sich in dem Umstand, dass Dallagos religiöse Utopie irdischer Glückseligkeit immer mehr in Gegensatz zu einer christlichen Vertröstung im Jenseits geriet und infolge der Mitarbeit des KierkegaardÜbersetzers Theodor Haecker ab 1914 im Brenner regelrecht attackiert wurde. Während Dallago seinen ‚reinen Menschen‘ in den Dienst einer die Diesseitigkeit betonende Erlösungsbotschaft stellte, konnte Haecker in seiner katholischen Orthodoxie damit nichts anfangen: Dallago lebe in dem Wahn, „gar ohne

21  Unterkircher, Ich hab gar nichts erreicht, 194. 22  Carl Dallago, „Meine Einsamkeit redet“, in: Der Brenner, 3, 1913, Nr. 10, 450–458, hier 452. 23  Vgl. Klettenhammer, „Das Geschlecht des ‚Brenner‘ 1910–1914“, 112. 24  Karl Borromäus Heinrich, „Christentum und Sexualität“, in: Der Brenner, 3, 1913, Nr. 7, 281– 288, hier 287. 25  Götz Müller, „Einleitung“, in: ders., Gegenwelten. Die Utopie in der deutschen Literatur, Stuttgart 1989, 1–46, hier 34.



Utopie und Apokalypse 

 173

den Glauben an Christus ein Erlöster zu sein“, so Haecker in einem Brief an Ficker.26 Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg wurde Dallago im Brenner zudem mit Ferdinand Ebners Utopie vom Beginn der „wirkliche[n] ‚Herrschaft Gottes‘ über das Herz des Menschen“ konfrontiert.27 Für Ebner bestand die „innere Not des Existierens“ des Menschen darin, dass er durch die Erbsünde „sich selbst und seine Menschlichkeit verloren und nicht wieder gefunden hat“.28 Die Aufgabe des Brenner sah er als „Brennpunkt“, in dem „die allgemein menschliche Sehnsucht nach dem ‚reinen Menschen‘ […] unmittelbar in Berührung gebracht wird mit dem Sinn des Lebens u. Wortes Christi“.29 Dallagos ‚reinem Menschen‘ traute Ebner die geistige Erneuerung der Menschheit jedoch nicht zu. Auch Haecker begegnete Dallago, der die Selbsterlösung des Menschen in Aussicht stellte, mit Ablehnung: „Dieses ‚reine Menschentum‘ ist das ganz gewöhnliche nicht nur der Schwachheit sondern auch der Erbsünde, nur ohne diese Einsicht“.30 Wurde im Vorkriegs-Brenner – abgesehen von der Propagierung eines neuen Menschenbilds – vor allem das Philistertum gegeißelt, kam nach 1918 verstärkt das Thema der individuellen und allgemeinen Schuld des Menschen, deren Ursprung ins Innere jedes Einzelnen verlegt wurde, zum Tragen. Die Schrecken des Ersten Weltkrieges hatte Dallagos Ideal des Landschaftsmenschen ad absurdum geführt.31 Dallago stellte, nachdem er nach der Lektüre u.a. von Laotse den Übergang zum ‚reinen Menschen der Vorzeit‘ vollzogen hatte, Jesus Christus als Inkarnation des ‚reinen Menschen‘ schlechthin in den Mittelpunkt seiner Essays.32 Obwohl er zunächst Topoi expressionistischer Zeit- und Kulturkritik aufgegriffen hatte, bezog er letztlich in weltanschaulichen Fragen eine andere Position. Sein ‚neuer Mensch‘, der nicht vom Intellekt geleitet ist und außerhalb der Gesellschaft steht, zeigt sich als wandelbare, diffuse Kategorie, die nicht mit dem expressionistischen Ideal gleichsetzbar ist.33 Nicht zuletzt wegen dieser inhaltlichen Unbestimmtheit polarisierte Dallago auch bei

26  Brief von Theodor Haecker an Ludwig von Ficker, 23.04.1921. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von ­Ficker, Sign. 16/26–4. 27  Ferdinand Ebner, „Die Wirklichkeit Christi“, in: Der Brenner, 10. Folge, 1926, 3–53, hier 46–47. 28  Ebner, „Die Wirklichkeit Christi“, 11. 29  Brief von Ferdinand Ebner an Ludwig von Ficker, 07.03.1920. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von ­Ficker, Sign. 8/26–7. 30  Brief von Theodor Haecker an Ludwig von Ficker, 15.01.1932. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von ­Ficker, Sign. 16/38–8. 31  Vgl. Unterkircher, Ich hab gar nichts erreicht, 155. 32  Vgl. Unterkircher, Ich hab gar nichts erreicht, 153. 33  Vgl. Eberhard Sauermann, „Die Literatur der Moderne im ‚Brenner‘“, in: Zeitmesser. 100 Jahre „Brenner“, 57–77, hier 76.

174 

 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

der Leserschaft: Teils wurde er als weltentrückter, asketischer Künstler verklärt, teils als „Müßiggänger in der Natur“, der sich selber für die Verkörperung des Ideals des ‚reinen Menschen‘ ansehe, abgelehnt.34 Dallago, überzeugt, dass der ‚reine Mensch‘ der Menschheit „als Masse […] eher verwehrt ist“,35 nahm eine Randposition ein, die er mit der expressionistischen „Kultur der sozialen Außenseiter“ teilte.36 Zwar schätzte Ficker, der später im Rückblick die Mit­ arbeiter des Brenner als „einsame Naturen, Sonderlingsnaturen dem Anschein nach“ betrachtete,37 damals noch das „Menschliche“ Dallagos, dessen „‚Standpunkt‘, geistesgeschichtlich betrachtet“ er aber als „überwunden“ empfand.38 In diesem Sinne stellte er sich auf die Seite Haeckers und Ebners. 1927 veröffentliche Dallago seinen letzten Beitrag im Brenner.

Abgrenzung von anderen utopischen Ideen Schon vor dem Ausscheiden Dallagos hatte sich im Brenner das Elitebewusstsein im Geistigen kritisch gegen andere utopische Ideen gerichtet.39 Die – bei aller Aufnahmebereitschaft für zeitgenössische Ideen – von Anfang an im Brenner beobachtbare Abgrenzung von bestimmten für das ‚expressionistische Jahrzehnt‘ konstitutiven Strömungen wurde spätestens ab jenem Zeitpunkt klar ersichtlich, als Ficker ab 1919 „von „der neuen Aera“40 des Brenner sprach und ihn als „die Zeitschrift der religiösen Erhebung“41 postulierte. Damit wollte er auch

34  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Ferdinand Ebner [06.03.1920], in: Franz Seyr (Hrsg.), Ferdinand Ebner, Schriften III: Briefe, München 1965, 316–322, hier 321. 35  Carl Dallago, „Siderische Geburt“, in: Der Brenner, 1, 1911, Nr. 17, 471–482, hier 480. 36  Thomas Anz, Der Sturm ist da. Zur literarischen Moderne im „expressionistischen Jahrzehnt“, 2015, http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=14761 (Stand: 19.02.2015). Zur Erfahrung der sozialen Entfremdung und Identifikation mit Außenseiterfiguren, vgl. auch: ders., Literatur des Expressionismus, Stuttgart 2010, 67–77. 37  Dankesrede [Ludwig von Fickers] am 14. April 1955. 38  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Theodor Haecker, 17.04.1921. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Kopiensammlung Korrespondenz Ludwig von Ficker. 39  Auf die „historische durchgehend ablesbar[e] Verbindung von Utopie und Utopiekritik“ hat bereits Wilhelm Voßkamp verwiesen. Vgl. ders., „Utopie und Apokalypse. Zur Dialektik von Utopie und Utopiekritik“, in: Julian Nida-Rümelin und Klaus Kufeld (Hrsg.), Die Gegenwart der Utopie. Zeitkritik und Denkwende, Freiburg im Breisgau 2011, 54–65, hier 56. 40  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Theodor Haecker, 19.07.1919. BA, Kopiensammlung Korrespondenz Ludwig von Ficker. 41  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Max von Esterle [Entwurf, wahrscheinlich November 1919]. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Sign. 56/117–2.



Utopie und Apokalypse 

 175

dem „Einbruch der ‚neuen Daimonen‘ aus dem Osten, die ja die alten Schwindler aus dem Westen sind und linkerhand mit altindischer Weisheit und rechterhand mit kommunistischen Phrasen hausieren gehen“, unbedingt „einen Damm entgegensetzen“.42 Spätestens zu diesem Zeitpunkt hatte der Brenner seine „partiell[e] Aufgeschlossenheit gegenüber der expressionistischen Moderne“, wie sie sich u.a. in der temporären Mitarbeit von Robert Müller, Albert Ehrenstein oder Else Lasker-Schüler gezeigt hatte, bereits verloren.43 Auch das Interesse von esoterisch-naturmystischen bis hin zu sozialistischen, kommunistischen und anarchistischen Zeitschriften am Brenner, das gerade wegen Dallago stark gewesen war, wurde vor allem von Ficker, Haecker und Ebner mit Befremden konstatiert. Dallago, der Ideologien und Ismen jeder Art skeptisch gegenüber stand, hatte sich gegen Produkte einer „esoterischen Astrologie“ ausgesprochen,44 die nichts mit dem ‚Menschentum‘ zu tun hätte, welches „sich in den Evangelien­ berichten kundgibt“.45 Gegen den Gnostizismus, der den Menschen Jesus verneine, opponierte er. In einer Zeit der „falschen religiösen Umtriebe“46 bekam ihm die „theosophische Luft“ ebenfalls nicht gut.47 Ein Grund für ungewollte Vereinnahmungen durch Vertreter verschiedenster Ideologien und Utopien war zum einen die Unschärfe von Dallagos Leitkategorie ‚Menschentum‘ gewesen, zum andern vermutlich auch jene „Art Liberalismus“, die der Brenner „durch die Begünstigung einer Erscheinung wie Dallago pflege“, so der Vorwurf, wie er „nicht von Haecker selbst – aber aus seiner Umgebung und in seinem Beisein“ geäußert wurde;48 da könnte man „ebenso gut auch Rudolf Steiner oder schließlich gar Kundgebungen à la Marx bringen“.49 Letztlich stand hinter der Abwehr anderer Utopien aber wohl die Überzeugung, dass die „tödliche Krisis der Moderne“ durch diese nicht überwindbar wäre: „sie sind nur die ironische Umkehr der Ismen, ihr eigener Überschlag“.50 Die

42  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Theodor Haecker, 20.05.1919. BA, Kopiensammlung Korrespondenz Ludwig von Ficker. 43  Peter Sprengel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1900–1918, München 2004, 118. 44  Carl Dallago, „Widersacher des Menschen“, in: Der Brenner, 4, 1914, Nr. 17, 737–760, hier 744. 45  Dallago, „Widersacher des Menschen“, 743–744. 46  Brief von Carl Dallago an Ludwig von Ficker, 31.03.1914. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Sign. 6/44–5. 47  Brief von Carl Dallago an Ludwig von Ficker, 26.02.1914. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Sign. 6/43–2. 48  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Ferdinand Ebner, 15.03.1921, in: Seyr (Hrsg.), Ebner, Schriften III, 390–394, hier 392. 49  Seyr (Hrsg.), Ebner, Schriften III, 392. 50  Michael Brink, „Der Weg der Armut (1943)“; in: Der Brenner, 16. Folge, 1946, 15–31, hier 20.

176 

 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

„einzige notwendige Revolution“ wäre „die Hinwendung zum Menschen und damit wieder zu Gott“,51 der „revolutionärst[e] Akt“ zur Rettung müsste lauten: „Wieder Mensch zu sein und zu werden“.52 Mit dieser Einschätzung Michael Brinks 1946 im Brenner schloss sich der Kreis zu Dallago, der schon 1912 die allgemeine kritische Zeitdiagnose gestörter Interaktion und Kommunikation gestellt hatte: „Der Mensch dringt nicht mehr zum Menschen durch“.53

Neue Zugänge in der Zwischenkriegszeit Mitte der 1920er Jahre nahm Ludwig von Ficker mit Paula Schlier und Ignaz Zangerle zwei neue MitarbeiterInnen in den Kreis der Brenner-AutorInnen auf, die fortan nochmals wesentliche und langlebige Impulse für die seit dem Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges veränderte Ausrichtung der Zeitschrift geben sollten. Nun erhielt jenes Offenbarungsdenken, das in den ersten Jahren der Zeitschrift latentsubliminal als Komplementärfaktor zum vitalistisch-utopischen MenschentumsKonzept Dallagos gestanden hatte und das Ficker insbesondere in Georg Trakls Kunstproduktion verwirklicht zu finden glaubte, in Form von Schliers literarischen wie auch Zangerles essayistisch-theoretischen Beiträgen breiten Raum und neue Impulse im Brenner. Erste Ausprägungen dieser Hybridisierung von utopischen und eschato­ logisch-visionären Vorstellungen finden sich im „Brenner“ unter anderem durch die Veröffentlichung von Auszügen aus Paula Schliers Roman Chorónoz54 unter dem Titel „Das Menschenherz“.55 Zu Beginn charakterisiert Schlier die für den Roman namensgebende Stadt: „Chorónoz war nicht nur die nördlichste und letzte Stadt der Erde, sondern auch die höchste, die Krone der Städte, zu der man hinaufsteigen mußte, das letzte Stück Land gegen den Himmel zu“.56 Die Attributierung dieses Ortes als „letzter“ bzw. „höchster“ verweist durchaus auf gängige historische Topoi wie die ‚Insel der Seligen‘, ‚Ultima Thule‘ oder das ‚klassische‘ Utopia von Thomas Morus. Chorónoz suggeriert aufgrund dieser Strukturen, ein den tradierten Inselutopien nachempfundenes Exempel eines idealen Gemeinwesens präsentieren zu wollen. Die nachfolgenden Texte

51  Brink, „Der Weg der Armut (1943)“, 20. 52  Brink, „Der Weg der Armut (1943)“, 20–21. 53  Carl Dallago, „Philister“, in: Der Brenner, 2, 1912, Nr. 15, 495–505, hier 498. 54  Paula Schlier, Chorónoz. Ein Buch der Wirklichkeit in Träumen, München 1928. 55  Paula Schlier, „Das Menschenherz“, in: Der Brenner, 10. Folge, 1926, 72–119. 56  Schlier, „Das Menschenherz“, 72.



Utopie und Apokalypse 

 177

enthüllen­aber – obwohl auf inhaltlicher Ebene mehrmals auf die Stadt rückverwiesen wird –, dass die Kompilation nicht nach diesen Gesetzmäßigkeiten funktioniert, sondern vielmehr den Charakter visionärer Offenbarungsschriften ohne konkreten topographischen bzw. metaphorischen Rückbezug auf (wie auch immer geartete) Utopie-Konzepte trägt. Es handelt sich bei den Auszügen aus Chorónoz vielmehr um Traumsequenzen, die – durch das Motiv des Unvorhergesehenen bzw. der Störung der bestehenden Ordnung – bereits eher fantastische Züge erhalten und auf inhaltlicher Ebene weniger die Regelmäßigkeit der Utopie57 in den Vordergrund stellen als vielmehr das Subversive zum prägenden Merkmal erheben. Formal vollziehen die Traum-Texte eine Art Re-Aktivierung des expressionistischen Ausdrucks bzw. stellen einen Versuch der Integration expressionistischer Stilistik dar, wenngleich dieser Ansatz nur sehr verhalten zur Ausprägung kommt; inhaltlich wurden sie in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren zum Teil als psycho­analytische Projektionsflächen rezipiert oder – vor allem durch den persönlichen Einsatz Ludwig von Fickers sowie durch Wilhelm Weindlers Interpretationen im Brenner forciert – als visionäre Manifestationen einer göttlichen Wirklichkeit gelesen.58 Schlier veröffentlichte über eine Zeitspanne von annähernd 30 Jahren im Brenner; ex post betrachtet, illustrieren die Auszüge aus Chorónoz, dass Ficker sie in ähnlicher Weise wie die apokalyptischen Visionstexte, die er nach 1945 in die Zeitschrift integrierte, wahrgenommen haben musste.

Biblische Apokalyptik zwischen Schuldbewusstsein und Atomkriegsangst 1991 traf Joachim Fest die Feststellung, dass bis zum Zusammenbruch der sozialistisch regierten Staaten die Vorstellung präsent gewesen sei, „daß der Mensch die Unvollkommenheit seiner Bedingungen überwinden und die Welt gleichsam neu erschaffen könne“.59 Von diesem Zeitpunkt an musste „der mehr als zweihundert Jahre alte Glaube, daß sich die Welt nach einem ausgedachten Bilde

57  Zum Unterschied zwischen Utopie und Phantastik, vgl. Müller, Gegenwelten, 33. 58  Ficker bemühte sich intensiv um Verbreitung des Buches; der Kurt Wolff-Verlag sicherte ihm diesbezüglich zu, dass (neben den vielen von Ficker genannten Rezensenten) unter anderem Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Annette Kolb, René Schickele, Max Brod, Otto Flake sowie Max Krell ein Rezensionsexemplar erhalten sollten; vgl. Brief von Kurt Wolff an Ludwig von Ficker, 19.11.1927. BA, Nachlass Paula Schlier, Sign. 13.11.3. 59  Joachim Fest, Der zerstörte Traum. Vom Ende des utopischen Zeitalters, Berlin 1991, 10.

178 

 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

von Grund auf ändern lasse“60, als gescheitert betrachtet werden, mit ihm waren allerdings auch jene „Träume über die Menschheitszukunft, die aus der Welt ein riesiges Schlachthaus gemacht haben“,61 Geschichte geworden. Doch nicht erst 1990, sondern schon im Frühsommer 1945 hatte die Menschheit auf ein „riesiges Schlachthaus“ geblickt, nämlich auf jenes, zu dem Europa durch den vom national­ sozialistischen Deutschland initiierten und vollzogenen Völkermord während des Zweiten Weltkrieges geworden war. Die jede Vorstellung sprengende Dimension an Unmenschlichkeit, die mit dem Holocaust einhergegangen war, vor allem aber die Sinnlosigkeit des industriell betriebenen Massenmords musste für die Zeitgenossen das Ende jeder teleologischen Geschichtsvorstellung bedeuten und forderte gleichsam die Notwendigkeit einer geistigen Neuorientierung heraus. Zu dieser Zeit, als die Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit ruchbar wurden, griff Ficker für den Brenner einmal mehr – und stärker als zuvor – auf eschato­ logisch unterfütterte literarische und essayistische Werke, unter anderem von Paula Schlier, zurück. Mit der Vorabveröffentlichung von Auszügen aus Schliers 1949 bei Herder in Freiburg erschienenen Roman Legende zur Apokalypse62 nahm er einen Text in seine Zeitschrift auf, der wegen seiner „spezifische[n] Symbolik der Erfahrungsauslegung“63 in hohem Maße paradigmatisch sowohl für das Kunstverständnis Fickers als auch für die restaurativen Tendenzen in der Literatur der unmittelbaren (österreichischen) Nachkriegszeit rezipiert und interpretiert werden kann. Der Ursprung dieses Textes reichte nach Schliers eigenen Angaben bis in den Spätherbst 1937 zurück; in der ligurischen Hafenstadt Rapallo soll sie in einem Erweckungserlebnis von einem Engel gleichsam den göttlichen Auftrag zur Niederschrift der Legende zur Apokalypse erhalten haben. Ludwig von Ficker und Wilhelm Weindler verwehrten sich zunächst gegen diese Vorstellung; Ficker änderte seine Meinung jedoch während des Weltkrieges und hielt Schlier schließlich kontinuierlich dazu an, ihre Visionen zu verschriftlichen. Nachdem eine erste Niederschrift in den Kriegswirren verloren gegangen war, erschien der Roman erstmalig 1949 unter dem Titel Legende zur Apokalypse und in veränderter Form 1958 unter dem Titel Die letzte Weltennacht. Schauungen zur Apokalypse.64 In der Legende zur Apokalypse wird, eng an den biblischen

60  Fest, Der zerstörte Traum, 81. 61  Fest, Der zerstörte Traum, 81. 62  Paula Schlier, Legende zur Apokalypse, Freiburg im Breisgau 1949. 63  Klaus Vondung, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland, München 1988, 48. 64  Paula Schlier, Die letzte Weltennacht. Schauungen zur Apokalypse, Salzburg 1958.



Utopie und Apokalypse 

 179

Prätext angelehnt, die gesamte Offenbarung des Johannes in inhaltlich annähernd identischer Manier und in ähnlichem bildlichen Sprachduktus nochmals erzählt – allerdings um ein Vielfaches umfangreicher als in der neutestamentarischen Vorlage. Der Roman will expressis verbis nicht als Reflexion wahrgenommen werden; der Text unternimmt, wie es in der „Vorbemerkung“ formuliert ist, „keine Betrachtungen über die Apokalypse“, sondern versteht sich als „ein Nachblicken gleichsam und ein Nachhören dem, was der Heilige Geist durch Johannes der Kirche über ihre letzte Erwartung mitgeteilt hat“.65 Der ästhetische Gehalt des Romans ist weitgehend vernachlässigbar; er stellt ein ausgesprochen schwer zu rezipierendes Konvolut von repetitiven Wendungen bzw. eine ubiquitäre Aneinanderreihung von den biblischen Text imitierenden Bildern dar. Von Bedeutung hingegen sind – insbesondere hinsichtlich des diskursiven Zeithorizonts der unmittelbaren (nicht ausschließlich österreichischen) Nachkriegszeit, in den der Text eingebettet erscheint – die Rolle der Autorin und das inhaltliche Konzept vom Himmlischen Jerusalem, das als teleologischer Flucht- und Angelpunkt des Romans dient. Über diese Aspekte lässt sich ein Zusammenhang zwischen der streng nach dem Vorbild der neutestamentarischen Offenbarung konstruierten Neu-­ Erzählung der Apokalypse und der in realiter existierenden, von Ficker und seinen Zeitgenossen als latent bedrohlich wahrgenommenen Weltuntergangsstimmung herstellen, die bereits gegen Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges und insbesondere in der Nachkriegszeit während des Kalten Krieges, freilich unter verschiedenen Vorzeichen, angesichts des Zerstörungspotenzials der neuartigen Kernwaffen herrschte. Die literarische Apokalypse, die Ficker in den Brenner von 1948 inte­grierte,66 birgt eine Fluchtmöglichkeit vor der Kontingenz in sich, denn: „Die ganze als sinnlos empfundene Welt wird dem Untergang anheim­ gegeben und Sinn von einer neuen Welt erhofft“.67 Das Gefühl von Sinnlosigkeit erstreckt sich dabei zum einen auf die unmittelbar zurückliegende Erfahrung des Völkermordes, zum anderen auf einen zukünftigen durch einen Atomkrieg ausgelösten Kataklysmus, der, wenngleich er auch nur hypothetisch imaginiert wurde, nichtsdestotrotz jederzeit möglich erschien. Die Rezeption belegt, dass bereits Schliers Romanauszüge im Brenner von 1948 durchaus auf dieses Deutungsspektrum hin interpretiert wurden. Am 7.

65  Paula Schlier, „Vorbemerkung“, in: dies., Die letzte Weltennacht, 7–10, hier 7. 66  Paula Schlier, „Legende zur Apokalypse (3, 1–13). Gericht über Sardes“, in: Der Brenner, 17. Folge, 1948, 145–161; Paula Schlier, „Legende zur Apokalypse (19). Am Hochzeitstag des Lammes“, in: Der Brenner, 1948, 17. Folge, 211–227. 67  Vondung, Apokalypse in Deutschland, 110.

180 

 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

Februar 1948 schrieb Ficker an Lisl Eichholz-Schönfeld, dass der Verlag Herder „die Veröffentlichung ihres Hauptwerks ‚Legende zur Apokalypse‘ […] vor­ bereitet. Es wird dann endlich ihre Sendung im Rahmen ihrer Begabung klargestellt sein und ich kann, wann immer es sei, getroster das Zeitliche segnen. Gott sei Dank, daß dieses Wagnis geglückt ist! Es war und ist ein unerhörter Gnadenbeweis – vielmehr: ein unerhört erhörter, wenn ich so sagen darf. Denn hier haben die Abgründe einander gerufen. Das wissen Sie selbst noch aus Tagen, die der Erinnerung angehören – nicht wahr, liebe Freunde?!“68 Mit den „Abgründen aus den Tagen der Erinnerung“, auf die Ficker verwies, sind nicht nur die Schrecken des Weltkrieges, sondern auch jene des Holocaust bezeichnet, über welche Ficker, wie einige Briefstellen aus seiner Korrespondenz belegen, durchaus Bescheid gewusst hatte.69 Der Biologe und Kosmologe Hans André unternahm in einem Brief an Paula Schlier hingegen eine Deutung, die, expressis verbis „Alamogordo“ (jenen Ort im U.S.-Bundesstaat New Mexico, in dessen Nähe im Juli 1945 die erste Atombombe gezündet wurde) und indirekt „Robert Oppenheimer“ (den leitenden Physiker, der den Bau der ersten Kernwaffe verantwortete) benennend, auf den drohenden Untergang durch die Atombombe abzielte, und vermeinte, in dem Roman der Autorin ein spirituelles Desiderat zu erblicken.70 Dieser Bezug ist insofern bedeutend, als die Existenz der Atombombe im Grunde die Heilsgewissheit der christlichen Apokalypse unterwandert hat; es ist nicht mehr Gott, sondern der Mensch selbst, der nun in der Lage ist, den Weltuntergang zu verursachen und der im Grunde damit das Kommen des Himmlischen Jerusalem ad absurdum führt. Günther Anders hat in diesem Sinne 1956 in seinem Essay „Über die Bombe und die Wurzeln unserer Apokalypse-Blindheit“ für die Zeit nach 1945 folgerichtig konstatiert: „Die prometheisch seit langem ersehnte Omnipotenz ist, wenn auch anders als erhofft, wirklich unsere geworden. Da wir die Macht besitzen, einander das Ende zu

68  Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Lisl Eichholz-Schönfeld, 07.02.1948. BA, Kopiensammlung Korrespondenz Ludwig von Ficker. 69  Vgl. Brief von Ludwig von Ficker an Robert Michel, 29.09.1941. BA, Sammlung FIBA, Sign. 47/10–11; Brief von Theresia Bauer-Zangerle an Ludwig von Ficker, 10.11.1942. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Sign. 2/31–4. 70  Vgl. Brief von Hans André an Paula Schlier, 29.10.1958. Beilage zu einem undatierten Brief von Birgit Schowingen-Ficker an Paula Schlier. BA, Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Sign. 11/17–3: „An den wachsenden Gegenzeichen des Antichrist enthüllt es wie ein Blitz im Wettersturm der Zeiten uns durchtreffende Zeichensprache Gottes – nicht exegetisch, nicht theologisch, sondern im Geheimnis der inneren Wunde des Dichters empfangen, der den Einbruch der Welttragik in den Vollbringensweg der Liebe erleidet und den verschütteten Hunger zum Mysterium wieder aufgräbt“.



Utopie und Apokalypse 

 181

bereiten, sind wir die Herren der Apokalypse. Das Unendliche sind wir“.71 Unabhängig davon, ob die literarische Apokalypse einer eschatologischen oder säkularen Lesart unterzogen wird, auch für die im Brenner veröffentlichten Texte Paula Schliers gilt das Prinzip, dass „die Naherwartung des Weltendes und der kommenden Himmelsstadt in aller Regel mit sich abzeichnenden, tiefgreifenden gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen“72 einhergeht.

Apokalypse als Zukunftsutopie? Die utopisch-apokalyptischen Texte Paula Schliers stellen im Wesentlichen literarische Figurationen jener katholischen Utopie vom Dichter als Werkzeug der Offenbarung dar, die Ignaz Zangerle in seinem literaturtheoretischen Aufsatz „Die Bestimmung des Dichters“73 im Brenner aus dem Jahre 1946 dargelegt hatte. Zum Verhältnis von Immanenz und Transzendenz bemerkt Zangerle: „[Die Wirklichkeit] ist ein System von verborgenen Zeichen, die uns von Gott zur Entzifferung aufgegeben sind. Sie kann wie ein Buch gelesen werden, wenn der Mensch den Schlüssel dazu hat. Die Wirklichkeit ist ein göttliches Palimpsest“.74 In diesem Sinne verstanden und auf die Literatur umgelegt, erhält auch die Apokalypse wieder das Attribut ihrer ursprünglichen, im biblischen Sinne über die Ver­ nichtung der bestehenden Welt hinausgehenden, letztgültigen Heilsgewissheit, die sie im 20. Jahrhundert zu verlieren drohte bzw. angesichts des Selbstvernichtungs­potenzials der Kernwaffen verloren hatte. Die Funktion und die Aufgaben des Dichters „im neuen Äon“75 bestünden laut Zangerle nun darin, diese religiöse Dimension in der literarischen Produktion sichtbar werden zu lassen und als Mittler zwischen dem Immanenten und dem Transzendenten aufzutreten: „Man muß, um die besondere Bestimmung des Dichters deutlich werden zu lassen, ihn zunächst der Zeit enthoben sehen, ihn aber dann wieder der Zeit, seiner Zeit zurückgeben. Aber er ist nicht an sie als in bloße Gegenwart verloren. Sie ist ihm immer eines Kommenden trächtig. […] Der Dichter verhilft

71  Günther Anders, „Über die Bombe und die Wurzeln unserer Apokalypse-Blindheit“, in: ders., Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, München 1968, 234–324, hier 269. 72  Wolfgang Braungart, „Apokalypse und Utopie“, in: Gerhard R. Kaiser (Hrsg.), Poesie der Apoka­lypse, Würzburg 1991, 64–102, hier 66. 73  Ignaz Zangerle, „Die Bestimmung des Dichters“, in: Der Brenner, 16. Folge, 1946, 112–199. 74  Zangerle, „Die Bestimmung des Dichters“, 124. 75  Zangerle, „Die Bestimmung des Dichters“, 180–199.

182 

 Markus Ender und Ingrid Fürhapter

der Zukunft zur Wirklichkeit, indem er sie heute schon als möglich erscheinen l­ äßt“.76­ Auf Schliers Brenner-Texte bzw. ihren Roman übertragen, lässt eine solche Sichtweise zweierlei Schlüsse zu. Dichtung habe laut Zangerle mit Apokalypse, Eschatologie und Messianismus Hand in Hand zu gehen. Zwar kann das von Schlier präsentierte Himmlische Jerusalem als Utopie verstanden werden; ebenso lassen sich in ihren Texten jene strukturellen „Merkmale modernen Endzeitbewußtseins“77 festmachen, die Gunter E. Grimm mit Totalität, Entropie und Irreversibilität beschrieben hat.78 Zudem gilt auch für Schlier, dass die „Apokalypse […] den Verlauf der bisherigen Geschichte als Abstieg […] hin zu einem absoluten, nicht mehr zu unterbietenden Tiefpunkt [sieht]. An diesem Punkt erwartet sie den radikalen Umschlag in einen Zustand der Vollkommen­heit […]“.79­ Dieser „Umschlag“ funktioniert im Fall der Brenner-Texte allerdings nur über jenen Elitarismus, der der christlichen Apokalypse zu eigen ist. Überdies drängt sich bei Schliers Legende zur Apokalypse mit ihrer spezifischen Struktur der Doppel-Offenbarung (gemeint ist die Legitimation der ‚noch­maligen‘ schriftlichen Niederlegung der Apokalypse durch das Engelserlebnis Schliers) der Verdacht auf, dass es bei einer solch spezifischen Adaption der biblischen Apokalypse vor allem darum bestellt ist, den Akt des Offenbarens zu zelebrieren und weniger die Offenbarung selbst; es rückt damit „eher die Wahrheit des Offen­barens als die geoffenbarte Wahrheit“80 in den Vordergrund. Am schwersten wiegt allerdings die Vorstellung, dass angesichts einer nicht zu leugnenden moralischen Schuld, die die Deutschen und Österreicher aufgrund der Ver­brechen während des Krieges nach der Kapitulation im Mai 1945 zu gewärtigen hatten, der Verlauf der Geschichte wieder Gott überantwortet wird, denn Er­lösung stellt im Fall der Apokalypse „kein Ergebnis inner­weltlicher Ent­wicklungen [dar]. Sie ist vielmehr ein Einbruch der Transzendenz in die Geschichte, ein Einbruch, in dem die Geschichte selber zugrunde geht […]“.81

76  Zangerle, „Die Bestimmung des Dichters“, 181. 77  Gunter E. Grimm, „Einleitung“, in: ders., Werner Faulstich und Peter Kuon (Hrsg.), Apokalypse. Weltuntergangsvisionen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main 1986, 7–13, hier 9. 78  Grimm, „Einleitung“, 9–10. 79  Klaus Vondung, Wunschräume und Wunschzeiten. Einige wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Erinnerungen, 2008, http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/fallstudie/KVondung1.pdf (Stand: 18.02.2015). 80  Jacques Derrida, Apokalypse, Hrsg. Peter Engelmann, Übers. Michael Wetzel, Wien 1985, 73. 81  Gershom Scholem, „Zum Verständnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum“, in: ders., Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, Frankfurt am Main 1980, 121–167, hier 133.



Utopie und Apokalypse 

 183

Angesichts der hier skizzierten Entwicklungslinien muss zumindest fraglich erscheinen, ob die von Ficker seit der ersten Brenner-Nummer in einer Vielzahl von Beiträgen (von denen hier nur einige wenige genannt werden konnten) angestrengte und fast viereinhalb Jahrzehnte dauernde Suche nach dem ‚Menschentum‘ befriedigende Ergebnisse zeitigen konnte. Nach zwei blutigen Weltkriegen und vor allem nach Auschwitz kann sich eine Form der Weltdeutung mittels religiös motivierter apokalyptischer Zukunftsutopien, wie sie in Paula Schliers Literatur, die von Ficker immer mit besonderem Vorzug behandelt wurde, entworfen werden, kaum vom Vorwurf des Eskapismus befreien.

Sami Sjöberg

Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde German-Jewish Visions of the Future The goal was, the goal is: to live in Paradise. – Kurt Hiller

“Its main characteristic is activism. The relentless activism [of expressionism that] approaches the issues of human coexistence, socialism, pacifism and materialism”.1 Fritz Herzog listed these negatively conceived attributes in his national socialist survey Die Kunstzeitschriften der Nachkriegszeit (Art Magazines of the Post-War Period, 1940), where the Jewish participation in the avant-garde is made explicit through the identification of ethnic origin. Herzog mentions that expressionism attacked religion as well, by which he refers solely to Christianity while making no reference to Judaism. Beyond the far right politics represented by Herzog, several critics have concluded that German expressionism was first and foremost a secular enterprise, in which case the messianic elements prominent in the work of the expressionists should be regarded as merely rhetorical.2 However, such a generalisation is apocryphal and unfruitful, because the literary work of a number of writers suggests otherwise. Hence, I will propose another reading of these avant-garde texts by focusing on authors originating from the German-Jewish sphere of the early 20th Century. One of the most well-known of such authors was the Jewish poet and playwright Ernst Toller (1893–1939). His account of the fervent years of the 1920s and 1930s epitomises the German Zeitgeist: “Everywhere the same lunatic belief that a man, a leader, […] a Messiah, will suddenly appear and work a miracle; will suddenly arise and take upon his shoulders all responsibility for the future; will master life, banish fear, abolish misery, create new people, a new kingdom of splendour”.3 Regardless of Toller’s pejorative tone, he inadvertently describes the

1  Fritz Herzog, Die Kunstzeitschriften der Nachkriegszeit, Berlin 1940, 16. I wish to thank Sascha Bru for bringing this study to my attention. All translations are by the author of the article unless otherwise stated. 2  See, for example: Thomas Anz and Michael Stark, Die Modernität des Expressionismus, Stuttgart 1994; Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19, Chicago and London 1990. 3  Ernst Toller, I Was a German: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, trans. Edward Crankshaw, Saint Paul 1934, 297.

186 

 Sami Sjöberg

basic tenets of messianism. The sophistication of messianic tendencies among young German-Jewish authors, and their understanding of those tendencies, is evident in Toller’s statement. In fact, he outlines the key dogmatic elements derived from different variants of Jewish messianism: firstly, the belief in the Messiah who is yet to come. Judaism does not recognise Jesus as the Messiah, but rather understands the Messiah as a promise that is to be fulfilled.4 The anticipation of the Messiah entails a messianic hope, which is evident in the expressionist author Kurt Hiller’s (1885–1972) statement that “we should wait. Mute dogs. Passive. Until the Messiah comes”.5 Secondly, Toller mentions that this Messiah will redeem the Jews and bring about redemption. Indeed, in Jewish thought redemption signifies a messianic age or realm distinct from current reality.6 Thirdly, by talking about “a” Messiah, Toller hints at the possibility of this Messiah being a personal one. The idea of the Messiah as hidden personal potential – “messianic potential”, conceptually speaking – derives from the 13th Century, but grew unattractive during the 19th Century due to the Enlightenment (Haskalah) and the emergence of socialism in Jewish communities.7 In its social form, messianism was woven into the fabric of early 20th Century Jewish thought, exemplified by figures such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Franz Rosenzweig.8 The intellectual current they were part of paralleled the simultaneous but more radical aesthetic movements of the time. Therefore, the pressing question is: what did the avant-garde add to the equation? In a nutshell, the avant-garde endeavoured to make real the – rather abstract – conception of a better world through the unification of art and life. This goal comprised one of the avant-garde’s key utopias. Jewish artists, such as those discussed below, adopted it and tended to interpret it in relation to their own cultural background. Messianism in expressionism was not merely rhetorical, because expressionism hoped for a better future and strove for an inclusive society, world brother­

4  See, for example: Lev Gillet, Communion in the Messiah: Studies in the Relationship between Judaism and Christianity, Cambridge 2002, here especially 102–104. 5  Kurt Hiller, “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus”, in: Das Ziel. Jahrbücher für geistige Politik, 3, 1919, 195–217. 6  Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, London 1992, 64–66. 7  See: Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe, New York and London 1994, here especially 23–46. 8  This is well documented, see: Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity, Detroit 1991; Ivan Boldyrev, Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism, London 2014. In Bloch’s view, the infusion of messianism was intended to redeem the socialist ideal from Marxism’s unidimensional focus on economics.



Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde 

 187

hood and peace. In cases like Hiller’s eschatological activism, such hope was interpreted through what was already familiar – the Jewish tradition. This tradition also included the desire for “an other, a new world”, which one poet fervently called “the world of my dreams!”9 Accordingly the dreamed world to come is messianic, whereas the current world is fragmented and needs to be mended. This in turn suggests that individual Jewish expressionists regarded their mission as messianic. As Toller outlines, the artist who manages to unify art and life by claiming the role of the Messiah might be able to bring about a messianic future. This is not to say that the Messiah functioned merely as an instructive frame of reference or as a “role model” for the artist, but rather indicated personal potential in a more religious and metaphysical sense. The adoption of the role of the Messiah, who would not be actualised until the moment of redemption, entails fundamental changes regarding the basis of the ego. This investigation into the ontology and epistemology of the self by means of art was central in the work of Jakob van Hoddis (Hans Davidsohn, 1887–1942). Van Hoddis has been canonised as one of the most prominent figures of early expressionism, and his most renowned poem, “Weltende” (The End of the World, 1911), opens Kurt Pinthus’ famed anthology of expressionist poetry, Mensc­hheitsdämmerung (The Dawn of Humanity, 1919). Furthermore, van Hoddis was a founder of Der Neue Club, a group of expressionist artists who launched Das Neopathetische Cabaret (Neopathetic Cabaret), one of the most important expressionist literary soirées in Berlin. The work of van Hoddis contains both denominational and messianic elements, although in fragmentary forms. His vision of the world mirrors the fragmentation of the self, which he sought to overcome by means of poetry and messianism. His messianic leaning was linked with an endeavour to unify art and life, exemplified by what he termed Selbstpoetik – a sort of poetics of the self which includes varied philosophical and religious facets. Van Hoddis is exemplary in illustrating how messianism was understood in expressionism and how it became fused with it. Expressionism of this nature highlighted the individual subject’s “inner life”.

9  Jakob van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, ed. Regina Nörtemann, Zürich 1987, 76.

188 

 Sami Sjöberg

Messianism in Germany at the Turn of the Century I will return to van Hoddis and his poetics further on, but first it is necessary to map briefly the Jewish messianism of the early 20th Century in Germany. As already noted, the hope for a Messiah had developed into a more social and ideological kind of messianism: redemption was to follow thorough societal renewal. This is to say that in the late 19th Century, messianism was not only a religious but also a political issue. In the wake of 19th-Century leftism and anarchism, messianism acquired more than a mere structural affinity with revolutionary thought. Indeed, Jewish spiritualism informed the revolutionary ethos and was regarded as a continuation of messianic imagination.10 After all, all utopian ideals – especially those of the avant-garde – were aimed at a better future whether a hearkening back to another age or place, or something entirely new.11 The zealous optimism regarding the future was sarcastically portrayed by the expressionist writer Alfred Lichtenstein (1889–1914) in his poem “Der Traurige” (The Sad Man, 1911): Today I have bigger things in mind – Ah, I shall find out the meaning of life [Sinn des Daseins]. And in the evening I shall do some roller-skating Or maybe go to a Jewish Temple [Judentempel].12

The tragicomic (or grotesque) hero of the poem sets out to answer the mysteries of existence, while already contemplating what to do afterwards, implying that such mysteries are facile in character. Alternatively, one can interpret that the contemplation does not come to a conclusion but rather continues during the athletic exercise or while attending a service at a local synagogue. Indeed, Lichtenstein’s poem exhibits a contemplative undercurrent paralleling the humorous details. Its blunt reference to roller-skating and attending a religious service in the same breath, however, is defiant. Accordingly, Jewish messianism is anarchic in character. The Messiah is a transgressive figure who violates religious laws and morals. For instance, even

10  Löwy, Redemption and Utopia, 127–129. 11  These varied stances suggest that in Jewish thought, utopia and messianism cannot be strictly distinct. The idea of redemption, even in a quasi-religious form, exists in both the socio-political utopias and romanticist hopes for a messianic future. See: Moshe Idel, “Multiple Forms of Redemption in Kabbalah and Hasidism”, in: Jewish Quarterly Review, 101, 2011, no. 1, 27–70. 12  Alfred Lichtenstein, Gesammelte Gedichte, ed. Klaus Kanzog, Zürich 1962, 22.



Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde 

 189

the heretical acts of the self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), such as his conversion to Islam or his marriage to a Torah scroll, were regarded as proof of his messianic status. Such biographies of these early paragons were suitable for the avant-gardists, who often transgressed mainstream aesthetic preferences and bourgeois complacency for the sake of distinguishing themselves from the past. This transgression was manifested in literature as the destruction of form and syntax, and ultimately resulted in new forms, such as montage. In the case of Jewish expressionism, a messianic element was clearly at work in the literary uprooting of convention. The commonplaceness of this somewhat distinctive approach to aesthetics was explicit particularly in the negative responses it evoked. The entanglement between messianism and aesthetics was reflected early on by the Czech-Jewish writer Camill Hoffmann (1878–1944), who stated that expressionism was tainted with “all of this Judeo-Christian didacticism, which is evaporating into ever more shadowy abstractions”.13 Hoffmann explains how expressionist literature was being read at the time. He seems to worry that the revolutionary tendencies of the avant-garde were aligned with a messianism that merely provided unhelpful or counter-productive abstractions. Hoffmann’s argument states that the inclusion of the Jewish and to some extent Christian tradition or religious attitudes – including messianism – deluded authors into choosing not to revolt.14 Obviously, his view at the time differed radically from what Herzog claimed some twenty years later. The expressionists adopted the “shadowy abstractions” for a reason. In order to succeed, revolution, or any thorough renewal for that matter, cannot adopt the means of the current order. Hence the expressionists often deliberately chose anti-rational or, at least, alternative modes of thought, such as mysticism. In the case of Jewish writers, such elements were readily available in the Jewish tradition, for instance in kabbalistic and Hasidic writings. One of the most important things to note here is that in the Jewish sphere of the avant-garde, the coexistence of such varied elements signifies the entanglement between tradition and the modern.15 In this sense, Jews in the avant-garde

13  Trans. by and quoted in: Lisa Marie Anderson, “Redemption and Aesthetic Imagination: The Messianism of German Expressionism”, in: Wayne Cristaudo and Wendy Baker (eds), Messian­ ism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th Century German Thought, Hindmarsh 2006, 127–138, here 137. 14  Jewish expressionists also discussed Christian themes, for instance in Walter Hasenclever’s (1890–1940) provocative poem “Christus” (1913), which describes a situation where people are disillusioned by Jesus not arriving to redeem them. 15  A secular instance was the Kultur-Lige (Yiddish Culture League) in Kiev, established in 1919.

190 

 Sami Sjöberg

were explicitly utilising elements of tradition in their utopian endeavours. It is not merely another case of the avant-garde’s various self-definitions in terms of alignment against the immediately preceding tradition, but a more fundamental actualisation of tradition in the very making of the modern. One should note that radical aesthetics should not be straightforwardly equated with progressive political (or religious) values, or established aesthetics with conservative values.16 Indeed, the individual cases of Jews involved in the avant-garde suggest a more varied repertoire of means when connecting politics with aesthetics. A representative case is that of the expressionist author Albert Ehrenstein (1886–1950). In his thinking, the modern revolutionary utopia is enmeshed with nostalgia for a pre-capitalist past. Even though the idea of such a past was contemporary, the endeavour to actualise the past in the present equates to a combination of tradition and the modern. There is a suppressed religious dimension to Ehrenstein’s work. Reflecting on expressionism, he explained that the large role played by Jews was “due to the religious tradition of the Word”, while emphasising the ethical component of this Jewish contribution.17 The same is true for many of the Jewish artists in the avant-garde such as Lichtenstein and Paul Adler (1878–1946).18 However, it is impossible to know unequivocally what these artists believed in and what redemption meant to them. Someone like Toller believed wholeheartedly in a socialist utopia, which he thought he had accomplished when governing the short-lived Bavarian Socialist Republic following the German revolution. In addition, he was a messianic thinker, as suggested by his play Die Wandlung (Transfiguration, 1919). Erich Mühsam (1878–1934), an anarchist and poet, also believed in revolution and apocalypse – the messianic future thus remained important to him in the form of political messianism combined with radical utopian thought.19 The reverse is represented by Franz Werfel (1890–1945), who was devotedly religious and held

Artists such as El’ Lisitskii and Isaac Ben Ryback pursued a Jewish form of modernity while adopting imagery from Jewish folk tradition. See: Ruth Apter-Gabriel (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912–1928, Jerusalem 1987. In the case of expressionism, the application of traditional elements was not as straightforwardly secular. 16  Sascha Bru, “The Phantom League: The Centennial Debate on the Avant-Garde and Politics”, in: Sascha Bru and Gunter Martens (eds), Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde (1906–1940), Amsterdam 2006, 9–34. 17  Steven Beller, “Albert Ehrenstein”, in: Glenda Abramson (ed.), Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture, London 2004, 230–231, here 231. 18  See: Paul Adler, Elohim, Dresden 1914. 19  See: Richard David Sonn, Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France, University Park 2010, 149.



Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde 

 191

on to the idea of universal redemption, which for him was more crucial than any political revolution.20 Located between these tendencies, van Hoddis exemplifies the making of the modern through the appropriation of traditional elements. As a poet, there was perhaps no better way of realising this process than to create a pastiche of a traditional religious text and recontextualise it in the post-romanticist milieu of pre-war Central Europe. In his early poem “Sprichwörtliches” (Proverbial, 1905– 1906), van Hoddis utilises Talmudic elements: Who is big? He who is only himself. Who is good? He who views life happily. Who is wise? He who learns from everyone. Who is honourable? He who respects people.21

The last two lines of the poem derive from the Talmud. Nevertheless, already in the second verse, van Hoddis reveals an attitude that was elementary in the Neo-Pathetic Cabaret. In this context Hiller states that pathos does not arouse sadness but rather gives birth to a “universal joy, a Pan-like laughter”.22 This is to say that van Hoddis combines the grave advice of the ancient text with an avant-gardist frivolity, changing the overall mood by virtue of this recuperation. Indeed, the recontextualisation of traditional elements was rather common in expressionism throughout its lifespan.

From Kabbalism to Selbstpoetik In this spectrum of individual beliefs, the case of van Hoddis is one of the most revealing. He co-founded the Neo-Pathetic Cabaret in 1910, which was something of an institution among the Berlin expressionists – attracting the attention of authors such as Lichtenstein and Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945). One of the people frequenting the soirées was the German-Jewish philosopher of religion Oskar Goldberg (1885–1953). According to several accounts, a “Jewish sect” had

20  Lore Barbara Foltin, Franz Werfel, 1890–1945, Pittsburgh 1961, 38. 21  Van Hoddis Dichtungen und Briefe, 215. 22  Kurt Hiller, “Das Cabaret und die Gehirne Salut. Rede zur Eröffnung des Neopathetischen Cabarets”, in: Der Sturm, 1, 1910, no. 44, 351. Hiller overturns the common connotations of pathos, such as pity or sympathy. A similar attitude is evident in the title of van Hoddis’ tragicomic poem “Visionarr” (1911), which is a play on the words “Visionär” (visionary) and “Narr” (a fool).

192 

 Sami Sjöberg

congregated around him, including the key figures of the Cabaret: van Hoddis, Hiller, Georg Heym (1887–1912) and Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946).23 Goldberg’s exact role in the Cabaret is unknown, but Gershom Scholem characterised him as the “quintessential Jew” amongst the expressionistic authors and painters who frequented the Berlin cafés.24 Goldberg provided a modern and idiosyncratic appropriation of the Kabbalah. He had published in 1908 Die fünf Bücher Mosis: Ein Zahlengebäude (The Five Books of Moses: A Structure of Numbers), a volume that addressed the Torah from a kabbalistic numerological perspective with the aim of proving the existence of God.25 The subtitle of the book refers to the numerical significance of Hebrew letters and the reciprocal exchange of passages according to their numerical value. Originally, this kabbalistic method supposedly revealed deeper “latent truths” in the text. Goldberg’s book is, in fact, composed according to the teachings of the so-called medieval rational Kabbalah, which utilised ars combinatoria.26 Indeed, his approach is one of the modern appropriations of the religious tradition focused on the word, as mentioned by Ehrenstein. One should also note that Goldberg’s project is messianic in its attempt to name God by means of textual manipulation. Van Hoddis already knew Goldberg from their school-days.27 The Goldberg-link reveals that van Hoddis was familiar with kabbalistic mysticism and messianism (at least with the Goldbergian version) well before the 1911 publication of “Weltende”. Moreover, he was raised in a religious Jewish family and stated that he would “always have faith in the Jewish people”.28 He was, however, quick to absorb and embrace new cultural and religious influences. This became evident through his sudden conversion to Catholicism in the autumn of 1912. However, only some months later he realised that “my Jewishness breaks through

23  Manfred Voigts, “Oskar Goldberg und Thomas Mann. Die Revision eines Fehlurteils”, in: Hans Otto Horch et al. (eds), Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis 1933/1938, Berlin 1993, 363–379; Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, Jugenderinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main 1994, 182. 24  Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, 182. For a further discussion of Goldberg’s involvement in the Neue Club, see: Manfred Voigts, “Die Dichter des Neuen Clubs”, in: Daniel Hoffmann (ed.), Handbuch zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Paderborn 2002, 103–130. 25  The title also refers to the construction of the world based on numbers and numerology. 26  Its kabbalistic version is known as gematria, a system based on the numerical value of letters in Hebrew, which does not use distinct numerical symbols. It explains a word or group of words according to the numerical value of the letters, or by substituting other letters of the alphabet for them in accordance with a set of rules. 27  Helmut Hornbogen, Jakob van Hoddis. Die Odyssee eines Verschollenen, Munich 1986, 117. 28  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 234.



Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde 

 193

again. Catholicism was just an adventure”.29 In the light of his letters, Catholicism was a way to vent his antagonism towards German Protestants and the fairly recent appropriations of Jewish elements by German Romanticists.30 Illustrating this, in 1913 van Hoddis declared that he would battle “intellectual anti-Semitism” and its logos theory, by which he meant the philosophical rationalism promoted by, among others, Fichte, Hegel, Herder and Schleiermacher.31 In addition, he wanted to contest Hofmannsthal’s views of the Enlightenment and Jewish textual corpus, such as the Kabbalah and Talmud. By this, van Hoddis referred to the Kabbalah fashioned by German Romanticism, which has been described as “confused” due to its lack of religious content.32 For their part, the Romanticists had a critical attitude towards language, regarding it as arbitrary and insufficient for reflecting experience. Similarly, a thoroughly anti-linguistic attitude is incorporated into van Hoddis’ poetics of the self. As a poet, van Hoddis was more than aware of the problematics of language, and became sceptical of language in general. It is plausible that Goldberg’s experimental approach to language led van Hoddis to reflect on its material and technical aspects. The “hidden traces” of the name of God sought by Goldberg were contained in the Torah, but lay behind the immediate and conventional meaning of the text. However, in the case of van Hoddis, there seems to be no direct link with kabbalistic techniques. Instead of methods, he is more likely to have adopted from the Kabbalah a certain attitude towards language. Van Hoddis, being a poet, took this approach to language further by connecting the expressionist focus on the individual subject with epistemological self-reflection: language is fundamental in how one grasps oneself. For him, language ultimately discloses the limits of the self: “The word as a henchman. Or: language is the bureaucracy of the soul. Just as one needs to think in words, one needs to

29  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 235. 30  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 232. 31  For a further discussion, see: Peter G.J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, Cambridge 1988, 264–266. 32  Andreas Kilcher refers to the Romanticist conception of the Kabbalah rather pejoratively as a false or confused Kabbalah (“unechte Kabbala”, “verwirrte Kabbala”): Die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala als ästhetisches Paradigma. Die Konstruktion einer ästhetischen Kabbala seit der Frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart 1998, 348–349. In addition to Friedrich Schlegel, both Friedrich Schelling and Franz Molitor were key figures in the incorporation of the Kabbalah into German philology and idealistic philosophy. See: Giulio Busi, “Beyond the Burden of Idealism: For a New Appreciation of the Visual Lore in the Kabbalah”, in: Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds), Kabbalah and Modernity: Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, Leiden and Boston 2010, 29–46.

194 

 Sami Sjöberg

write poetry with words. The power of thought has also a meaning for the poet. The joy of oneself […] is a poetic experience. To desire is a poetics of the self [Selbstpoetik]”.33 Van Hoddis realised early on that the poet must negotiate between experiences and their expression. In other words, he or she needs to reflect on the linguistic repertoire of his or her chosen language. This process is internalised, and in van Hoddis’ view delimiting: the bureaucracy of the soul denotes conceptual language. By “power of thought”, van Hoddis refers to non-linguistic experiences, which is to say that poetic experiences avoid language. This, furthermore, suggests that poetry occurs in the process of its making rather than in the eventual outcome. Hence he refers to a desire that is the basis of a poetics of the self. The desire is intimate and of an inner kind, but the object of it is something other than what the poet is able to fathom and express in words. Indeed, due to the failure of words, van Hoddis turns to formulations that are familiar from mysticism where language gains more leeway in religious and poetic discussions. For him, the self remains at least partially beyond the grasp of language. Accordingly, “we are in every moment something else, always incomprehensible [Unbegreifliches]. We feel ourselves without defining ourselves. There is no higher existence [Dasein] than the incomprehensible”.34 Van Hoddis adopts Rimbaud’s famous verse “je est un autre” (I is an other) and posits unintelligibility as a character of Dasein (the mode of being of human beings). It is by virtue of this statement that van Hoddis establishes the possibility of a personal Messiah, which is inner but yet unattainable. That side of being or of Dasein, which eludes definitions, undermines the rationalistic logos theory. This means that van Hoddis applied messianism also in an instrumental sense to subvert rationalism. For the poet, it seems, language and concepts are unnecessary due to the utter incomprehensibility of both existence and the self. These musings recall the vague abstractions mentioned by Hoffmann, but are far from being reactionary. To avoid such murky characterisations, van Hoddis described the modern fragmentation of the self by employing philosophical rhetoric. He clarified the relation of thought to the self by formulating that: Cogito ergo sum: Thinking is no evidence for the I, but rather the I is a postulate of thought. I am another, that who I am (Ur-I) Another I, that which I think of (I-idea)

33  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 66. 34  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 67.



Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde 

 195

Or: The Ur-I = postulate of thought The I-idea = object of thought35

Van Hoddis addresses the cogito problem by unpeeling the various layers of the self. In the Cartesian model, the “I” is based on the ego’s ability to self-reflect. However, van Hoddis states that this kind of self is only an ideal, and an object of thought. Furthermore, it is this self, the I-idea, that is the basis of poetics.36 In a very Rimbaudian fashion, van Hoddis formulates that the “true” self is a postulate resulting from the possibility of thought. As such, the “Ur-I”, as he calls it, remains beyond the sphere of thinking. This is what he referred to by the incomprehensibility of being: in van Hoddis’ view, the self cannot comprehend itself completely and be a wholly rational form of existence. What we end up with, rather, is dubito ergo sum – a doubtful attitude towards the self as a whole. Here we return to Toller’s characterisation of messianism. As Dasein is incapable of total self-reflection, the possibility for a Messiah of a personal kind opens. The incomprehensible within the self is a kind of unknown reservoir for the personal Messiah and for its eventual actualisation. Thus the incomprehensible is a sort of u-topos – an abstract no-place – to which the messianic potential is projected. All in all, van Hoddis’ Selbstpoetik enables an inner utopia of sorts, which can become universal via the actualisation of the Messiah.37

The End of the World as a Beginning In light of the internalised and instrumental messianism discussed above, as well as the ideas regarding the self and the character of poetry, van Hoddis’ most renowned poem evokes an impression of an alternative end. The theme was “in the air” at the time, as shown by Lasker-Schüler’s 1902 poem (also entitled) “Weltende”, Heym’s “Untergang” (Apocalypse, 1911) as well as Lichtenstein’s “Überfall” (Invasion, 1911) and “Die Dämmerung” (The Twilight, 1911).38 On first appearance, van Hoddis’ “Weltende” seems to paraphrase a news­ paper article reporting the end of the world:

35  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 65. 36  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 66. 37  The actual praxis of this actualisation is seldom described in detail even in the more religious contexts, and should be regarded as a facet of the promise upon which messianism is based. 38  When the latter of Lichtenstein’s poems was published in Die Aktion in 1913, the editor, Franz Pfemfert, noted that the author should have read van Hoddis’ “Weltende” and that van Hoddis was the poet who established the style. Paul Raabe (ed.), Die Aktion, Darmstadt 1961, 921.

196 

 Sami Sjöberg

The hat flies off the bourgeois’ pointed head. There is a sound that shrieks through the air. Tiles tumble from rooftops and shatter in two. And on the coasts, we read, the tide is rising. The storm has come, the wild seas lurch ashore To crush the bulging dams. Most people have colds, their noses running. Trains plunge off the bridges.39

Some obvious features of the poem immediately draw one’s attention, such as the slowly emerging disaster which leaves the petty bourgeoisie unprotected. However, “Weltende” is not just an anti-bourgeois poem executed with grotesque symbols, nor does it merely utilise the topos of the end of the world ironically. These are valid readings if one does not take van Hoddis’ messianism into account; but when one does, it changes the overall mood of the poem. It is true that the imagery of the technical world and the structural fragmentariness of the verses refer to the disappearance of a “human voice”, but who is depicting the situation? No explicit “I” is present, but rather an impersonal voice that is devoid of individuality and expressiveness – the very thing expressionism supposedly required. The impersonal voice suggests that the interlocutor has no personal relation to the events taking place, and that no conspicuous cogito or “intelligent presence” is reacting to them. This detached address, which appears to take place without intending to have an impact, suggests the relative autonomy and automatism of language. The individual lines appear as almost randomly joined elements, resulting from an exercise in combinatorics (what would later become dada poems using newspaper cuttings à la Tzara). However, the combination is not kabbalistic but rather reflects messianism, which, in turn, raises the question of what takes place after the events described in the poem. To support this alternative reading, one should consult other fragments penned by van Hoddis. Accounting for his influences, which are also literary ones, he said that “the books of the Jews, especially the Old Testament, give me the right faith in a living God”.40 Further supporting this view, certain connecting passages read as an epilogue to “Weltende”, such as “the masses are underway in search of God” and “every Heaven gapes like an abyss [Abgrund]”.41 Heaven,

39  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 15. 40  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 233. 41  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 71, 123.



Redemption, Utopia and the Avant-Garde 

 197

which refers to messianic paradise, is abyss-like in its current nonexistence: it is an “abyssal” utopia that cannot be described. However, people (the impersonal masses) want to approach this abyss in order to find God and to “realise” the utopia in the form of a messianic realm. By way of this quest, a new community is established, because the people are united, sharing a common goal and aspiration. Indeed, as Toller mentioned, expressionists anticipated a messianic figure who would create a new community and a grand, new realm. Given these fragmentary passages, it seems that even though “Weltende” indeed depicts the end of the world as we know it, the mood is not bleak and nostalgic but rather hopeful. The current imperfect world will recede by the actualisation of messianic hope: the arrival of the Messiah. Hence, the apocalypse parallels the ongoing wait for redemption. The world to come is abyss-like because it is inconceivable before its arrival, and precisely because the messianic age exceeds the constraints of our current existence and comprehension. In relation to van Hoddis’ Selbstpoetik, this abyss-like future world can also be understood in relation to the Ur-I, that is, to the incomprehensible Dasein. It is a departure from the logos theory in favour of messianism. Furthermore, it signals that the incomprehensible is still beyond our knowledge and comprehension. As noted, van Hoddis posits incomprehensibility within himself, which invites parallels to be drawn between the fragmentation of the self and the surrounding world. Furthermore, through a messianic lens, this can be read as hoping for a completion of both the self and the world. What role did art play in this? Here one needs to recall what Toller’s text suggests concerning the Messiah who would unify art and life. For van Hoddis, the highest form of existence is crystallised in the incomprehensibility of Dasein, and this form remains beyond the scope of poetry. How can such incomprehensibility of the self be unified with art? It seems that for van Hoddis, poetry is capable of probing the incomprehensible: not by saying something about it, but rather by framing it, in relation to language, as that which cannot be said. This further suggests that the idea of Selbstpoetik is the creation of the “reality of life” (“Lebenswirklichkeit”) through signs, symbols and images.42 By the same token, it is the language of poetry and not the language of rationalism that potentially expands the limits of the postulated self, the I-idea, towards the incomprehensible (Ur-I). In this somewhat solipsistic sense, poetry is the means to create individual realities. Hence, van Hoddis concludes that ideally “the relationship between art and life is restored. Because artwork by artwork, life takes after poetry and poetry

42  See: Carola Hilmes, Das inventarische und das inventorische Ich. Grenzfälle des Autobio­ graphischen, Heidelberg 2000.

198 

 Sami Sjöberg

after life. Just as a torch kindling torch”.43 Accordingly, the flames of poetry and life may burn as one, so to speak, and may merge into one reality where their roots remain distinct. Hereby poetry is able to venture beyond the rational and “investigate” the incomprehensible, the private utopia. As van Hoddis formulated, poetry deals with language, but poetics, which instructs the arrangement of words, derives from the desire for fulfilment (of the self). In line with messianic thought, van Hoddis’ incomprehensible Ur-I is substantial, because it maintains the possibility of the messianic potential within, and hence enables the ideal world to come into being. However, in van Hoddis’ utopian thinking, messianism provides only potentialities, not epistemological or ontological actualities. Hence, the potential outcome of redemption should likewise be regarded as incomprehensible in the present moment but potentially comprehensible in the future.

Coda Some of the avant-gardists of Jewish origin were religious while exhibiting anarchist and messianic tendencies. The case of van Hoddis suggests a similar religious motivation, which combines traditional messianic thought with modern anti-rationalism and language scepticism. His poetics of the self is based on the desire for fulfilment that emphasises the incompleteness of the present self. By terming the presence of desire as “poetics”, he makes it clear that the postulated self is organised like language and that a part of the self remains utterly beyond language’s grasp. Moreover, van Hoddis suggests that the overcoming of language is linked with the overcoming of the current limitations of the self, and, eventually, the utopian unification of art and life. This in turn suggests that the creation of the reality of life by means of expressions may eventually lead to unification and the actualisation of the Messiah. Van Hoddis’ fragmentary texts imply that the presently unattainable aspect of the self can be regarded as a possible inner Messiah. Such a belief appears anachronistic in the modern age, but it is an instance of how remainders of the Jewish tradition were utilised in expressionism by artists of Jewish origin. Indeed, the conditions for the advent of a future world are exhibited and performed by the texts themselves, which evoke the distortion and fragmentariness of the present. These conditions include the incomplete present self that is located in an unfinished world.44

43  Van Hoddis, Dichtungen und Briefe, 67. 44  This article is a part of the project “Jewish Writers in West European Avant-Gardes 1908– 1939” (SA 2744994), funded by the Academy of Finland.

Natalia Baschmakoff

From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” Perceptual Utopias in the Russian Avant-Garde (1910s–1960s) Le mélange de la couleur locale d’un objet avec les diverses lumières colorées qui y affluent (lumière solaire, normales irradiations de complémentaires et reflets accidentels), mélange qui constitue la teinte sous laquelle nous percevons cet objet, est un mélange optique. – Félix Fénéon: La Peinture optique: Paul Signac (1890).  And so, light is continuous. But it is not the optical environments, filled with light and transmitting light to us, that are continuous. They are granular, they consist of some sort of extremely fine dust, and they themselves contain another dust, so fine that no microscope can detect it, yet nevertheless consisting of separate granules, separate particles of matter. – Pavel Florenskii: Celestial Signs (1919).

In this article I focus on the historical Russian avant-garde and the cross-fertilisation of ideas that gave way to an epoch of new artistic perceptions of the physical world. I try to follow the meandering and sometimes vanishing thread within the emergence of a rebellious aesthetic from the philosophical and eclectic mélange of artists’ visions and efforts to adopt a novel scientific approach to art. My essay is, then, an attempt to reconstruct an historic narrative of how perceptual utopias evolved in the verbal and visual practices of the Russian avant-garde in the period from the 1910s to the 1960s.

Neo-Romantic Roots of Russian Avant-Garde Utopianism In Late Imperial Russia modernist art emerged in an atmosphere shaped by evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, and mystical beliefs associated with “panpsychism”, a neo-romantic conception of a cosmos imbued with consciousness. Avant-garde artists imagined themselves as a new species of human beings, who altered means of perception and expanded consciousness to communicate

200 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

a “panpsychic” spiritual meaning.1 One attempt to penetrate the invisible reality was manifest by a growing fascination with the supernatural. Julia Mannherz, who has studied Russian occultism in the context of the history of science, concludes that early 20th-Century occultism in Russia was definitely a modern phenomenon: it brought up new concepts about the self and stressed the existence of a powerful and unexplored hidden mental realm.2 In an essay about death, Freud argued that modern man was essentially unable to believe in his own death.3 The Russian avant-garde painter and neurophysiologist Nikolai Kul’bin wrote in 1910: “Death means inactivity of life, not its absence. There is no nothingness”.4 Immediate and personal encounters with the supernatural served as an extension of life and could at times give meaning to the pre- and post-mortem dimension of human existence.5 Apart from Freud, Darwin also fed artists’ imagination and his theory was received in Russia with enthusiasm.6 Thanks to Darwin, a human brain was understood as evolving physically, and this realisation opened up new horizons for expanding the understanding of perceptible reality. Gustav Fechner proclaimed that experimental psychology provided an inductive aesthetics based on principles that could be verified by the experimental method. Fechner’s psychophysical law, which connected the physical intensity of a stimulus with the psychological threshold of perception, fascinated artists. Fechner found the beauty of an object particularly important, because it caused “immediate pleasure”, which, in turn, stimulated the mind and helped man to expand, evolve, and transform his consciousness.7 Fechner’s concept profoundly affected both Kandinskii’s and Malevich’s spiritual art and led the viewer through the contemplation of pure colour and form toward sublime aesthetic satisfaction.8

1  Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual, Princeton, N.J. 2002, 107. 2  Julia Mannherz, Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia, DeKalb, IL 2012, 106–108. 3  Mannherz, Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia, 41. 4  Nikolai Kul’bin, “Svobodnoe iskusstvo kak osnova shizni”, in: Vladimir Markov (ed.) Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov / Die Manifeste und Programmschriften der russischen Futuristen, Munich 1967, 15. 5  Mannherz, Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia, 192; Natalia Baschmakoff, “Razrezhennost’ i nedovoploshchennost’ materii v russkom avangarde (Khlebnikov – Guro – Chekrygin)”, in: Russian Literature, 71, 2012, no. 3–4, 271–295, here 273–280. 6  Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, 95. 7  Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, 96–97. 8  Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, 97–98.



From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” 

 201

Fig. 21: Aleksandr Antonov, Mogaska (1909). Cover design by Mikhail Matyushin. National Library of Finland, the Slavonic Collection, Helsinki.

202 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

The modernists’ neo-romantic quest for a holistic aesthetic space drew from the contemporary religious-philosophers’ search for the “positive all-unity” (polozhitel’noe vseedinstvo), a concept created by Vladimir Solov’ёv (1853–1900). Solov’ёv was the leading philosopher of the Russian spiritual renaissance of the modernist age. The concept of the “positive all-unity” was further developed into the dichotomy of “verbal all-unity” and “pictorial all-unity” (slovesnoe and zhivopisnoe vseedinstvo).9 Zara Mints emphasises that the Solov’ёvian idea of the positive all-unity is the key-concept, the “center of the center” of neo-romantic thought in Russian modernism.10 It is often the less known authors rather than the great masters who offer a more adequate picture of the spirit of the age. This is the case with Aleksandr Antonov, a forgotten author, whose philosophical poem The Mighter (Mogaska) appeared in 1909 in Saint Petersburg with a cover design by Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934; see fig. 21), a key member of the Saint Petersburg avant-garde group the “Union of Youth” (“Soyuz molodëzhi”). Antonov’s poem was written in a fashionable fin-de-siècle style: it opposed the idea of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and proposed, instead, an idea of “Super Harmony” (Supra-Garmonium), the union of the natural forces with the human brain. According to Antonov, the creation of Super-Harmony was the super-task of the Man-Creator, who will hasten the “ascent of the serfs”.11 Antonov’s idea of Super-Harmony can be understood as similar to both the Slavophile concept of “spiritual community” (obshchina, mir) and the Solov’ёvian “positive all-unity”. While objecting to Nietzsche, Antonov’s poem illustrates also Bergson’s idea of both the continuity of all living beings as creatures and the discontinuity implied in the evolutionary quality of this creation. In Bergson’s terms matter itself is “rather a flux than a thing”.12 Antonov concludes the preface of The Mighter echoing Bergson: The central motive is that there are “no things”… In the transforming relationship of phenomena, in the manifold processes, there is the sole unchangeable life… Amidst a shower of phenomena that are quickly flashing by… there is the moving, growing and comprehending

9  Dmitrii Sarabianov, “Russkii avangard pered litsom religiozno-filosofskoi mysli”, in: Iskusstvo avangarda: Yazyk mirovogo obshcheniya. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii, 10–11 dekabrya 1992 g., Ufa 1993, 3–11. 10  Zara Mints, “Futurizm i neoromantizm (K probleme genezisa i struktury ‘Istorii bednogo rycarya’ E. Guro)”, in: Tartu riikliku ülikooli toimetised 822, Tartu 1988, 109–121, here 110. 11  Aleksandr Antonov, Mogaska, Saint Petersburg 1909, 60. 12  “[T]here is no form”, says Bergson, “since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real”. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, New York 1911, 302.



From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” 

 203

“Me”, which cannot be detached from them… An active fluidity, a fluid activity… only this is what counts – the perpetual transition of Everything.13

The cover of Antonov’s book shows Mikhail Matyushin’s stylised graphic work the head of Gorgon Medusa with exuberantly floating hair, partly made of snakes on the back of her head. Medusa was one of the central symbols modernists used to render the reverse side of the Universe.14 An Egyptian blacksmith or sculptor moulds the snaky hair of Medusa at the same time as the snakes continue to breed more snakes. Antonov’s neo-romantic poem with Matyushin’s cover image and the Bergsonian theme of Homo Faber, resonates with Andrei Belyi’s essay of 1907 “The Art of the Future” (Budushchee iskusstvo), in which Belyi outlines the profile of the future artist: Here’s the answer to the artist: if he wants to remain artist and, at the same time, remain Man, he must become his own artistic form. Only this form of art promises us the salvation. It is here that lies the future of the arts.15

Forcing the Limits of the Perceptual Belyi’s artistic execution of his utopian theory, and his response to the quest for a perceptual utopia, was his first big novel The Silver Dove (Serebryanyi golub’, 1909). Thematically related to the then current debate about East-West relations, the novel was full of transcendental motifs connected with panpsychism, mysticism, theosophy, Christian and sectarian beliefs. It begins with a description of the village of Tselebeevo,16 represented as a kind of ideal seedbed for Eastern

13  Antonov, Mogaska, 7. The Russian translation of Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (1907) came out in 1909. 14  For instance in Velimir Khlebnikov’s early folkloristic drama poem Night in Galitsiya (Noch’ v Galitsii, 1913) appears the terrifying phantom-like character of Mava, the Ukrainian equivalent of Medusa, whose back is pulled up and filled with snakes, she sings a voiceless song like a fish, her reverse side is skinless and red like a rose, she carries an axe behind her belt, she is powerful and horrifying like a ghost (Velimir Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. R.V. Duganov, Moscow 2003, vol. 4, 275). 15  Andrei Belyi, Simvolizm, Moscow 1910, 453. Italics mine – N.B. 16  In the endnotes to the English translation John Elsworth links the name Tselebeevo of the village with the word tsel’ – “the target” (Andrey Bely, The Silver Dove, trans. John Elsworth, London 2000, 307). I would rather connote the name of the village with tselebnyi, which means “healing”, since in the novel the “good” village life is opposed to the “evil” city life naming the city Likhov – the “evil place”.

204 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

communitarianism (sobornost’), a commonwealth of the village people, where everything works in harmony, and all sensations – sounds, colours, smells, heat – act together and resonate with human senses, creating a collective perceptual experience. Again and again, into the blue abyss of the day, hot and cruel in its brilliance, the Tselebeevo bell-tower cast its plangent cries. In the air above it the martins fretted about. And heavy-scented Whitsuntide sprinkled the bushes with frail pink dogroses. The heat was stifling; dragonfly wings hung glassy in the heat above the pond, or soared into the heat of the day’s blue abyss, up into the blue serenity of the void. A perspiring villager assiduously smeared dust over his face with his sweat-soaked sleeve, as he dragged himself along to the bell-tower to swing the bell’s bronze clapper and sweat and toil to the glory of God.17

Kandinskii’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), written in 1910, was published in Munich in 1912. In Russia, Nikolai Kul’bin had already brought the essay to the attention of young artists in 1911, while in Europe it was the English painter Edward Wadsworth, one of the authors of the Vorticist Manifesto, who captured acutely the point of Kandinskii’s thought: “He writes of art… in its relation to the universe and the soul of man. He writes… as an artist to whom form and colour are as much the vital and integral parts of the cosmic organisation as they are his means of expression”.18 Fechner’s law of “immediate pleasure” that stimulates the mind might have triggered Kandinskii’s idea of the internal perception of a work of art. In his early graphic booklet Verses without Words (Stikhi bes’ slov’, 1903–1904)19 Kandinskii creates a fairy-tale universe of black-and-white wood-cuttings, which were to be perceived through the receiver’s inner gaze. The booklet contains only the title of the cutting but no verses. Apparently Kandinskii’s point was not to make “pictorial verses” or “versified pictures”, but, on the contrary, the pictures themselves, with their minimalised colour and strongly stylised form, create a particular space, a dreamlike meta-reality full of potential though not yet audible sounds.20

17  Bely, The Silver Dove, 35. 18  Quoted in: John E. Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long, The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art”, Newtonville, MA 1980, 43. Italics mine – N.B. 19  See: http://www.moma.org/collection_ge/artist.php?artist_id=2981 (accessed 31 July 2015). 20  For the poet Khlebnikov the word itself, as a poetic protagonist, expressed the idea of unity between word and image: “There are words, with which one can see, they are ‘eye-words’ and there are ‘word-hands’, with which one can act”. Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, 123. See also: R.V. Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov: priroda tvorchestva. Moscow 1990, 192. Paraphrasing Khlebnikov one could say that Kandinskii’s wood-cuttings are “picture-ears”.



From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” 

 205

Kandinskii’s booklet could be interpreted as an attempt to experiment with Theodor Lipps’ ideas about a fundamental unity between vision and hearing, which Lipps had been developing in his public lectures in Munich during his tenure at the university.21 In Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Kandinskii writes that “black is the most soundless colour”, whereas white is “full of potential […] like a silence which, suddenly, can be comprehended”.22 In Verses without Words Kandinskii seems to aspire to transgress the limits of the perceptual by experimenting with optical illusion. He forces the viewer/reader to observe the work of art “with naked eyes”, to make him participate in the creation of the meta-reality which is represented “in-the-state-of becoming”, as a flux rising up from entropy. In Kandinskii’s wood-cuttings the white dots give articulated forms by trickling little by little through the vast black cloth of the background’s quietude. In his essay “About the Artist” (O khudozhnike, 1916) Kandinskii wrote: “Colours are trickling through a strainer. The space is trembling with thousands of voices. The world yells”.23 The quest for a perception which would penetrate materiality was felt especially in the genre of monodrama. Nikolai Evreinov’s theory of monodrama strongly influenced the modernist stage. Evreinov moved the experimental play into the central character both psychologically and physically. In his one-act play In the Side-Scenes of the Soul (V kulisah dushi, 1912) the action takes place in the human thorax. The main characters are represented by the three Selves: The Emotional, The Rational, and the Subconscious Self. The duration of the action was estimated to be 30 seconds and at the end of the play the Big Outer Man shoots himself.24 In Velimir Khlebnikov’s (1885–1922) lyrical monodrama Mrs Lenín (Gospozha Lenín, 1909, 1912) each sense of the mentally ill main character is personalised and put under a microscope. Mrs Lenín’s senses – Voice of Sight, Voice of Hearing, Voice of Touch and others – become independent protagonists of the play and enter into discussion.25 The spectator or reader has to make the

21  Theodor Lipps worked on an experimental basis with spatial perception and optical illusions in Munich in 1894–1914, Kandinskii’s Munich period fell almost on the same years. See: Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, 101; Bowlt and Washton Long, The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky, 123–124. 22  Quoted in: Bowlt and Washton Long, The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky, 87. 23  Quoted in: Olga Matich, “K istorii oblaka: Vasilii Kandinskii, Andrei Belyi i dr.”, in: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 6, 2011, no. 112, 211–234, here 217. 24  Yuri Tsivian, “Media Fantasies and the Penetrating Vision: Some Links between X-Rays, the Microscope, and Film”, in: John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (eds), Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, Stanford 1996, 81–99, here 93. 25  Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 180–183.

206 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

deduction: Mrs Lenín is an autistic patient. The dramatis personae act in her mind only. Her inner voice and exterior reality do not correlate.26

Transparency or Atomisation of Matter? In an attempt to transcend the limits of the physicality of things, and to find the hidden “reverse” side of the universe, the Futurists set out to generate new languages in order to “see through” physical opacity. A utopian dream to generate a perfectly “transparent” language, a New Logos, was to start a glottogenetic process of the rebuilding of an ideal world in its Edenic state.27 Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in his essay on Picasso in 1914: “Seeking for skeletons of things of the physical world, Picasso had ended up in a New Stone Age”.28 The new era differed from the old one because of its transparency. But was the physical manifestation of the New Stone Age transparent (prozrachnyi), phantasmagoric (prizrachnyi)29 or pulverised (raspylennyi)? This was the question that occupied the modernists’ minds. According to Berdyaev, Belyi had already in his symphonies (1902–1908) “thrown Man into cosmic infinities”. As Berdyaev put it: [Belyi] melts and pulverises the crystals of words, the solid forms of the words, which seemed to be eternal, and by this measure he expresses the slicing and pulverisation of the crystals of the whole substantial world […] which he inducts from the spiritual life and not from the flaking matter of physicality of the world.30

26  The play is indebted to Maurice Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles (The Sightless, 1890). Khlebnikov’s play could be called “The Voiceless” or “The Wordless”. In his play the Voice of Hearing of the main character understands that the psychiatrist is approaching and knows him by his name Loos, which in Russian is usually pronounced as a two-syllable word Lo-os. If the protagonist could find the missing consonant between the two syllables, she could also find the right name both for her illness and for her healer – Doctor Λόγος. The word “logos” can be read anagrammatically as the Russian word for “human voice” – “golos” (G. Amelin and V. Morderer, Miry i stolknoveniia, Moscow and Saint Petersburg 2000 – available at: http://magazines.russ.ru/ novyi_mi/filos/amelin/index.html; accessed 31 July 2014). Duganov interprets the monodrama in a more metaphorical key: Velimir Khlebnikov, 196–202. 27  Irina Gutkin, “The Magic of Words: Symbolism, Futurism, Socialist Realism”, in: Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Ithaca and London 1997, 225– 246, here 225. 28  Nikolai Berdyaev, Pikasso [1914], in: Krizis iskusstva, Moscow 1918, 29–35, here 32 – available at: http://philologos.narod.ru/sophia/berd_crisis.htm#2 (accessed 18 June 2014). 29  As Berdyaev still hypothesised in his essay about Picasso in 1914. 30  Nikolai Berdyaev, “Krizis iskusstva”, in: Krizis iskusstva, Moscow 1918, 3–28, here 18 – available at: http://krotov.info/library/02_b/berdyaev/1918_14.html (accessed 31 July 2014). Italics mine – N.B.



From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” 

 207

In the visual arts, a balance between the physical texture and its spiritual dimensions manifests itself, for instance, in Vasilii Chekrygin’s (1897–1922) graphics and oil canvases (see col. fig. 5). In such works as Transformation of Physical into Spiritual (1913, also known by the name Painfulness), The Souls (1914–1915) and the series Resurrection from the Death (1921–1922) Chekrygin illustrates his idea of a spiritualised universe of the future. Similarly to Andrei Belyi, he fades out and pulverises crystals of solid textural forms visualising in this way his understanding of a potential spiritual utopia, which is achievable through artistic perception of the granulate matter of the world.31 In the verbal arts, the balance between sense and beyond-sense troubled the Futurist poet Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), who created a language beyond reason called zaum. It was not meant to be irrational but to express a higher order of reason evolving in human development. Kruchenykh based it partially on the automatic speech of religious persons who “spoke in tongues”. Rejecting Symbolist aesthetics, Kruchenykh boldly wrote: “Our new devices teach a new understanding of the world, shattering the impoverished constructions of Plato, Kant, and other ‘idealists’, where man stood not at the centre of the universe, but behind the fence”.32 Olga Rozanova (1886–1918), an intimate friend and colleague of Kruchenykh, with whom she co-authored several Futurist booklets in 1913– 1916, manifested in her paintings this shift to a new existential perspective. In her early cityscapes, especially the canvas The City (Gorod, 1914), Man is not “standing behind the fence”, but represented amid centrifugal urban events, “conveying the movement – if not external and visible, then internal and spiritual”.33 He is seen “through” his stream of consciousness and perceptions. This “seeing through” crisscrossing streams of consciousness was the “transparency” that the Futurists had in mind when they famously proclaimed in 1913: We split the object open! We started seeing the world through to the core.34 We learned how to look at the world backward, we enjoy this reverse motion […]. We can change objects’ weight (the eternal force of gravity), we see buildings hanging in the air and the weight of sounds.35

31  See: Baschmakoff, “Razrezhennost’ i nedovoploshchennost’ materii v russkom avangarde”, 284–287. 32  Herbert Eagle, “Afterword: Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism”, in: Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (eds and trans.), Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, Ithaca and London 1988, 281–304, here 287–288. Italics mine – N.B. 33  Nina Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde, Berkeley and Los Angeles 2012, 75. Italics mine – N.B. 34  In Russian: “My stali videt’ mir naskvoz’”. 35  A. Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word (the language of the future, death to Symbolism)”,

208 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

By isolating sounds and signs common to all languages Khlebnikov tried to invent a universal rhetoric, a language that could be understood by everyone in the world. One such experiment was his early poem I and Ė. A Story of the Stone Age (I i E: Povest’ kamennogo veka, 1911–1912), which shows his interest in the human proto-language (Ursprache). In his programmatic essay “Our Foundation” (Nasha osnova, 1919) Khlebnikov argued that since trans-rational poetry is based on an intuitive perception, it reflects the laws of universal language better than does poetry based on the logic of grammar.36 In 1914 the painter Pavel Filonov (1883–1941), who was close to Khlebnikov and had made illustrations for Khlebnikov’s many poems, organised a group of fellow-painters who shared his belief in aesthetic evolution. Like Kandinskii, Filonov forces the viewer/reader to participate in the creation of the meta-reality which is represented “in-the-state-of becoming”. Following Khlebnikov’s primitivist texts, Filonov tries to find corresponding organic proto-forms for the woodcut letters. Under the name Universal Flowering (Mirovoi rastsvet) Filonov developed for his group a synthetic philosophy focused on the extreme intellectual and physical efforts of the artist, which he called sdelannost’ kartiny (a painting made in the extreme). In the mid-1920s and through the 1930s Filonov guided a group of his students called Collective of Masters of Analytic Art, which focused on transcending subjectivity and sharing artistic cognition. Among other projects they illustrated the Finnish national epic Kalevala.37 The idea was to create an artistic anonymity following the example of the workshops of medieval masters. Each artist of the group could continue the work of another, and the final painting would have no particular authorship, much like the practices of a “thought community” of believers. The Universal Flowering was influenced, among others, by the Russian theosophist Pёtr Uspenskii’s (1878–1947) idea of accessing a “cosmic consciousness”.38 Artistic energy, as Filonov believed, would be preserved in the paintings “made in the extreme”.39 He argued that his paintings had a life of their own and they “continued to grow after he had put down his brush”.40 According to Filonov, ­a

in: Lawton and Eagle (eds), Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 69–77, here 76. 36  Gutkin, “The Magic of Words”, 238. 37  The Russian translation of the Kalevala, illustrated by the Collective of Masters of Analytic Art, was published in Moscow in 1933. 38  Charlotte Douglas, “Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin, and their Circles”, in: Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, New York 1986, 185–199, here 187. 39  Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy, 70. 40  Bowlt, “Esoteric Culture and Russian Society”, in: Tuchman (ed.), The Spiritual in Art, 165– 183, here 174.



From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” 

 209

work­of art “made in the extreme” becomes the concrete intermediary between the universe, the artist, and humanity. Especially in his paintings made after 1917 called “formulae”, Filonov persistently tries to penetrate the tissue of every constituent of the physical reality: I know, analyse, see, feel by intuition that in any object there are not just the two predicates of form and colour, but a whole world of visible and invisible phenomena, their emanation, reactions, interfusions, geneses, separate realities, and known or unknown qualities which, in turn, sometimes contain innumerable predicates.41

Both Malevich and Matyushin were invited to participate in Filonov’s group. Filonov believed that controlling his own physical features could lead him to a more acute artistic vision, and this belief was close to Matyushin’s theory of “expanded viewing”, which Matyushin developed in his Visiology Center (ZorVed) in Petrograd-Leningrad in the 1920s and early 1930s. Referring to optical variables in nature, Matyushin affirmed that the human body contained dormant optical reflexes. Hence, humans could expand the optical radius of their visual perception. Matyushin wanted to widen the visual angle to a full 360°, thus incorporating an awareness of the occipital part of the brain as an active visual centre.42 Through the years of campaigning against Formalism, until his death in the mid-1930s, Matyushin and his colleagues managed to investigate the possibilities of expanding viewing while borrowing from the sciences and studying the relationship between the five senses and the effects of colour environment on artistic creativity.43 For Matyushin the changes in colour and form, which he could observe in the laboratory conditions at the GINKhUK (State Institute of Artistic Culture), were not merely perceptual but real. Like Fechner, who had experimented with several kinds of threshold phenomena, Matyushin and his students studied meticulously both material and immaterial aspects of colour in different colour surroundings. Matyushin’s understanding of colour perception also included experiments with differently shaped forms in various spatial situations and moving with different speed.44

41  Douglas, “Beyond Reason”, 192. Italics mine – N.B. 42  Margareta Tillberg, Coloured Universe and the Russian Avant-Garde: Matiushin on Colour ­Vision in Stalin’s Russia 1932, Stockholm 2003, 157. 43  See: John E. Bowlt, “Body Beautiful: The Artistic Search for the Perfect Physique”, in: Bowlt and Matich (eds), Laboratory of Dreams, 37–58, here 51–52; Tillberg, Coloured Universe, 261–280. 44  The pinnacle of Matyushin’s and his students’ endeavor was the reference book The Laws Governing the Variability of Colour Combinations (Zakonomernost’ izmenyaemosti tsvetovykh sochetanii) published in 400 copies in 1932 (see: Tillberg, Coloured Universe, 83–131).

210 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

Soviet Legacy of the Historical Avant-Garde – from an Open Field to an Inner Refuge The heritage of the historical Russian avant-garde from the early Soviet years to the late 1960s can be traced by following the connection between the Moscow group Makovets, founded in 1921, and the Leningrad group called the “Invisible institute”. The intellectual force of Makovets was the priest, philosopher, physicist and mathematician Pavel Florenskii (1982–1937) and the painter Vasilii Chekrygin (1897–1922). The “Invisible institute” was also known as the “Sterligov School”, named after its leader, the painter Vladimir Sterligov (1904–1973), who had been Malevich’s and Matyushin’s student at GINKhUK.45 As John Bowlt has put it: “If we are to pinpoint Florensky’s real significance as an art historian on the practical development of modern Russian art, we must turn our attention to the short-lived group called Makovets (1921–1926)”.46 The word “makovets” signifies a hill, a summit or a culmination. It was connected with the hill on which St. Sergius of Radonezh had founded St. Trinity Monastery in the 14th Century, which eventually became the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church. The name may be deciphered as a competitive response to Malevich’s Supremus.47 So it was no accident that the founders of the artistic association, which initially was called Art-Life, decided to call their magazine Makovets. Florenskii was invited to join the group and he made an important contribution to its work by publishing two essays titled “The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts” and “Celestial Signs”. In his art philosophy Florenskii aspired to a synthetic vision, which extended his viewpoint from an object’s self-sufficiency to the perceptual context and the intellectual and psychological ambience that surrounded it. He concretised his

45  It is worth remembering that, apart from Malevich’s and Matyushin’s systematic research on artistic perception at the GINKhUK, in the early 1920s the Moscow RAKhN (Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences) also brought together the best of the Russian intelligentsia and high-level professionals from different disciplines including historians, physicists, philosophers, literary scholars, musicologists, psychologists, mathematicians and sociologists, and that in the fall of 1920 there was even a proposal to establish a “Laboratory for the Study of the Modalities of Artistic Perception” (see: Nicoletta Misler, “Toward an Exact Aesthetics: Pavel Florensky and the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences”, in: Bowlt and Matich (eds), Laboratory of Dreams, 118–132, here 123–125). 46  John E. Bowlt, “Pavel Florensky and the Makovets Group”, in: Michael Hagemeister and Nina Kauchtschischwili (eds), P.A. Florenskij e la cultura della sua epoca, Marburg 1995, 130–140, here 132. 47  Bowlt, “Pavel Florensky and the Makovets Group”, 132.



From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” 

 211

understanding by using the Russian medieval icon as an example. In his essay “The Church Ritual” he wrote: A work of art is a living entity and requires special conditions in which to live and particularly in which to flourish. Detached from these concrete conditions of its existence, specifically its artistic existence, it dies, or at least it enters a state of anabiosis. It ceases to be perceived, and at times it even ceases to exist, as a work of art.48

During the 1920s Florenskii distanced himself from the eccentricities of the avantgarde. His interest was rather focused on purifying the means of verbal and visual communication and on preserving cultural memory, which was seriously threatened when the early Soviet iconoclasm attacked the cultural heritage of Imperial Russia. Florenskii and Chekrygin were not especially close, but they shared a number of basic philosophical ideas. Chekrygin aspired to an art that would have the power to change Man’s consciousness and, consequently, the world.49 In the spirit of the philosophy of the group Art-Life Chekrygin wrote: “The synthesis of the living arts is Man, he is living painting, sculpture, architecture, music; but Man, of course, is not perfect, his body is only half-way”.50 Bowlt argues that the similarity between Chekrygin’s and Florenskii’s concepts of Man is striking. For Florenskii, Man “is the sum of the world, its abbreviated synopsis”.51 Andrei Belyi proposed a corresponding thought in his vision of the future artist, who had to become his own form. The cover of the Makovets journal (3/1923) designed by Vladimir Favorskii concretely illustrates the utopian vision of the New Man as the synopsis of the world. To sum up Florenskii’s art philosophy, one has to remember his book Imaginaries in Geometry (Mnimosti v geometrii), which he started as early as 1902 and finished during his Makovets period in 1922, and which had a great impact on the nonconformist artists who formed the alternative culture during the Soviet period of the 1920s–1960s. The book was not only about geometry, but about what was crucial in the first decades of the 20th Century for the quest of both contemporary science and the contemporary avant-garde: metaphorically it was a quest for “the reverse side of Gorgon Medusa” and conceptually – a step towards a semantics of possible worlds.

48  Pavel Florensky, “The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts”, in: Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond, London 2002, 95–113, here 102. 49  Bowlt, “Pavel Florensky and the Makovets Group”, 135–136. 50  Quoted in: Bowlt, “Pavel Florensky and the Makovets Group”, 136. 51  Bowlt, “Pavel Florensky and the Makovets Group”, 136.

212 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

Fig. 22 (left): Unpublished cover of the journal Makovets 3/1923 designed by Vladimir Favorskii. Woodcut, the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg. Fig. 23 (right): Vladimir Sterligov, Geometrisation: Straight Line Dividing, Curved Line Connecting (1965). Etching, paper, private collection, Saint Petersburg.

As a descendant of the historical avant-garde Vladimir Sterligov (1904–1973) continued to rework the traditions of Saint-Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad art during the harsh Soviet period of the 1920s–1960s. His wife and close colleague Tatyana Glebova (1900–1985) was a student of Filonov. They were both deeply religious artists. Their Leningrad home became the “Invisible institute” and, as Isabel Wünsche has put it: “an intellectual alternative to the established cultural system of Soviet realism in its various dimensions”.52 Sterligov was a painter, poet and illustrator of books for children, especially those written by his friends Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) and Aleksandr Vvedenskii (1904–1941). Both writers belonged to the short-lived unofficial literary and philosophical group Chinari (Knights of the Order, 1925–1927),53 whose members were fascinated by the idea of the absurd and illogical utterance. Sterligov’s own paintings were perceived as irrational and alogical and it was believed they were searching “for the reverse side of the universe, as if the painter followed

52  Isabel Wünsche, “The Heritage of the Russian Avant-Garde: Vladimir Sterligov and His School”, in: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union and Russian Art. Zimmerli Journal, 5, 2008, 6–23, here 6. 53  For more about Chinari, see: Zh.-F. Zhakkar [Jaccard], Daniil Kharms i konets russkogo avangarda, Saint Petersburg 1995, 115–122.



From the “Transparent Stone Age” to the “Space of the Chalice-Cupola” 

 213

the Moebius strip”.54 Artists of the “Invisible institute”, Sterligov and Malevich included, had professional and personal contacts with the members of Chinari. The existential philosopher Yakov Druskin (1901–1980), whom Sterligov knew well, kept Kharms’ and Vvedenskii’s unpublished manuscripts for 30 years during Stalin’s terror and the Leningrad siege and saved them from total oblivion.55 Druskin was a central figure of the group’s regular meetings. In his Diaries, which he kept through the years 1928–1962,56 he revealed his highly personal apophatic theology concerning God’s providence. Druskin’s diaries shed a special spiritual light on the “Knights’” philosophical discussions during the “catacumbal” period of the avant-garde.57 Sterligov’s main contribution to the historical avant-garde was the original formal system, which he invented or “got from above”, as he described it, on 15 April 1960 in accordance with his religious worldview, and which he continued to work on until his death.58 He called his system the space or the consciousness “of the chalice-cupola”,59 which he had developed on the basis of Malevich’s Suprematism and Matyushin’s organic perception of universal space (see fig. 23). Starting from the 1960s, the spatiality in Sterligov’s paintings is shown in curved lines, the new element of avant-garde art after Malevich. Eventually Sterligov’s forms became “curved, spherical, and connected to the realm of natural, organic forms”.60 He wrote: “After the square I set the chalice, and the chalice is transforming itself into the cupola”.61 Sterligov perceived his art as a spiritual act and,

54  E.F. Kovtun, “‘Dukh dyshit, gde khochet’. Materialy k biografii khudozhnika”, in: Miera, 2, 1993, 72–84, here 76–77. 55  Lidiya Druskina, “Zhizn’ ili zhitie? Shtrihi k portretu Yakova Druskina”, in: Yakov Druskin, Lestnitsa Yakova: Esse, traktaty, pis’ma, Saint Petersburg 2004, 15–27. 56  They were not accessible for a wider audience until post-Soviet years. 57  See: Druskin, Lestnitsa Yakova. The literary heritage of this group is mostly interpreted as absurd, though it often has a deeper spiritual subtext. For instance Kharms also wrote religious poems in the 1930s, de facto prayers: O Lord, awake Thy flame in my soul. Illuminate me, o Lord with Thy sun. Scatter at my feet golden sand, so I can take a pure route to Thy Chamber. Repay me, o Lord, with Thy Word, so it will sing praising Thy Dwelling. (Daniil Kharms, Sobranie proizvedenii, ed. M. Meilakh and V. Erl’, Bremen 1988, vol. 4, 43). 58  Kovtun, “Dukh dyshit, gde khochet”, 76. 59  Sometimes translated also “cup-cupola”; in Russian: “chashno-kupol’noe prostranstvo”, “chashno-kupol’noe soznanie”. 60  Wünsche, “The Heritage of the Russian Avant-Garde”, 9. 61  Prostranstvo Sterligova, Saint Petersburg 2001, 7.

214 

 Natalia Baschmakoff

accordingly, expressed his theoretical ideas in a very precise idiom; for example, the physical gesture of contact with a paintbrush was a “touch” (prikosnovenie), but the artistic result was a “tangency” (kasanie).62 During the years of stagnation Sterligov showed his work mostly at small one-day private studio exhibits. After the Soviet regime fell, Sterligov’s oeuvre was honoured by a vast exhibition of his works opened in 1995 at the Russian museum exposing his art to the wider Russian public. The catalogue was headed by the artist’s quotation of the Gospel of John (3:8): “The spirit breathes wherever it pleases” (“Dukh dyshit, gde khochet”).63 Evgenii Kovtun considers Sterligov the last master of the Russian historical avant-garde.64 Yet many of Sterligov’s students, mainly born in the 1940s, have carried on their master’s artistic legacy into the post-Soviet years and to the next generation of disciples of Sterligov’s art philosophy (see col fig. 6).65 Soviet nonconformist artists and writers, such as Chinari and the artists of the “Invisible institute”, had to work and survive in a socialist straitjacket of a totalitarian regime showing obedience to the official ideology, which promoted the “mastering and controlling of nature”. Many ended their lives in the Gulag. For the early utopianists of the 1910s and 1920s the transcendental was an open field of exploration, for the nonconformists of the 1930s–1960s – an inner refuge in spirituality.

62  Kovtun, “Dukh dyshit, gde khochet”, 78. 63  In English translation of the Gospel: “The wind blows wherever it pleases”. 64  E.F. Kovtun, “‘Dukh dyshit, gde khochet…’. Zhivopis’ i grafika V.V. Sterligova”, in: Vladimir Vasil’evich Sterligov 1904–1973, Saint Petersburg 1995, 7–22, here 7. 65  For more information, see: Prostranstvo Sterligova, 78–189.

Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique Sound Representations of Utopia in the Works of Russian Musicians in the First Three Decades of the 20th Century1 Researchers are usually interested in visual, philosophical and verbal texts concerning utopia or dystopia. In this paper, however, I will outline the main characteristics of the various sound representations of utopia given by a series of Russian musicians in the first three decades of the 20th Century. The “immateriality” of these utopian sound worlds and their literary descriptions will shed some light on the particular characteristics of this phenomenon in its Russian version. Because of its non-imitative nature, music is intrinsically “utopian” sound which organises sound spaces into certain time and acoustic structures. I will not discuss here the sound worlds of Futurism, Acmeism, Constructivism and other movements. I will only outline the imaginary levels of the acoustic space as “extra-verbal communication” (A. Sokhor), which endeavours to express representations of (im)possible life and create a kind of musical utopia. Neither will this article deal with “utopias of the national character” in music, in the period when Russia was identified with the “East” and, starting from the assumption that true Russian art can only be national, the country was seen as a Messiah with the mission of bringing a new superior spirituality to the whole world. Let me draw a brief outline of the works in which the link between this “utopian sound” and a theurgist and mystery vision of music is particularly important. The Russian vision of utopia is particularly evident in Rimskii-Korsakov’s liturgical opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (Skazanie o nevidimom grade Kitezhe i deve Fevronii, 1903) and in particular in the Hosannahs for the dead heroes who found paradisiacal life (“eternal joy”) in the invisible city of Kitezh at the bottom of the lake. It was exactly the treatment of this theme in opera that turned it into a symbolic phenomenon and a musical national variant of utopia – a hidden, invisible locus of joy which mystically remains in existence in spite of the destructive force of reality. This place resounds with Hosannahs full of joy and sensuality. This chanting is based on luminous sound sequences, similar to the melos of religious chants, to the Znamennii Chant and the Orthodox Hallelujah. In an organic

1  Thanks are due to Gabriella Imposti and Jeremy Barnard, who translated this article into English. All translations from Russian are ours, unless otherwise indicated.

216 

 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

fashion, typical for the composer, they fuse together with the complex language of harmonics. Not unlike the late Wagner, Rimskii-Korsakov is attracted by the problems of good and evil and of spiritual transfiguration. Furthermore, there are other mystical representations of the “music of the possible ideal” which are distant from the nationalist theme. First of all, let us mention the impact that the theory of the Übermensch had on Russian philosophy and music. This is particularly clear in Aleksandr Skryabin’s views, through which new utopian ideas entered Russian culture. They were inextricably linked with new sounds which had a radical impact and were devised to transform the world and realise utopia. Already in the zen-like overtones of the finale of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) the radiance of the Earth dissolves into non-existence. Skryabin’s “mysterium” works were also designed to spiritually uplift the listeners, leading to the fusion of all mankind. The fusion of the arts is not only a new stage of previous experiments combining sound and colour. It is also a symbol of ecstatic union embodied by the tastiera per luce (keyboard for light) in the synesthetic mysterium Prometheus. Skryabin thought that his music would lead mankind to a higher stage of existence, when the heavenly bells would start ringing and the sound of divine silence would manifest itself. A grand utopia of musical transformation of the world was envisaged by Skryabin on the basis of Vyacheslav Ivanov’s projects and the composer’s own conceptions. After the sacred preparation of the Acte préalable (Prefatory Action, 1914–1915), the “purified” community of devotees would gather against the backdrop of the Himalayas in India and join in the performance of the Mysterium, which unfortunately Skryabin never completed. This would lead to the collective transition of mankind to its immaterial phase and to the achievement of utopian harmony. In this conception, the pre-war expectations of apocalypse and utopian harmony were reflected through the musical organisation of sound. Musicians agree that “the 20s in Russia passed ‘under the sign of Skryabin’”.2 His mythological system, his esoteric conceptions and, accordingly, his sonic atmosphere exerted a strong influence on the works of Nikolai Roslavets and Samuil Feinberg, among others. Not without reason, the young Soviet state, which was close to the composer’s ritualistic mood, planned a monument to Skrya­bin and his utopia of collective “ascension”. The denial of the culture of the past sometimes acquired a provocative character, as for instance in Efim Goly-

2  “Russkii muzykal’nyi avangard segodnya i vchera. I ne tolko… Beseda s Viktorom Ekimoskim”, in: Muzykal’naya akademiya, 2014, no. 2, 25.



A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique 

 217

shev’s Anti-Symphonie (Musikalische Kreisguillotine), presented at the Dada exhibition in 1919.3 There was a strong need for new purposes and new summits. Let us now identify some of the different directions taken by the utopian “musical worlds” created in the years around the October Revolution. Sergei Prokof’ev embodied the lost harmony of the past in his Classical Symphony, and his “astral” nostalgia in the Violin Concerto no. 1 (1917). Nikolai Myaskovskii, who in World War I served in the artillery, left two different pictures of his musical utopia. The Fifth Symphony (1918) transfigures the horrors he endured into the rustic idyll of “Holy Russia”, while in the Sixth Symphony (1921–1923) he depicts the apocalypse of the Russian Revolution. “21 April 1917, soon after the February Revolution, in Kharkov Velimir Khlebnikov, together with Georgii Petnikov, publishes his Appeal by the Presidents of Planet Earth”.4 Arthur Lourié was the only composer in the group of the Russian Futurists. He wanted to translate their poetics into the language of his art, although in the spirit of the Russian version of the idea of the Übermensch, the young Mayakovskii also called Prokof’ev the “president of the Planet Earth for the musical sector” in the copy of his book War and the Universe (Voina i Mir) he gave to Sergei Prokof’ev. Like other musicians of the beginning of the Century who represented the idea of the “death of God”, that is to say the disappearance of moral qualification and centre, Lourié was close to atonality. On 1 January 1914 he was the co-signatory, with the painter Georgii Yakulov and the poet Benedikt Livshits, of the Petersburg Futurist manifesto, “We and the West”, proclaiming principles common to all three arts.5 He also demanded the inclusion within music on an equal standing of all kinds of sounds and noises from the environment, thus becoming a forerunner of musique concrète. In his cycle Formes en l’air (1915) there are also experiments with sound analogies to geometry and with an extension in depth of musical space. This involves a Cubist use of an innovative form of notation, in which different systems are placed spatially on the page in independent blocks, with blanks instead of bar rests. With the victory of the October Revolution the visionary innovators and eccentrics were certain that for the first time that, as Lourié said, they “could realise their dreams and that into pure art there would be no intrusion of politics

3  Detlef Gojowy, Neue sowjetische Musik der 20er Jahre, Regensburg 1980. Quotations from the Russian translation: Novaya sovetskaya muzyka 20-kh godov, Moscow 2006, 96. 4  Nikolai Stepanov, Velimir Khlebnikov. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, Moscow 1975, 171. Printed in Kharkov, in Vremennik 2. 5  See: Georges Jacouloff, Benoit Livschitz and Arthur Vincent Louré, “Nous et l’occident”, in: Mercure de France, 108, 1914, no. 404, 882–883.

218 

 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

or violence […]. It was a fantastic, incredible time and Futurism was the purest thing I knew at the time”.6 There were enthusiastic attempts at attracting the “masses” with the refined fruits of culture. The press and the newly-created radio were involved in these educational activities. Some of the “enthusiasts” tried in many ways to eradicate the past, creating in its place a new sound-space close to the neophile conceptions about the “music of the future”. In alliance with the new Soviet state, new “socialist” musical ideals and utopian perspectives started to take shape. A particular type of ritualisation can be detected in the Russian “sacralisation” of the concept of people (“narod”), in the idealistic and utopian interpretations of this rather vague concept as an incarnation of the Messiah or of the supreme truth. The ideas of this so-called “democracy” involved theoretical musical research as well as the practice of composition, where the former was far ahead of the latter. Particularly urgent was the pursuit of a “new simplicity” of musical Futurism. This tendency was combined with the aspiration of broadening the concepts of “Music”, “Art” and “Culture” and was embodied in the musicalisation of noise, in bruitisme and in the use of industrial sounds. The desire of the artists “to go towards the masses” also meant going towards the new means of mass communication. At the beginning these seemed to be purely entertainment, but they in fact realised the most important dreams of their time and in particular that of the sound of a possible future. Technological discoveries of the end of the 19th Century, such as the fixation of sound and image, are rarely connected with the avant-garde. However, as in the case of the invention of the opera three centuries before, they embodied the new utopian representations and made it possible to radically change the relationship between everyday life and art, culture and State, between elite and masses, unique and replicable artefact. At the turn of the Century, revolutionary changes were anticipated by the invention of mechanical and later electro-acoustic phonography. Thus, humankind’s utopian dream of a technique for fixing the flow of time (Carpe diem!) was finally realised for sound and image. Initially, the reproduction of “live” sound was very approximate, flat and fuzzy for the audible and the visible. However, what is important is not the quality of what is recorded but the fact of being able to fix the elusive simultaneous sound, especially of music, which is the symbol of the swift flowing of time. In this we can see the aspiration to overcome spatial and temporal limitations which in the past were insurmountable by “materialis-

6  Arthur Lourié, “Nash Marsh”, in: Novyi zhurnal, 1969, no. 94, 127–142, here 128.



A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique 

 219

ing” and transferring over distances the sounds of the voice, of instruments and noises, as we now habitually do.7 A particularly interesting aspect of these inventions is that they project the controllers’ utopia about the automatism of the masses’ response. This is why we listen attentively to phonographic appliances like automatophones and gramophones. Paraphrasing Stanislavskii’s method, we could say that in musical automatic machines the action of levers imitating the labour of the interpreter generates the sound of the interpretation fixed onto the punched tape, while sound tracks drawn in wax reproduce the traces of sound unchanged. By acquiring materiality, these innovations became metaphors of the utopian / dystopian automatic control and predictability of human feelings and actions. This is why in this period there are so many projects for producing sounds literally freed from machine-readable media, as if they descended from the ether, splitting the sound and its electro-acoustic reproduction. This idea generated the term “schizophonia”. In order to listen to beautiful and ideal sounds the actual work of playing music is no longer needed and the production of sounds is easy and affordable. This can be heard in some works created for innovative instruments, for instance in the “suspension” and “immateriality” of the sounds of Skryabin’s Prometheus and Lourié’s Formes en l’air. From this point of view there were many symptomatic experiments, however short-lived, such as the so-called “Optophonic piano” created in 1916 by the Futurist artist and musician Vladimir Baranov-Rossine. This electronic optical instrument generated sounds and projected revolving patterns onto a wall through a series of revolving painted glass discs. The keyboard controlled the combination of the various filters and discs, which created a “new type of sound”. Also worthy of mention are the phantoms of Velimir Khlebnikov’s The Radio of the Future (Radio budushchego, 1921): The Mussorgsky of the future is giving a coast-to-coast concert of his work, using the Radio apparatus to create a vast concert hall stretching from Vladivostok to the Baltic, beneath the blue dome of the Heavens. On this one evening he bewitches the people, sharing with them the communion of his soul […]. The artist has cast a spell over his land; he has given his country the singing of the sea and the whishing of the wind. The poorest house in the smallest town is filled with divine whistlings and all the sweet delights of sound.8

7  Elena Petrushanskaya, “Fonografiya v kontekste drugikh form mekhanicheskogo vosproizvedeniya muzyki”, in: Istoriya russkoi muzyki. Sobranie v 10 tomakh, vol 10b: 1890–1917 gody. Serebryanyi vek, Moscow 2004, 803–863. 8  Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Radio of the Future”, in: Collected Works, vol 1: Letters and Theoretical Writings, ed. Charlotte Douglas, trans. Paul Schmidt, Cambridge, MA 1987, 392–397, here 394.

220 

 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

Furthermore, the Thereminvox (1919–1921), the first electronic instrument, was originally the product of Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors for defence purposes. It is controlled without physical contact by the thereminist (performer) through metal antennas that sense the relative position of the thereminist’s hands for frequency and amplitude, sending the amplified signal from the Theremin to loudspeakers. The Russian avant-garde aspired to transform and transfigure reality as the goal of its utopian research. It is symptomatic that in these utopian visions the radical changes in the field of musical language and musical instruments were combined with the desire to transform the traditional system of culture into a new one oriented towards mass communication and for the use of the masses. Russia dreamed of hymns to the future boldly adopting mechanical instruments as forerunners of utopian equality in the distribution of music to the masses, as can be seen in the 1912 Russian translation of Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, 1907), where Busoni discussed the use of electrical and other new sounds in future music. The utopian myth of the “machine”, which is so important in Futurist mythol9 ogy, was very frequent in the musical images of this age. Many compositions of this period embodied the composers’ representations of salvific mechanicalness, both in the shape of anthropomorphic mechanisms, and of mechanical representations of automaton-like human beings. Drawing a sketchy outline of the models towards which the art of sounds was oriented in this period, we could say that the starting point was a utopian ideal of music as reflection of the divine “harmony of the world” and of an ideal mathematical construction. At the turn of the Century the next step was the search for the “dark matter” of the universe, which expressed itself in “diabolic” sonorism. The 20th-Century avant-garde proceeded to sacralise the engine and its “mechanical essence”, transforming existence and human beings accordingly. It idolised the machine as “teacher of precision and speed”,10 it exalted a new idol – e­ lectricity.­ Later a new ideological model emerges in Russia. It joins two of the preceding representations of the future developments of life: “Work will be the ruler of the World”. Physical and mechanical work is made sacred and the unemotional “resonant matter” produced by its tools is now considered suitable material for

9  See: Daniele Lombardi, Nuova Enciclopedia del Futurismo musicale, Milan 2009, 188–200. 10  This is how in the poem “Pachka orderov” (1921) the proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev described the “machine”, which in his opinion is one of the postulates for the “remaking of Man”. Available at: http://futurum-art.ru/autors/gastev.php (accessed 18 April 2015).



A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique 

 221

music. In 1923, in a manifesto named “Zvuchashchee veshchestvo”, that is to say “Resonant Matter”, Mikhail Druskin bases his theories on Marinetti’s views and bruitisme, declaring that there is no need to contaminate the [musical] material with human feelings […]. We are tired of the empty sounds of contemporary instruments […]. We must take into account all the possibilities of resonant matter (with additional sounds, noises) […]. And with no emotional predilection and no aesthetic prejudices […] submit everything that sounds to the power of organising work.11

All of this was synthesised in the sound and musical messages of the newly-born radio. This is why the image of radio sound as sonorism of the Future can be considered as a kind of programme. For instance, in the “Order No. 6” from Gastev’s poem we find a metaphorical picture of (im)possible world consonances: Asia is all in the note Re. America is one accord higher. Africa is in Si Bemol. Radiokappelmeister. Cyclovioloncello – solo. On forty towers – with a bow. Orchestra at the Equator. Symphonies at the 7th parallel. Choirs at the 6th meridian. Electric strings to the centre of the Earth. Keep the Terrestial Globe in music during the four seasons. Sound pianissimo on orbit for four months. Do for four minutes Volcano-fortissimo. Break off for a week. […]12

The phenomenon of speed, the acceleration of the tempo of actions and sounds, began to play an important role and this parameter became an absolute. According to Iosif Brodskii, this metaphorical acceleration was a dangerous penetration of the inhuman.13 The obsession with mechanical, reproducible, increasing speed acted subconsciously. After the relatively recent abolition of serfdom and

11  Mikhail Druskin, Zvuchashchee veshchestvo: Tezisy, Saint Petersburg 1923. Available at: http://www.theremin.ru/archive/phono_druskin.htm (accessed 18 April 2015). 12  Gastev, “Pachka orderov”. 13  Iosif Brodskii, “Interv’yu o muzyke”, in: Elena Petrushanskaya, Muzykal’nyi mir Iosifa Brodskogo, Saint Petersburg 2004, 15.

222 

 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

the rapid democratisation in Russia, this prefigured the specific development of a new mass society. According to Jean Baudrillard: Automatism amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere spectator. Contained within it is the dream of a dominated world, of a formally perfected technicity that serves an inert and dreamy humanity.14

This is why the apparently multi-directional democratic tendencies of the avantgarde and “automatic music” influenced the formation of social consciousness and acquired the ambivalent aura of being the only possible, rational and just system the country could take. In Russia this prefigured a unique situation. There was a tendency to a sense of wholeness which did not derive from levelling pre-existing differences, existences, purposes, or methods. It consisted in unifying, in creating units of “similar” fellow-members, of faceless “nails”15 to be later hammered into the edifice of the Soviet “radiant future” under construction. The dreams of the “impossible world” found their vivid expression in the literary descriptions of the unheard-of. In Evgenii Zamyatin’s novel We (My, 1920) the representations of sound reflect the connection between rationality and intuition in art. The “phono-lecturer”, a prototype of the radio-propagandist and in general of the authoritative “voice from above”, tells us about “our music, mathematical composition (the mathematician as the cause, music as the effect)”. He was describing the recently devised musicometer, which has replaced spontaneous­ composition: Simply by turning this handle, any of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. Yet think how much effort this had cost your forebears! They were able to create only by whipping themselves up to fits of “inspiration” – an unknown form of epilepsy.16

In the world of Zamyatin’s dystopia, “present music” is a “vitalising stream that flow[s] from the loud-speakers”,17 a mechanical march, consonant with the afternoon walk of faceless “numbers”: The crystalline chromatic measures of converging and diverging infinite series and the synthesising chords of Taylor and McLauren formulas; the full-toned, square, heavy tempos of “Pythagoras’ Trousers”; the sad melodies of attenuating vibrations; vivid beats alternating

14  Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, London 1996, 110. 15  Quotation from the final lines of Nikolai Tikhonov’s famous “Ballad of the Nails” (1919–1922). 16  Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg, New York 1999 [1972], 13. 17  Zamyatin, We, 13–14.



A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique 

 223

with Frauenhofer lines of pauses – like the spectroscopic analysis of planets. What grandeur! What imperishable logic!18

A direct continuation of Zamyatin’s phantasmagoria can be seen in Arsenii Avraamov’s texts. He is one of the most significant utopian visionaries, who theorised a “new age of music”, organising and performing neo-mysteria and mass musical actions. His most famous work is the “Symphony of Sirens” performed in Baku in 1922, in Moscow in 1923, and in Germany in 1928. He used navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, the foghorns of the Soviet flotilla in the Caspian Sea, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes and dreamed of a Thereminvox playing from an airplane. He dreamed of the technical means for propagating sound, which would develop into “self-sufficient arts”. Avraamov imagined a “music written for a grandiose electro-mechanic orchestra, where there will be no limit for virtuoso technique nor for multi-level sound series or contrasts of dynamic expression”.19 As early as 1916, he saw great opportunities for new technological discoveries in the “general tendency of contemporary city life […] towards massive machine production of all sorts of valuables”.20 Avraamov’s research into microtonal music was parallel to the work on quarter tones of other innovative Russian composers, Ivan Vyshnegraskii and Nikolai Obukhov. However, Arthur Lourié’s utopian ideas about a music of “four tones” anticipated all of them.21 Furthermore, Avraamov was a fanatical enemy of the musical temperament of the past. In 1920 he even submitted a project for “burning down all grand pianos” to the Soviet People’s Commissar for Education Anatolii Lunacharskii. The reason for this project was that the grand piano is the “king” of all instruments.22 Therefore, according to the objectives of class struggle, it should be destroyed. The idea of destroying the sounds of the past is inherent to the “Internationale”, which in Kots’ translation became the hymn of the Soviet Union: “We will destroy this world of violence / Down to the foundations, and then / We will build our new world. / He who was nothing will become everything!” In his memoires the poet Anatolii Mariengof describes the scene he witnessed:

18  Zamyatin, We, 14–15. 19  Arsenii Аvraamov, “Novaya era muzyki”, in: Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1925, no. 3, 66–69, here 67. 20  Arsenii Аvraamov, “Gryadushchaya muzykal’naya nauka i novaya era istorii muzyki”, in: Muzykal’nii sovremennik, vol. 2, Petrograd 1916, 82, 100. 21  Arthur Lourié, “K muzyke khromatizma”, in: Strelets, Petrograd 1915, 81–83, here 82. 22  The Russian word for the grand piano, “royal”, expresses this very idea.

224 

 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

Lunacharskii said: “I’ll report about your proposition to comrade Lenin, […] but I am not sure whether he will agree with your ingenious project. You know, he loves the music of the violin, the grand piano […]”. The indignant composer interrupted him: “The grand piano is the international balalaika! I’ll reform this balalaika with pedals!” Afterwards Esenin and I listened to the pieces Avraamov wrote for this reformed piano.23

By destroying the past, the path for the “new” in sound was cleared. A unique method of synthesis of sound with the help of light and artificial graphics for soundtracks was invented, along with a hand-drawing technique for producing sound effects combining images. Avraamov created an “Ultrachromatic” 48-tone microtonal system for Abram Room’s documentary film The Five Year Plan (1929). The creator of the Variophone, Evgenii Sholpo and the director of animation films, Mikhail Tsekhanovskii worked with him. Thus, the members of the team formulated the idea of graphic sound, with which any sound and any effect could be synthesised. Polyphonies could be recorded without the help of interpreters, on the basis of the acoustic and mathematical data. The laboratories that were created soon after were the first prototypes in the world of the future research centres for computerised music. The Thereminvox was highly esteemed because of its innovative pathos as the “first revolutionary” instrument. Lev Termen, better known as Theremin, conceived its functioning principle while working for the security system of the Kremlin. He played it for Lenin himself, ensuring the success of his invention. Oddly enough, for the demonstrations of this innovative, but rather dull-sounding instrument, the inventor would use quite conventional and “backward” music, romance and songs. Later on the Thereminvox acquired its own niche in “Cosmic music” and in the sphere of cinema soundtracks for “superhuman” or frightening sounds. In the 1920s it seemed that “all the artistic experience of the previous generations was elementary in comparison with the rules discovered by science”.24 Sounds similar to the voice of God were to be emitted by “a Thereminvox installed on an airplane gliding in the sky of Moscow”. Avraamov maintained that: The perspectives that Theremin has opened in music with his invention are really un­limited.­ His “Thereminvox” is not simply a “new musical instrument” […] it is a giant step forward towards the Future. Our Future is the social revolution in musical art, its resurrection. The political, agitational purpose of this invention is in the foreground, while the “artistic” meaning comes second. The ideological objectives are paramount. They d ­ etermine­the

23  Anatolii Mariengof, Moi vek, moi druz’ya i podrugi, Moscow 1990, 90–92. 24  Arsenii Avraamov, “Nauchnaya Organizatsiya Truda. Perspektivy metoda tochnykh nauk v teorii i praktike sovremennogo iskusstva”, in: Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1928, no. 4, 72–75, here 74.



A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique 

 225

revolutionary character of aesthetics. […] The complete freedom of timbre and intonation nuances leads to: a) a broadening of the European tonal system, which has led music into a dead end; b) an alliance with the grandiose art of the East, which until now has been impossible because of the restrictions of the 12-tone temperament; c) an unprecedented synthesis with the art of the word, because the intonations and timbre of speech are encompassed in the range of the Thereminvox; d) to the creation of a completely new, unheard-of differential stochastic music (Differenz-Muzik) and grandiose harmonic glissandi in parallel and opposite directions.25

From 1928 to 1931 in the United States another avant-garde composer, Iosif Schillinger, a poet who created the phenomenal theory of composition, cooperated with Lev Theremin. Schillinger considered his invention the beginning of “the second half of the history of music”. He wrote that the Thereminvox had a salutary effect on the ear […]. It will eliminate all the existing musical instruments which do not correspond to the level of the general musical culture. […] For me the supreme creative joy would be to be able to write an “airphony”, that is to say a symphony for an orchestra consisting of similar instruments […]. “The first Airphonic Suite” is only the first step among my composition projects connected with this instrument. I intend to make the next largescale composition for an ensemble of these instruments and the organ. […] I think that the combination of the orchestra with the RCA Theremin is like the union of the last word of the instruments of the past with the first word of the instruments of the future.26

In spite of the fact that the way for the new electronic music had been prepared, the new timbres did not replace the old. However, unlike many inventions of musical instruments based on utopian ideas, the Theremin did actually lay the groundwork for research and discoveries in the field of interactive instruments. The utopian plan of uniting the genres of the great past with the new democratic intonations, the “song opera” and the “song symphony”, were also unsuccessful. The straightforward combination of the intonation material of “popular music” with the methods of exposition and development of “higher” genres and symphonic thought, revealed their incompatibility with similar leveling socialist projects. The works created on this basis in Soviet Russia were essentially opportunistic. They did not live beyond the time of their composition and sank into oblivion. This was also the destiny of perhaps the best Soviet work of

25  Arsenii Avraamov, “Universal’naya tonsistema”, in: Rabis, 1927, no. 26, 3. 26  Iosif Schillinger, “Fel’eton o Termene”, 1929. The Russian version of the manuscript of this article is kept in the Library of the Lincoln Center in New York. Quoted from: E. Dubinets, “Pereros muzyku kak takovuyu”, in: Izrail XXI. Muzykal’nyi zhurnal, http://www.21israel-music. com/Schillinger.htm (accessed 18 April 2015). See also: E. Zaltsberg (ed.), Russkie evrei v Amerike, vol. 2, Saint Petersburg 2007, 159–187.

226 

 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

this type, Schillinger’s symphonic rhapsody “October”, performed in 1927 by the Persimfans, that is to say the First Soviet symphonic orchestra without a director, a utopian “realisation of equal opportunities” in a collective body with no leader-dictator. Schillinger himself followed a series of variations of utopia. In his early poems he celebrated the “indivisible singing of brotherhood”, the “communal action” of the young makers of “the new era”, similar to Schumann’s “Davidsbündler”. The “construction material” of the new creation was to be Music: “Music in the Word”, “Music in the gesture”, “Music in colour and light”, “Music in shape”. He then developed a passion for jazz, which in his opinion could “revive the music of socialist Russia” as a form of “musical freedom”. He later moved to “industrial music”, in which he saw a possible source for interesting new genres. After 1921 he found a new utopian objective, composing on the basis of a kind of “rationalised mathematical emotionalism”.27 This led Schillinger to creating a general system for teaching composition, which he conceived as the creation of architecture, following constructivist principles of exposition and development of the material. Judging from the achievements of his students, among them George Gershwin and Glen Miller, his system was quite successful. Perhaps the 1927 symphonic rhapsody was Schillinger’s last attempt at expressing the sounds of the “Great October”. Paradoxically, the music let out something that the composer himself, who soon after left the Soviet Union, would not say openly. Apparently the idea of the rhapsody was the realisation of the utopian fusion of radically new, mass folklore and revolutionary songs with the sonorities of the avant-garde. But through joy, one can sense the horror of dystopia, the incompatibility with the elevated objectives, as well as an absurd deep sadness. The maximalism of these sound utopias was in conflict with the demands of Soviet everyday life and generated ambiguity both in sounds and in their perception. In Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Second (October) Symphony, for example, one can sense a universal mythmaking and soteriological pattern – the making of a society of like-minded people, from struggle and resistance to glorification.28 Nowadays this symphony sounds tragic: “by spontaneously renouncing independent thought and feelings, Man has transformed himself into a puppet”. It uncovers its dystopian meaning, “sounds like a scene of an execution by ­shooting

27  See Schillinger’s “Questionnaire”, in: Inna Barsova, “Karkovskie ‘davidsbyundlery’. Literaturnoe uklonenie Iosifa Shillingera”, in: Sto let russkogo avangarda, Moscow 2013, 330–337, here 331. 28  See: L.A. Akopyan, Dmitrii Shostakovich. Opyt fenomenologii tvorchestva, Saint Petersburg 2004, 56–65.



A la recherche d’une sonorité utopique 

 227

rather than a scene of celebration”.29 In Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto we can also hear a secret dystopia, “flickering” under the appearance of cynicism. The quotations hint at the “death of the Hero”, whose place has been taken by an immoral, virtuoso buffoon. This concerto for the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution reveals the complete failure of utopia. The picture of Russian sound representations of utopia in the first three decades of the 20th Century would be incomplete without those who turned to their Orthodox past instead of the future. This is the case of a kind of “retro-­ utopia”, hidden in the heritage of sacred art and folklore. Sacred music, which in the Soviet Union was composed in spite of the prohibition of any kind of religious manifestation, was a consolation for the believers and the suffering. Most of these works limited themselves to repeating the past. After the end of New Economic Policy in 1928, public worship began to be severely limited and repressed. Church music was no longer published, the old scores were copied by hand and new music was written with no hope of publication. This inevitably led to the banal repetition of old models. Nikolai Golovanov’s and Georgii Izvekov’s work stands out against this background.30 Although they do not have any pretensions to innovation and operate with quite traditional means of expression, they offer an original world of utopian sounds of a “quiet, silent world” of faith in a “living Russia”. The authors of utopian manifestoes were certain that the “equal distribution” of spiritual assets would change the world and lead to the victory of Good and Light. However, the manifestoes about the free diffusion of music remained on paper. The populist cultural policy of Soviet radio created new and false representations of art.31 Theremin’s utopian project and the artist himself were exploited for industrial espionage and political repression. Theremin’s plans to

29  M. Aplecheyeva and A. Rovner, “Ot avangarda do nashikh dney. Prodolzhenie 3. Pod zvuki mednykh trub”, in: Muzykal’naya akademiya, 2014, no. 2, 24–27, here 27. 30  Archpriest G. Izvekov was shot in 1937. Before the Revolution he studied composition and polyphony and worked in the Orthodox centres of Prague and Berlin. He openly opposed the new regime. His music is based on the Znamennii Chant and polyphony. After the Revolution, Golovanov secretly wrote religious music. He was a well-known symphony and choir director. He was awarded three Stalin prizes and the title of People’s artist of the U.S.S.R. in 1948. 31  See: Elena Averbakh [Petrushanskaya], “Muzyka i SMK: iz proshlykh prozrenii, prognozov i problem”, in: V zerkale kritiki. Sbornik stat’ei, Moscow 1985, 214–230; Elena Petrushanskaya, “Ekho radioprosveshcheniya v 1920–1930-e gody: Muzykal’naya galvanizatsiya sotsyal’nogo optimizma”, in: Hans Günther and Sabina Hensgen (eds), Sovetskaya vlast’ i media. Sbornik stat’ei, Saint Petersburg 2006, 113–132.

228 

 Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh

revive Lenin’s corpse and many other “acoustic fantasies” remained frozen or were still-born. Some of them turned into dystopias. It seemed, on the other hand, that Kul’bin’s ideas of “free art as a basis for life” would find their realisation in Soviet Russia. From the very beginning, however, with the first decrees of the Soviet government, the picture is totally different. For example, the decree dating 26 November 1918 “On the acknowledgement of scientific, literary, musical and artistic works as State property” deprives authors of their copyright, declaring that “any published and unpublished” work, including those of dead authors and translations, “in whose ever hands might they be, are property of the RSFSR”. In the final article 11 it says: Unauthorised publication, reproduction, distribution and public performance of works infringing the dispositions of the present decree entail responsibility as offence against State monopoly.32

Artists and intellectuals could feel their increasing dependence on the “needs” of the State. As an appendix of this ideology, the new genre of the “agit-guignole”, intended to link agitation with the device of horror, was created for Eizenshtein’s theatrical show based on Tret’jakov’s pièce Hello, Moscow, Can You Hear Me? (Slyshish, Moskva?, 1924). Here the artistic objectives are transformed into propaganda. The series of “attractions” become a means to unleash the aggression and emotions of the public. A new genre of “pseudo-utopia” in the form of cantatas, symphonies and other genres was created, which later developed into a cynical composition of enthusiastic sound canvasses for the Party. These became obligatory for whoever wanted to enter the Union of Soviet composers. The free utopia game had come to an end. A new, increasingly strict control on culture, considered a kind of important ideological production, had begun and was becoming harsher and harsher. What had seemed the beginning of the realisation of utopia had indeed turned into dystopia.

32  Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, vol. 4, Moscow 2002, Decree Nr. 32, Pr. 226, p. 4 TsPA, f. 2, op. 1, ed. Khr. 7533, ll. 3–5.

Bruno Marques

Utopian Dimensions in Pedro Cabrita Reis A Melancholic Return to Modernist Paradigms? When I claim the position of builder, I’m really carrying further my previous statement that art is the sole absolute understanding of the world. It is only in the work built from a primordial gesture that the pursuit of the ultimate desire for unity converges and that it is all that is. It is certainly of a utopian situation, an attempt at building a state of whatever perfection, a moment in which, suddenly, one could recover something primordial that had been lost, and could reencounter it, obviously reencountering the quest for beauty. Beauty as the reinstatement of original harmony […] the search for an absolute and unique possibility of harmony that would vanquish the feeling of loss. When I say I am a builder, I am a builder because I wish to reinstate, I wish to restart, I wish to imagine that I can remake that harmony and exercise that beauty. And then maybe we will be able, God willing, to finally eradicate the problem of God. – Pedro Cabrita Reis, “Uma conversa no campo”, 2008.

The works of Pedro Cabrita Reis (1956, Lisbon) are associated with the redefinition of contemporary sculpture.1 By constantly re-working the process of “building” – a term he uses with an eloquent architectural resonance, although stripped of any sense of functionality – the Portuguese artist seems to represent, in an encrypted, archetypal and metaphorical way, the most melancholic side of the contemporary utopian impulse. In fact, his work implies the most ubiquitous trait assigned to the human condition from its earliest times: the act of (re)building a home, a place in the world, in a drive for continuous self-(re)definition. This paper examines the ways in which Cabrita Reis, through the recovery of a sense of mythic memory intertwined with the reinterpretation of ruins inherited from artistic creation (from a past that includes modernism), explores an idea of poetic, meditative and fictional utopia (with a strong philosophical and anthropo­logical emphasis) in contrast to the political gesture of the architectural and urban planning of collective space. For this purpose, Cabrita Reis opens up the possibility of continuing to pursue something that seemed long lost and distanced from the sphere of artistic

1  Bruno Marques is FCT-Portugal postdoctoral Research Fellow (RH/BPD/93234/2013). This article is an altered and updated version of a text entitled “Dimensões utópicas em Pedro Cabrita Reis”, previously published in: Margarida Acciaiuoli et al. (eds), Arte & Utopia, Lisbon 2013, 158–170.

230 

 Bruno Marques

creation: an attempt to build a “state of perfection”, an attempt that is driven by the “ultimate desire for unity” in order to “rebuild the world”, “reencountering the quest for beauty […] as the reinstatement of original harmony”.2 Guided by this demiurgic project, the artist is compelled, through his work, by a desire for a “utopian situation” as the “sole absolute way of understanding the world”.3 However, he does so without having to continue to evoke the name of God. We can in fact say that, rather than configuring a particular form of utopian solution, Cabrita Reis rehabilitates the ancient Greek word for “no place”, a place imagined but not realised: a word to which he assigns a current value in the sense that it is by imagining worlds where we can live (with our minds, in a poetic sense, and not strictly with our bodies) that man, in an emancipated manner, becomes self-aware and aware of his true potential for self-creation. Pedro Cabrita Reis started his artistic career as a painter and from 1981 began to exhibit regularly a form of expressionist painting in tune with the international context of “bad painting”. Beginning with Discretos Mensageiros (Discreet Messengers, 1984), the direct application of paint with the hands demonstrates the importance of the transition from gestures over a canvas to the act of building. In addition to silent and expectant, somewhat phantasmagorical, anthropomorphic figures, we find walls and gates either corroded or exalted by vivid and violent colours. In the mid-1980s, Cabrita Reis painted mainly on wood (his use of doors, initially used as a pictorial surface, starts around this time). Through a process of extension and transmutation, his works become pictorial objects, acquiring a sculptural, three-dimensional trait. The year 1985 is also when geometrical figures vaguely reminiscent of architectural elements such as walls, aqueducts, water tanks, cubes or boxes (which can be interpreted as tables or tombs) begin to appear. Using a darker and purer colour palette, the black and brown shadows reign in a dramatic tension that is slightly theatricalised. The following year witnessed a geometric purification of his painting, a stage best represented by the series of works Da ordem e do caos (From Order and Chaos, presented in the eponymous exhibition at Cómicos Gallery, 1986) that lasted for another two years. In 1988, sculptural combinations with a figurative and symbolic dimension build scenarios that seem to have been abandoned: in quarto dentro da parede (room inside the wall, 1989), we find a tiny chair in the corner of an empty room.

2  Pedro Cabrita Reis, “Uma conversa no campo / A Talk in the Countryside” [interview conducted by Augusto M. Seabra and Eduardo Souto Moura], in: Marta Moreira de Almeida, Augusto M. Seabra, Eduardo Souto Moura et al., Pedro Cabrita Reis: colecções privadas, Tavira 2008, 79–126, here 121. 3  Cabrita Reis, “Uma conversa no campo”, 121.



Utopian Dimensions in Pedro Cabrita Reis 

 231

By revising the aesthetics of Romanticism (associated with subjectivity at the service of transcendence),4 a philosophical, poetic and anthropological discourse emerges conditioned by the notion “that the work makes the world because it is an understanding of the world”.5 This demiurgic enthusiasm, committed to mystery and to the obscure, gave rise to a poetics of absence and abandonment (a metaphor for the presence that inhabits the world) best exemplified by the 1989 exhibition Melancolia (at the Bess Cutler Gallery, New York) in which a cypress – an arbor vitae usually found in cemeteries – next to a simple bench evokes tombstones or memorial plaques. Simple structures now consort with objects for the creation of ambiences, anticipating the concept of installation that would characterise his next step. With a sudden change of course away from the darkness and into the light, from 1990 Cabrita Reis’ works are poetically entitled “Houses”: A Casa do Silêncio Branco (The House of the White Silence), A Casa de Serenidade (The House of Serenity) or Casa do Esquecimento (House of Oblivion). Many are made of gypsum or plasterboard, evoking the whitewashed walls of traditional Portuguese houses. Confronting the senses with the experience of spaces and places, a well of cool water, doors, windows, walls and corridors place us inside the “inner labyrinths of memory”, likely to awaken, as someone wrote, “recollections of a random summer or details of a house from our childhood”.6 As “the only form to make the world comprehensible”, architecture, for the artist, acts as both a “mental discipline” and “an exercise of reality”.7 Thus, the constructive process, through his work, is a way of defining new “territories of perception” from which the observer reorganises an “‘intimate’ geography”, a “space of self-awareness”.8 The metaphor of the shelter, the archetype that follows the mother and the land, which makes the house the last place of being, gradually gives way to a perspective of “Life as a flow”.9 Hence we find the fountains, cisterns, canals and aqueducts that he made as from 1990. In these water architectures, the concept

4  Delfim Sardo, “Pedro Cabrita Reis. Casa, silêncio, melancolia, vigília. Notas sobre o trabalho recente de Pedro Cabrita Reis”, in: Visão em Apneia, Lisbon 2011, 337–342, here 339. 5  Augusto M. Seabra, in: Cabrita Reis, “Uma conversa no campo”, 80–81. 6  João Fernandes, “O construtor de lugares”, in: João Fernandes, José Miranda Justo, Adrian Searle and Michael Tarantino, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Ostfildern 2003, 201–250, here 207. 7  Pedro Cabrita Reis, “A Conversation with Pedro Cabrita Reis” [interview conducted by Adrian Searle], in: Fernandes et al., Pedro Cabrita Reis, 59–107, here 60–61. 8  Pedro Cabrita Reis, “Attrazioni ipnotiche per l’instabilità / Hypnotic Attractions for Instability” [interview conducted by Virginia Tieri], in: Claudia Gioia, Barbara Goretti, Virginia Tieri et al., Pedro Cabrita Reis: Macro/Hall, Rome 2007, 26–37, here 35. 9  Sardo, “Pedro Cabrita Reis. Casa, silêncio, melancolia, vigília”, 339.

232 

 Bruno Marques

of a conduit is introduced as a form of sharing and communication. As an isomorphism of movement, of managing energies and their circulation, it is like the flow of the river carrying life in the currents that circulate, withhold and transport (and transform through a mnemonic process) the residues of history (into knowledge). Through its rejected presence, water becomes a highly symbolic instance in these works: being a “state of grace” that precedes everything, it is perceived as the original place to which all searches for the origin are referred. Moreover, we could speak of a sort of anthropology of space, a convenor of the most distant human communities in time. Accordingly, architecture becomes the place for the interference of a sculpture that amends and redefines its coordinates and can thus be perceived as a “sculptural transformation of the world”.10 As an in situ construction, instead of adjusting itself to the space, it is the work itself that shapes the place where it stands. In projects such as Alexandria (1990) – evocative of the mythical lost library of antiquity – unexpected cartographies are made from the pre-existent space (where the well from the cloisters of an old monastery was re-centred by other memory-wells that flowed into it). In these topologies, the spectator is confronted with the realisation of singular maps, encouraged to follow a path that sometimes conceals its external surroundings from him – Rio (River, presented at Documenta 9, 1993) – and sometimes withholds access, keeping the spectator in a physical exteriority that deepens the mystery – Mãos dos Construtores I (Builders’ Hands I, 1993). 1993 was also the year that the Echo der Welt (Echo of the World) series began, a title that refers directly to the way Cabrita Reis perceives his work: as a “soundboard for the world”.11 Evolving from an intimate and secret laboratory to a new cosmogony, the gaze of the artist extends to Coelestis Atlas (1994). Observing outwards, he strives to reach the stars by using mirrors, stairs and steps. To this purpose, wide spaces are converted into star maps, scientific observatories or shrines (A Sala dos Mapas/Atlas III – The Map Room/Atlas III). Made of wood, glass, rubber and copper tubes, and other building materials, these new works, replacing the plaster sculptures, resemble the ancient devices that measured the world and the skies under the Renaissance ideal of the uomo universale.12

10  Fernandes, “O construtor de lugares”, 208. 11  Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter, “After All, Constructing an Artwork Is Still Building a Dream”, in: António Lobo Antunes, Dieter Schwarz, Sabrina van der Ley, Markus Richter and Pedro Cabrita Reis, Pedro Cabrita Reis: One After Another, a Few Silent Steps, Ostfildern 2009, 14–19, here 17. 12  Van der Ley and Richter, “After All”, 17.



Utopian Dimensions in Pedro Cabrita Reis 

 233

However, the familiarity of these constructions establishes uncommon connections between intelligibility and hermeticism, placing the viewer in a situation of ambiguity before a potential meaning: as a parable for a work of art, it opposes the clairvoyance that describes science in the search for logical constructions of meaning. After consulting these places of the alchemy of sight and thought – where the lost grandeur and the dullness of the materials are the axes for questioning the place of art in the world – from 1997 the prevalent metaphor of the House gradually gives way to the metaphor of the City. The dichotomy between the intimate dimension and social memory is present in the transitions and/or frontiers between the public and private spheres that oppose the street (the solar sphere of murmur and community visibility) to the dwelling’s indoor space (a place of silence, intimacy and shadow where man finds himself). This is embodied by the installation of windows in New York Red and Black Window (1997) and the door sequence in Lisbon Gates (initially presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale). In the latter, an objet trouvé reintroduces colour in the work of Cabrita Reis, forcing him to rethink the role of painting in the compositional apparatus of his works, as can be clearly seen in Cabinet d’Amateur #1 (Amateur’s Cabinet #1, 1999). Resembling the old 19th-Century picture galleries in the way the pictorial elements are arranged, an industrial-scale catalogue of a virtual collection was introduced into the exhibition space as wide range of abstract panels of the same size, which invariably combine two juxtaposed colours.13 Accentuating a combinatorial and serial dimension in order to explore the idea of “exhaustion”,14 it relates to the formal restraint of late modernism, evoking an understanding of space and time that seeks the absolute, and mathematical accuracy, with its infinite, eternal and transcendent features, while bringing to the fore a constructivist-based program15 that intersects with historical experiments in abstraction.

13  See: Pedro Cabrita Reis, “Pedro Cabrita Reis in Conversation: On Paintings and Houses” [interview conducted by David Batchelor], in: David Batchelor and Sarah Kent, Pedro Cabrita Reis: London, London 2005, 10–18, here 13. 14  Cabrita Reis, “Pedro Cabrita Reis in Conversation: On Paintings and Houses”, 12–13. 15  “Reis’ method embraces certain reminiscences of classic avant-gardism, in particular such originating in the constructivist movements of the first two decades of this century, when the act of constructivist was intimately related to the act of creating a completely new world, ruthlessly introducing a new collective culture, and educating a new kind of man”. Lóránd Hegyi, “Pedro Cabrita Reis: Sightless Cities – Periphery Experiences in the Labyrinth of Deserted Rooms”, in Lóránd Hegyi, Bruno Cora et al., Pedro Cabrita Reis, Milan 1999, 13–16, here 14.

234 

 Bruno Marques

When the first tendencies of abstractionism arose during the first decades of the 20th Century, the pictorial, as an autonomous and self-regulated system,16 claims an exemplary role in society as a whole, expressing the utopian belief in aesthetics’ ability to transform ethics. At its limit, painting, no longer imitating reality, summons to itself the ability to create the real (see col. fig. 7). In Doubles Pinturas Negras #2 and #4 (Double Black Paintings #2 and #4, 1998) or in the series of painted glass, Glass Paintings #1 (1998) and Large Glass, White and Red (1998), surfaces of plain colours painted on glass or including other building materials from the industrial area of construction help highlight optical effects (light variations, transparencies, gloss and reflectivity) combined with figures of spatiality that conjure up the infinite (the window, the mirror, the abyss). In these abstract polyptychs (which look like solar panels), Cabrita Reis puts in opposition easel painting and the essence of painting seen as poetic power. In the neutral intensity of industrial chromaticism or monochrome it is no longer the tactility that defines the perception of the images but rather the display of its presentation. While merging with elements of the surrounding real space itself (which includes the spectator), they create a disorientation regarding the boundaries between one and the other. The notion of painting as an opening to another world is replaced by a mirroring obstruction,17 triggering an ambiguity between substance and immateriality, between real and image, which allows a thin and frail frontier to be set between the sphere of the virtual and the sphere of the actual: space appears reflected in painting as a representation form, thus creating a paradox – the viewer is simultaneously inside and outside what he sees.18 From 1998 on, still in the domain of the City, in whose suburbs Cabrita Reis finds a prolific laboratory for experimenting with materials and construction processes, series such as Dans les villes (In the Cities) and Cidades Cegas (Blind Cities) find their main compositional mechanism in collage. Houses, walls and towers are the building archetypes with an evident use of an assortment of potentially precarious materials such as brick or plywood, aluminium or asphalted fabric,

16  See: Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, MA and London 1996, 154; Rosalind Krauss, “Poststructuralism and Deconstruction”, in: Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, New York 2004, 40–48, here 40. 17  Pedro Cabrita Reis, “Pedro Cabrita Reis: Blind sein, kann ein sehr reiches sehen bedeuten” [interview conducted by Doris Von Drathen], in: Kunstforum International, 2001, no. 157 (November–December), 200–211, here 208. 18  On the connection between mirror and utopia, see: Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, trans. Jay Miskowiec, in: Diacritics, 16, 1986, no. 1 (Spring): 22–27. Available online: http://web. mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf (accessed 27 July 2015).



Utopian Dimensions in Pedro Cabrita Reis 

 235

tape or telephone wire, recalling the repertoire of the unknown builders of slum dwellings19 or even the typical terrace houses in some Lisbon neighbourhoods (so familiar to the artist). But in the face of this unsettling familiarity,20 related to the Freudian concept of the uncanny, we find mysterious and inscrutable spaces spying on the viewer like “watchtowers” or hiding from him like “bunkers”,21 as if setting him aside as an outcast or a homeless person. At the same time, in these deaf homes, windows lose their function, as they do not show anything. Cabrita Reis uses this blindness as an invitation to an introspective gaze, a metaphor of the search for inner enlightenment (see col. fig. 8). While the processes and the scars of the construction are ostensible, in the name of the “eternal love for the beauty implied in chaos” or the “hypnotic attraction for instability”,22 we find a simple and mundane beauty rooted in these unexpected, imaginative and improvised solutions. The pragmatic empiricism of the spontaneous slum constructions seems to assert itself against the universalist, utopian, mystical, visionary or socially committed rationalism of constructivism and its European followers tied to abstractionisms from both sides of the Atlantic. After the intuited absence that dwells in each unknown house in Cabrita Reis’ blind cities, an elegiac dimension emerges in which the attraction for the monument becomes an expression of solitude and melancholy. Following this path, a permanent recycling of ruins also becomes visible in a series such as Catedral (Cathedral, 1999): adding itself to the space of the museum, the temple rises in an unfinished state from the ground between its own vestigial form and its continuous rebuilding. Disclaiming the transcendental dimension of great heights, Cabrita Reis challenges the childish fear which entrusts to a greater and higher power the responsibility of watching over our safety. The artist refuses the verticality of the old Gothic cathedrals, rendering them horizontal. Using walls of a human scale, Cabrita Reis suggests that the place of God can only be “down here”, “inside ourselves”,23 matching an image of a temple to be built with another of an art that is on the same plane as the subject-creator. On the one hand, Cabrita Reis restores the sanctified dimension associated with art, while on the other he supports or reverses the network of relations he

19  Bruno Corà, “Pedro Cabrita Reis: Conjuntos de lugares onde o encontrar”, in: Lóránd Hegyi et al., Pedro Cabrita Reis, 39–42, here 39. 20  Triggered by a process of transference using recognisable objects. 21  Fernandes, “O construtor de lugares”, 224. 22  Cabrita Reis, “Attrazioni ipnotiche per l’instabilità”, 35. 23  Cabrita Reis, “Pedro Cabrita Reis: Blind sein”, 208.

236 

 Bruno Marques

has designated. With this action, he reverses the hierarchy that regulates the dichotomy established in the Middle Ages between the space immediately associated with humans and the divine space.24 With a surgical approach to the notion of heterotopia conceptualised by Michel Foucault in “Des Espaces autres” (Of Other Spaces), we can appreciate how Cabrita Reis can overlap, in a single real space, several places that would be incompatible by themselves: the architecture of the Museum, the symbolic role of the Cathedral and the deconstructive/reconstructive purposes of the contemporary sculptural installation. To describe a type of heterotopia marked by the overlapping of several strange or conflicting spaces in a single real space, Foucault mentions the example of the Garden: in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. […] The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).25

Among a multitude of interpretations, Utopia can also be perceived from a religious standpoint as something that shifts between nostalgia for a sort of Arcadian Golden Age that is purely imagined (as a myth) – possibly with the Garden of Eden as one of its avatars – and a supernatural faith in the fulfilment, beyond our time on earth, of the biblical promise of an eternally happy life. After Cabrita Reis’ inhospitable cities, the gardens follow in 2000. The series True Gardens (see col. fig. 9) uses fluorescent light tubes over flat wooden structures or over plinths made of brick (True Gardens #2 (Stockholm), 2001). Considered one of the great questions and mysteries of painting, the use of light, representing the “idea of illumination”, does not merely point at the work of art as a “spiritual passage to a higher stage of knowledge and wisdom”.26 As the space-generating energy source, light is also taken as a structuring element while at the same time sets of mirrors in indoor courtyards allow the interior to dream it is the exterior (True Gardens # 1 (Crestet), 2000). Mistaking memory for imagination, these gardens

24  According to medieval cosmological theories of Christendom, heavenly places were in opposition to earthly places. 25  Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, 25. 26  Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, Pedro Cabrita Reis. O que resta de um sopro há muito extinto, Alfragide 2006, 17.



Utopian Dimensions in Pedro Cabrita Reis 

 237

live in a twofold interior space: they are both inside the building and inside us. Highlighting its natural artificiality, Cabrita Reis demonstrates that the garden in modern times is the subway, par excellence. Nostalgically, before a nature that has been forever lost as a reference, these interior gardens render tangible an “open wound that is yet to be closed”.27 For if, for the artist, the “city in itself is the quintessence of human presence”28 and the place of the human is not in nature, the self-awareness of a second, artificial, nature that defines him is nonetheless still a sort of nostalgia for the original. Following this, come the monstrous towers and mazes made of bricks which erect dark and threatening spaces. Given the old rivalry between the arts, as a painter and a sculptor Cabrita Reis aims to subdue the surrounding architecture, invading it, tampering with it, making it disappear behind new walls. In D’après Piranesi (2001; see col. fig. 10), the final result is an airtight space, seemingly underground, similar to an 18th-Century dungeon. With Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–1799) and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 -1778) forms the famous 18th-Century triad of visionary architects. Only a few of his projects were carried out, all in the later stages of his career. His most important work was a series of etchings he made starting in 1741. Among his most notable prints is the series entitled Carceri (Prisons). Internal passages such as stairs, ramps and bridges of a colossal architectural complex coexist in an apparently continuous, infinite and underground space. For Manfredo Tafuri, [i]n these etchings the space of the building – the prison – is an infinite space. What has been destroyed is the center of that space, signifying the correspondence between the collapse of ancient values, of the ancient order, and the “totality” of the disorder. […] And Piranesi translates into images not a reactionary criticism of the social promises of the Enlightenment, but a lucid prophecy of what society, liberated from the ancient values and their consequent restraints, will have to be.29

Tafuri speaks of exceptional structures which represent the ambition to build “perfect” structures for the “perfect” utopia. In these prints, Ancient Rome is not just converted to a collection of shapes reflecting “nostalgic ideologies and revolutionary expectations”. It is also a “myth to be contested, all forms of classical

27  “The loss of nature is a wound, still, or forever, to be closed. To be healed. Only artists can do it; in a manner, I suppose, very desperate”. Cabrita Reis, “A Conversation with Pedro Cabrita Reis”, 62. 28  Pedro Cabrita Reis, “Pedro Cabritas Reis” [interview conducted by Mark Gisbourne], in: Contemporary, 2002, no. 46 (December), 66–71, here 71. 29  Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta, Cambridge, MA and London 1976, 18.

238 

 Bruno Marques

derivation are treated as mere fragments, as deformed symbols, as hallucinating organisms of an ‘order’ in a state of decay”, foretelling that the ideal of totality and universality will go into “crisis”30 – an accusation that unreason is nothing if not the inevitable product of reason’s excessive and monstrous power in its obsessive search for the perfect city. If Cabrita Reis, in this affront to the architecture of the museum, uses this visionary architect’s model, the paradoxical opening of the prison to infinite space makes it coincide with human existence itself. With this gesture, the Portuguese artist opens himself up to the paradox of the accomplished utopia, where the impossible spaces dreamed up by Piranesi can finally be found (albeit on a different scale) with phenomenological thickness in a “sculptural installation” that radically effaces the space where it is housed. This new redesigned space – now obscure and hidden and in strong contrast to the expositive neutrality of the white cube – is seen as a means to redefine itself as an offer of a new relationship between architecture and work of art as transformative energy that undermines its own pre-existent conditions (see col. fig. 10). In 2003, Cabrita Reis was invited to exhibit at the 50th Venice Biennale by the Biennale commissioners and the Portuguese representation. In the Giardini, inside a blind artist’s pavilion that heralded darkness, visitors found hundreds of fluorescent tubes that disturbed the strict rigour of the geometrical interweaving of the huge grid that supported them. Anticipating their collapse, Absent Names (see col. fig. 11) echoes a melancholic return to modernist paradigms. The regulating purpose of the structural austerity and the dazzling energy of electric light when brought to the limit produces a strange mixture of cruelty and redemptive beauty. The repelling aggressiveness of an industrial colour combined with the nervous sound of the air-conditioning freezing the atmosphere results in a tense tranquillity. But in this frozen tomb, a mausoleum enclosing an Era, the metaphor of inner enlightenment emerges once more. In other words, touched by the aura of a secular “chapel”,31 Cabrita Reis metaphorically built a temple, restoring a sacred, ancient function of art, on behalf of an intellectual and emotional ascetic state, at a time when the artist admittedly identifies himself with the figure of the “monk” and the “visionary”.32

30  Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 14. 31  Cabrita Reis, “Uma conversa no campo”, 79. 32  “It’s about becoming a monk. […] It’s an image. In the sense that you can imagine a monk building a garden in the desert. Knowing exactly where to put the trees. Or maybe not. No, perhaps not a monk after all. Better said, a visionary, someone who knows where the water comes from just by looking through the shadow of a stone in the sand. That’s what an artist is. Someone who knows by looking through”. Cabrita Reis, “A Conversation with Pedro Cabrita Reis”, 63.



Utopian Dimensions in Pedro Cabrita Reis 

 239

In the Compounds series (started in 2005), monolithic structures of metal or marble are reminiscent of the historical and conventional semantics of the facades of modernist architecture – they appear to be extensions of both Grid Paintings (2006–2010) and Building # 07 (see col. fig. 12), a series of abstract drawings that at a distance appear three-dimensional perspectives of buildings. Some of them, like Compound # 4, refract light, appearing lighter from a certain angle as if they were a simple net filtering the surroundings. Reconfiguring the surrounding space, a kaleidoscopic pattern emerges through its rectangular structure, generating optical effects (illusions of movement) similar to the op incursions of modernist painting. Others, of a more monolithic nature and evoking the rigidity of the steel grid, can be mistaken for models of skyscrapers. Stripped down, they are ambivalently in the ante (at the project stage or already under construction as part of the structure’s skeleton) and in the post (as a result of erosion or cataclysm). This highlights the notion of an embargoed work – a sign of repentance, of unsustainability, failed promise or apocalyptic fire dissolving everything – and the paradox of the ruin of something left unfinished. Swiftly, an architecture of the future transforms into an image of the past. These skinned structures can be interpreted as bone remains corroded by time. But when read as ruins, they become potential material for actions of collective remembrance, namely on the role of the utopian impulse associated with the reformist ideals and construction practices that prevailed during the first half of the 20th Century. The series’ progression hints at a combination game of ways to change the grid, recalling minimalist research on this topic. Here, repetition is used to shape something real, or past, that is seen as traumatic. Looking through it and at the series as a whole, several locations follow one after the other, a stranger to each other, where each and every context can thus operate as a stage for a long, ongoing mourning, where the carcass of the deceased insists on returning, deploying itself on the ground, with no regard to its surroundings, drawing only attention to its presence.

Conclusion As opposed to the teleology of progress (which appears to be associated with industrial urbanity), the work of Cabrita Reis fosters a certain archaism, a recol­ lection that involves a “cipher of archetypal meaning” typical of a “mythical

240 

 Bruno Marques

time”.33 At the same time, it is full of echoes from paradigmatic cases of the history of art and architecture which present a strong utopian dimension (Piranesi, the formal restraint of modernist painting, the Russian Constructivists, the modernist towers, etc.). While it is possible to unveil a utopian space in his work,34 he acts in different ways, perhaps even in opposition to such references. The opportunity to foresee the present as a ruin through a primordial action dedicated to construction in order to rebuild the world and to reinstate an original harmony leads us to think in a circular movement that is regressive, suspended, mnemonic and superimposed rather than in the linear and progressive time (ultimately almost amnesiac) of modernity and especially modernism, which prevents an exemplary prediction of the future, but at the same time does not restrict his, let us say visionary, ambition. In the face of the infamous art/construction/utopia equation radicalised during the first half of the 20th Century in opposition “to the final political act of collective space arrangement”,35 Cabrita Reis has devised a meditative and fictional architectural parallel instead; a poetic and mythical revelation about our place in the world; an intuition of the truth that arises from a metaphorical space wishing to be anterior and posterior to where it is presented. Thus, it is a work that is both utopian and atopic which, while seeking the absolute, yearns to replace the entire world.

33  Almeida, Pedro Cabrita Reis, 11–12. 34  Almeida, Pedro Cabrita Reis, 10, 24. 35  Pedro Cabrita Reis, “The Polish Notes”, in: António Lobo Antunes et al., Pedro Cabrita Reis: One After Another, 20–21, here 21.

Joshua Dittrich

Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography Utopian Fragments in Hannah Höch’s Aus einem ethnographischen Museum [To] liberate[] from the past the still possible future within it only by placing both in the present […]. – Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit

Time may not be the most obvious category to come to mind upon viewing the “ethnographic” photomontages that Hannah Höch created in the late 1920s. Yet, as I argue here for a link between the discourse of primitivism, the form of photomontage and the idea of utopia, I would suggest that time can serve as the guiding conceptual thread. For primitivism – beyond its conventional definition as the problematic appropriation of “primitive” non-European styles by European artists – is necessarily also a problem of time. In the early 20th Century, as Europe begins to lose its inner sense of chronology, of historical progress and temporal coherence, European artists seek to graft their fractured present onto “timeless”, “primordial” or “primitive” forms. The language of art history of the early 20th Century articulates a theory of vision that is derived implicitly from a notion of historical or temporal rupture. Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) posits a rift between the history of art and the history of vision, arguing that, as different historical epochs come to see differently, their art changes accordingly.1 Wölfflin thus opens up the possibility that art history might not be a question of linear, technical development at the level of representation, but rather a contingent effect of the evolution of vision itself. Following up on this latent possibility in Wölfflin’s argument are the art historians Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, who argue for notions of “artistic volition”2 and “abstractive urges”3 respectively, and thus shift the emphasis of art history away from continuous historical narrative towards ahistorical, recurring formal and stylistic patterns that correspond to

1  Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger, New York 1950, 11–13. 2  Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, Vienna 1901, 209–218. 3  Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock, Chicago 1997, 4–6.

242 

 Joshua Dittrich

social and psychological needs. In other words, there is a diffuse recognition in visual discourse around 1900 that (the history of) art is not driven by tradition or purely technical questions, but rather by the ever-evolving needs of the present. As European visual artists initiate the movements in formal experimentation that we collectively call modernism, and, more or less simultaneously, the forms of cultural appropriation that we call primitivism, I would suggest that they do so with an inchoate awareness that vision itself has been set free of history and that new visual forms cannot be derived from tradition, but must be created in the temporal gap where history has stopped and the present moment begins. Following Ernst Bloch, the essential impulse of any utopian project proceeds from recognising the historically compact opacity, the “non-contemporaneity”, of precisely such a present moment. Bloch reminds us that “[n]ot all people exist in the same Now”, by which he means that the seeming self-evidence of the cultural present represents a contradictory, overlapping jumble of historical currents, personal experience, collective fantasy and cultural imagination, all permeated by unstable and largely unconscious reserves of revolutionary potential.4 Utopian thinking strives for a new mode of temporality through which the diffuse revolutionary potential might unfold without the ideological blockages, historical repressions and economic contradictions that Bloch locates in the Now. It is one of the paradoxes of primitivist discourse that, precisely in attempting to free itself from history by immersing itself in the immediacy of the moment and the primordiality of “primitive” imaginations, primitivism blinds itself to the social and economic underpinning of its imagination: European colonialism. The Now of early 20th-Century European visual culture would be unthinkable without acknowledging the complex role that colonialism and the art and culture of the colonial periphery played for the development of European art.5 Indeed, from the perspective of colonialism, European art had ceased to be strictly European by the late 19th Century, for its visual imagination had been steeped in a colonialist worldview that placed it in direct, if hierarchically skewed contact with nearly all the peoples on the face of the globe. Modern European art was unfolding in a colonialist, proto-globalised world, and the complex forms of

4  Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice, Cambridge 1991, 96. Bloch invents the concept of non-contemporaneity specifically to explain the social, economic and imaginary remnants of Germany’s pre-capitalist past that contributed to its fascist reaction (as opposed to socialist revolution) to the crises of industrial capitalism. In this essay, I extend Bloch’s notion of non-contemporaneity to include colonialism and Weimar Germany’s post-colonial imaginary of the 1920s. 5  For a succinct, but comprehensive account of visual culture and colonialism in the German context, see: Volker Langbehn, “Picturing Race: Visuality and German Colonialism”, in: Volker Langbehn (ed.), German Colonialism, Visual Culture and Modern Memory, London 2010, 1–33.



Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography 

 243

artistic experimentation and cultural questioning that we associate with modernism were permeated by a Self/Other dichotomy according to which Europe’s self-­ definition as a cultural centre was increasingly dependent on its colonial periphery. The primitivist/modernist striving for immediacy of expression and purity of form precisely contradicts the increasingly rarefied geopolitical conditions of European social life, disavowing, if not outright denying, the role of the colonial Other as the hidden mediator of modernist immediacy. Primitivism thus misrecognises its discontent with modern European civilisation because the utopian vision that it attempts to construct (through colonial and primitivist fantasy) represents in fact the most advanced stage of European civilisation, not an alternative to it. If, as we see in Bloch and in the art-historical sketch I offer above, the continuity of historical time can no longer be taken as a given, then the present has the ambiguous potential to regress into a pseudo-past under the illusion that it is entering a “revolutionary” or “utopian” future. In Blochian terms, primitivism would represent precisely such a regressive blockage of the Now, another way in which the past cannot flow into the future, but stagnates in the manifold imaginative and social contradictions of the present. In turning to the ethnographic series of Hannah Höch, I argue that we encounter an artist who has a deep awareness of primitivism’s relation to the compounded nature of the present moment, and uses the medium of photo­ montage precisely to reveal the ways in which primitivism seeks access to cultural and historical realms that it is at the same time incapable of understanding. Höch’s ironic and critical treatment of the formal and aesthetic aspects of primitivism explicitly confronts the fascination with the Other to open up a space of critique that locates primitivism’s basis explicitly in the unstable social reality of modern Europe. Yet that “space of critique” is itself constituted in and by the visual field of photomontage. Höch does not presume to have surpassed primitivism and found some higher intellectual or artistic insight on which to base a critique. Even as she reflects on the construction of the “primitive” and the role it plays in European art’s self-understanding, her work does not offer an independent and unambiguous meaning that stands above and beyond it as a political statement or social commentary. Rather, Höch’s photomontages contest the persistence into the 1920s of the discourse of primitivism (and its socio-political ramifications) within and against the confines of that very discourse. Her work is utopian not in the sense that it imagines an ideal or alternate trajectory of her cultural moment. Such a move would ultimately recapitulate the same structure of primitivist fantasy that abandons the present in favour of timeless primordiality. Rather, the utopian element resides precisely in her visualising the contradictions and repressions of the Now, the first step toward freeing the present of its historically backward imagination.

244 

 Joshua Dittrich

Primitivist Photomontage: Postcards from the Contact Zone Before I can proceed further, I need to address the apparent contradiction of bringing the terms primitivism and photomontage together in the first place. It is not at all self-evident to use primitivism to characterise Höch’s work, and some art historians prefer to avoid the “loaded term”6 altogether. Trained in graphic and applied arts, Höch came of age artistically through her association with Berlin Dada. Although Berlin Dada was deeply influenced by German expressionism and its primitivist imagination, the movement saw itself as radically opposed to any pre-existing artistic schools and ideas, believing in a new conception of art as an anarchic and ultimately utopian process of social disruption and trans­ formation. From such a perspective, even the most sophisticated developments in pre-war painting (including primitivist movements such as Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism) would have seemed hopelessly outdated to an artist like Höch. In the late 1910s, she invented (or co-invented with Raoul Hausmann) a visual alternative to painting, namely photomontage, which involves composing pictures through the cutting and re-assembly of pre-existing (and in most cases, commercially mass-produced) photographs. Photomontage thus thrives on fragmentation, irony and the reassembly of images that precisely the author herself did not produce organically, but merely manipulates second-hand and thus marks Dada’s decisive break from the privileged modernist/primitivist media of painting and sculpture. And so, in the mid-1920s, when Höch begins work on Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From an Ethnographic Museum), a series of approximately twenty photomontages which recombine images of African masks, ­European nudes, travel reportage and commercial advertising into grotesquely sculptural mash-ups that hover between celebration and mockery, naïveté and irony, feminist critique and post-Dada whimsy – in other words, when Höch devotes an entire series to the explicit sampling and scrambling of images of the non-European “primitive” and does so in a medium that is aesthetically and tech-

6  See: Brett M. van Hoesen, “Weimar Revisions of Germany’s Colonial Past: The Photomontages of Hannah Höch and László Moholy-Nagy”, in: Langbehn (ed.), German Colonialism, 197–219, here 199. Van Hoesen avoids the term “primitivism” because its connotations to expressionism (and the movement’s implicit colonialist imagination) contradict what she sees as Höch’s explicitly anti-colonial political position in her montages of the late 1920s. Maud Lavin occasionally uses primitivism to describe Höch’s series, though she emphasises the satirical or ironic citation of the “primitive” mainly insofar as it comments on European gender definitions, but not as a critique of European colonialism. See: Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, New Haven 1993, 159–182.



Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography 

 245

nically opposed to primitivist primordiality – one has to ask if primitivism can still be a viable critical tool. I would argue that it can, and I propose that Mary Louise Pratt’s well-known concept of the “contact zone” can give us a point of departure. The contact zone is a hybrid term Pratt coins from linguistics, ethnography and travel writing to describe “the social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today”.7 What is fascinating about Pratt’s contact zone is that, in the same breath that she acknowledges the crushing forces of colonialism and slavery, she also insists on a kind of genuine encounter and exchange between cultures. That is to say, for Pratt, political power, even as violence, does not impose itself wholesale on the minds of its victims; rather, culture and language always create imaginary spaces of resistance and counter-appropriation which, unevenly structured as they may be, allow something new and dialogical to emerge out of domination. This aspect of the contact zone – “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant group or metropolitan culture” – Pratt calls “transculturation”,8 and I suggest it provides the conceptual link between Höch’s photomontage and primitivism. Viewing Höch’s montages as a visual contact zone allows us a deeper insight into the ambivalence of her own artistic position, for which the visual rhetoric of primitivism becomes an unlikely, but expressive tool. For Höch, as a white German in the 1920s, is both part of a dominant, (formerly) colonising European culture, yet, as a Dada or post-Dada artist, acutely aware of the links between colonialism, capitalism and violence, whether that violence manifests itself as world war or simply as poverty, inflation and unemployment at home. In a text of decisive importance for Berlin Dada and for progressive art of the post-war era more generally, Richard Huelsenbeck’s “Dadaistisches Manifest” (“First German Dada Manifesto”, 1918) states: “The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash”.9 Art, in other words, will bear the permanent scars of the explosions of war and the crashes of the post-war economy, and

7  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York 2008, 4. 8  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 9  Richard Huelsenbeck, “First German Dada Manifesto (‘Collective Dada Manifesto’)”, trans. Ralph Mannheim, in: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, New Edition, Malden 2003, 257–259, here 257.

246 

 Joshua Dittrich

rather than try to assert the integrity of its vision against social and economic chaos, art should aim to foreground precisely its “visibly shattered” fragility as a sign of the war’s devastating effects. Toning down the more strident and anarchic aspects of Huelsenbeck’s text, we find the idea that Dada, and politically engaged art more broadly, must acknowledge and struggle against the chaos of the social world itself, and in this sense, art is conceived of as a kind of contact zone in that it seeks to bring the European imagination into contact with the repressed violence of its own mechanisms of domination, that is, capitalism and imperialism, which backfired so brutally in the war. Furthermore, as a woman artist (arguably the only woman artist of significance in the male-dominant Berlin Dada) who at the same worked in commercial publishing doing design work for women’s magazines catering to the so-called “New Woman” of the 1920s, Höch was keenly aware of the ambivalent and precarious position of women in her society.10 Höch’s own role in Berlin Dada has certainly been cast as a subordinate one.11 Despite having invented photo­montage and being one of the moving forces behind Berlin Dada culminating in the First International Dada-Fair in June 1920, her role in Dada has been consistently downplayed, particularly by Hausmann himself. One telling example is the misspelling of her name in Der Dada, a journal edited by Hausmann which appeared in three issues in 1919–1920.12 Hausmann did not ask Höch to contribute anything to the journal, but upon receiving a written request from their mutual friend and fellow Dadaist Johannes Baader, Höch produced a woodcut which appeared in the journal’s second issue under the wrong name “M. Höch”. In her personal copy of the journal, Höch crossed out the M, wrote an H over it and added the marginal note “H. mutilated again”. Höch’s seemingly exaggerated commentary demands a strong reading of this editorial oversight: given that Hausmann was in fact the editor overseeing the journal and that the second issue contained only eight pages of material, the misspelling – whether deliberate or unconscious – of his long-time lover’s and collaborator’s name could be read as evidence of a desire to distort or minimise Höch’s contribution to Hausmann’s work in the journal and perhaps in the development of Dada more generally. Bearing all this in mind, I argue that Höch’s use of images of the “primitive” in her ethnographic series (a use which involves cut-ups or “mutilations” of both white and black female

10  See: Lavin, Cut With the Kitchen Knife, 1–12. 11  See: Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, Minneapolis 2009, 298n1. 12  This affair is documented in: Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage, vol. 1, bk. 2: 1919–1920, Berlin 1989, 530, 618.



Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography 

 247

bodies) is already internally marked by irony and contradiction: she indulges a kind of primitivist fascination, but does not repress the violent and unilateral structure of the relation because she simultaneously identifies with the “primitive” and invokes its image as an obscure symbol of her own marginal and subordinate status as a woman and woman-artist. Höch “primitivises” the medium of photomontage by translating the primitivist fantasy of exotic primordiality into the fundamental elements specific to her medium (photographic fragments), while at the same time transforming primitivist discourse from a one-way fantasy into an open-ended, dialogic form that refracts, rather than disavows, the levels of difference, inequality and alterity invoked by the figure of the “primitive”. The “primitive” thus represents a complex web of exploitative cultural, social and economic relations (European Self vs. the non-European Other; masculinity vs. femininity; modern commercial and mass culture vs. colonial exploitation) projected onto a single imaginative and visual plane. Höch’s montages use the image of the “primitive” symbolically and critically to invoke these contradictions and inequalities, while at the same time rendering them strangely beautiful (as in her 1929 piece Fremde Schönheit (Strange Beauty) which I discuss below). I argue that this stylistic interplay between critique and beauty, between ironic distance and visual fascination is itself an effect of the formal interplay of images of the European and the “primitive” that Höch achieves in her hybrid figures. Pratt writes that the contact zone “is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect”.13 The literal contact zone created through the medium of photomontage (as fragments of the most heterogeneous images and contexts come into contact with each other within the space of the paper) produces a discursive contact zone in which primitivism is re-imagined in part as the fantasy of a culturally or temporally distant Other, but also, and more significantly, as an irrepressible cipher of the social alienations and contradictions of the Weimar Republic.

Making Beauty Strange Höch’s collection Aus einem ethnographischen Museum leaves behind a number of the dizzying formal aspects of her earlier Dada montages and represents a new kind of artistic desire on her part to experiment with and against tradition at one

13  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.

248 

 Joshua Dittrich

and the same time. Looking back on her ethnographic series in a 1960 interview, Höch says: “The flourishing at that time of ethnographic research brought home only the ‘primitives’ of African sculpture in particular. The German expressionists testified to that in many ways in their oil paintings. It was more fun for me to experiment with this material in a less serious way, but nevertheless as strikingly as possible”.14 Höch deliberately tempers the extremes of her Dada photomontages, experimenting playfully, yet incisively with the primitivist legacy of expressionism. I argue that this reworking of primitivism is crucial for understanding how Höch develops photomontage from a technique of Dadaist phantasmagoria into a medium of deliberate, if open-ended political self-reflection. In contrast to the explicitly politicised photomontages of Heartfield and Grosz, the restrained primitivism of Höch’s museum series creates a different kind of political dialogue marked by persistent questioning as opposed to ideological certainty. In 1929’s Fremde Schönheit (see col. fig. 13), we see the body of a traditional European nude with a “primitive” head imposed on it, the hybrid figure reclining/hovering in mid-air against a background of streaky orange and blue water­colours. The pasted-on head is dark-skinned and evidently non-European, though I think one would be hard-pressed to say whether it is a mask (possibly of African origin), some kind of doll or puppet, or a photograph of an actual person. This ambiguity is perhaps due to the face’s eyes, themselves a separate photographic fragment of a pair of aged, squinting eyes magnified under a pair of thick glasses. In any case, the explicit blending of “primitive” and European features in the same figure recalls more subtle 19th-Century strategies of blending European and non-European features in the representation of female sexuality, strategies which found their way into classic primitivist paintings of the early 20th Century and which Höch here uses in a striking ironic reversal. 19th-Century painting is, of course, rife with female nudes, often exoticised, in a posture of passive availability very similar to what we see in Fremde Schönheit. In L’Odalisque à l’esclave (Odalisque with Slave, 1839) of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (see col. fig. 14), for example, we see a pale-skinned, light-haired nude reclining in almost the exact same posture (if slightly covered) as Höch’s nude, in a heavily orientalist setting authenticated implicitly by the dark-skinned “slave” (possibly a eunuch) in the background. Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863; see col. fig. 15) presents a nude in an arguably less passive, more challenging posture, but like Ingres’ nude, she is shadowed and, in some way, authenticated by a dark-skinned female attendant. Sandor Gilman has famously demonstrated the ways in which Olympia represents both a repression and a fascination with the

14  Höch quoted in: Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 238n6. Author’s translation.



Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography 

 249

“primitive” and with female sexuality.15 The viewer’s presumably lustful gaze is deflected by the direct stare of the white prostitute (Manet scandalously portrayed a real prostitute in this painting) and her protective, covering gesture onto the seemingly sexually neutral figure of the attendant, whose mere blackness, according to Gilman’s reading of 19th-Century racial and sexual stereotypes, is enough to signify a fantasy of exotic voluptuousness. Despite the attendant being fully clothed and covered both by the textile she holds and the high bed she stands behind, her figure is nude at the imaginative level simply because of her blackness, while the white prostitute’s rather austere nudity becomes wildly erotic and exotic through the proximity to her black counterpart. It is this same disavowed relationship between refined white beauty and “primitive” black sexuality that allows Gilman to suggest that the white woman depicted in Manet’s subsequent Nana (1877; see col. fig. 16) is in fact a black woman in the sense that the stereotypical “primitive” sexualised features of the black female body, namely large and prominent buttocks, have been translated onto the white female body (though concealed under her undergarments). As far as the aesthetic conventions and racial stereotypes of the 19th Century are concerned, Nana is both black and white insofar as she both represents and represses “primitive” sexuality. At the turn of the Century, as primitivist painters stray further and further from the painterly conventions of the nude, such mixed or hybrid figures recur in more explicitly exotic scenarios. Hal Foster has shown that Paul Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau (L’esprit des morts veille) (Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892), Henri Matisse’s Nu Bleu: Souvenir de Biskra (Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra, 1907) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Mädchen unter Japanschirm (Girl under a Japanese Umbrella, 1909) comprise a kind of series of modernist revisions of Olympia which reconcile the figural splitting of the 19th-Century gaze in a single figure, a primitivist fantasy in which white female bodies exude black sexuality through their expressive, exaggerated, “primitive” curves (see col. figs 17–19).16 And so the figure of the black slave or the black attendant from the 19th-Century realist examples is curiously elided in the primitivist ones; the non-European figure is essentially absorbed by the white figure and thus rendered invisible, or only visible insofar as it appears as a white figure and to a white audience that is willing to appreciate its sexuality so long as it is deprived of its troubling, “primitive” racial origins.

15  Sandor Gilman, “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality”, in: Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, Ithaca 1985, 76–108. 16  Hal Foster, “Primitive Scenes”, in: Prosthetic Gods, Cambridge 2004, 1–54.

250 

 Joshua Dittrich

In Fremde Schönheit, Höch literally turns this disavowal on its head. Instead of exoticising the European female body, she leaves it in its conventional form, but rather shockingly affixes a “primitive” head on it, effectively inverting the structure of exoticism and making unmistakably visible the “primitive” elements that artists like Matisse and Kirchner simultaneously borrow and conceal in their works. The pasted-on head refuses to let the aesthetic elide the racial, while at the same time the head interrupts the sexual availability and passivity of the nude as such. In a reversal of the Nana effect, Höch’s use of the “primitive” paradoxically de-nudes this nude and reminds us of the ways that Western sexuality’s subordination of women has been historically linked to racial subordination as well: woman as sexual(ised) Other. Rather than using primitivist motifs with the contradictory effect of eliding the “primitive”, Höch uses primitivism to bring the Other back into explicit contact with a Western consciousness so willing both to exploit it and overlook it. The pasted-on eyes, myopically squinting under heavy glasses, may symbolise precisely the Western gaze’s inability or unwillingness to perceive the racial hierarchies that underpin its concepts and standards of female beauty, and indeed to acknowledge the whole colonial apparatus that presents the Other to it as “primitive”, passive and appropriable. While it is certainly true that Höch still makes use of the “primitive” for a kind of shock value (and arguably still preserves a trace of the tokenising, exoticising gesture of earlier European primitivists), her use of the “primitive” operates more forcefully as a biting critique of primitivism itself. Photomontage as a form allows Höch to refract the mediated images of the “primitive” onto a figure that calls attention to the in­stability of the figure itself; a hybrid that flaunts, rather than represses its hybrid status; a racially split beauty ideal that will not be reconciled into visible whiteness and invisible blackness.

Un-Masking the Ethnographic Portrait If Fremde Schönheit represents Höch’s use of photomontage to expose the contradictions of primitivist painting, then Mischling (Halfbreed, 1924; see col. fig. 20) marks a double intervention into the aesthetic discourse around African sculpture and the genre of ethnographic photography. Playing on a similar inversion of formal, racial and aesthetic conventions, the hybridised, cut-up portrait in Mischling both embodies and contests the contradictions of primitivist discourse. We see a black woman’s face in a three-quarter view with a crudely cut-out fragment



Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography 

 251

of a white woman’s mouth pasted in where the black mouth should be.17 The primly shut, lip-sticked lips of the white face, slightly askew and too small in relation to the other features, stand in jarring contrast to the black woman’s broad nose, wide cheekbones and open, distant gaze. Each cheek bears what appears to be a vertical scar, symmetrically placed to either side of the nose. Höch appears to have added her own “scar” to the photograph, cutting a jagged line that runs from the woman’s chin along the length of her jawline, visually marking the head as distinct from the neck below it. Höch is working with an ethnographic portrait collected in her mass media scrapbook (see col. fig. 21), and in comparing the two images we can see this cut especially clearly. Around the woman’s neck we see a beaded necklace, but note that her bare shoulders appear to have been cropped off to either side of the necklace, where a sepia background now surrounds the figure. Furthermore, the head itself has been significantly cropped, Höch having excised everything beyond the woman’s hairline (including her long, braided hair and left ear), setting the face against the same sepia background and adding white wisps of color along the hairline that potentially suggest a headscarf or wig. Setting aside for a moment the complex interplay between the expressive look of the eyes and silence of the closed lips, what Höch achieves formally in this image is the rendering of a photograph into a mask. The three-dimensionality of the human figure is reduced to a purely frontal, facial surface, the cut-off head and shoulders rendering the depth and mobility of the figure into a pillar-like stasis. Höch thus transforms the face of a real African person into a “primitive” African mask, and in doing so, engages another key aspect of the discourse of European primitivism. For the African mask was arguably the privileged sculptural form that garnered the fascination of French and German primitivist circles, as well as the physical object and metaphor onto which primitivist fantasy most consistently projected itself.18 In all the various accounts of the “discovery” of

17  The original photograph, which Höch collected in her mass media “scrapbook” (Hannah Höch, Album, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004), appears in a 1927 issue of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, which problematises the dating of Höch’s montage to 1924. Henrick Stahr includes the full-page spread of the issue of BIZ in which this photograph appears in: Fotojournalismus zwischen Exotismus und Rassismus: Darstellungen von Schwarzen und Indianern in Foto-Text Artikeln deutscher Wochenillustrierter 1919–1939, Hamburg 2004, 141. 18  For a discussion of contemporary African and African-American artists who seek to subvert the fraught legacy of the African mask, see: Melanie Ulz, “Masking the White Gaze: Towards a Postcolonial Art History of Masks”, trans. Jean Hamilton-Bick, in: Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier (eds), Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines, Amsterdam 2013, 51–68. It is worth mentioning that Höch’s photomontages in fact anticipate many of the stylistic and formal strategies that Ulz analyzes in works and exhibitions of the 1990s and 2000s.

252 

 Joshua Dittrich

African art by European artists and critics, it is the African mask that stands pars pro toto for all the arts of abstract and timeless Otherness.19 What is crucial to emphasise in all these accounts is: (1) the isolation of the mask as an art-object – whether physically hung in the atelier of a Parisian painter, or aesthetically grasped as a purely formal construction; (2) the projection of a fantasy of Otherness (timelessness, grandeur, abstraction, uninhibited feelings, and so on) onto the isolated object; (3) the persistent denial of individuality with which the mask is associated (as if this were not the work of an individual artist from a specific cultural context, but rather “African” in a vague, quasi-mystical sense). We now know that the traditional European conventions of framing and presenting a work of art – and in particular the modernist emphasis on the work’s purely formal, “constructive” dimensions – in fact violate the essential qualities of the African mask, namely that it be glimpsed in motion, as a part of the wearer’s larger costume and in the context of music, dance and the elaborate social and religious interaction of the ritual.20 In their intended context, African masks attain artistic significance not through the isolation and stasis of museum-like display, but precisely in and through their social use. Moreover, the meaning and spiritually communicative power of certain African masks depend precisely on the individual social status of their owners, as well as the whole ancestral history that stands behind an inherited mask.21 In other words, the notion that the mask is impersonal, without history and free of the influence of its social context is as much a projection of the European mind as is the notion that the mask offers a direct connection to “primitive” instinctual or mystical forces. Bearing this in mind, we can turn back to Mischling and read the otherwise inexplicable cut along the woman’s/mask’s jawline as the trace of precisely the violation of the unique qualities and local context of an African mask when it becomes an object of primitivist fascination. The scar is the visible trace of the invisible violence done to masks and other works of African sculpture as they are displaced from the original context of their use and converted into art objects for Western eyes. The cut seems to suggest that the more we contemplate the mask, the more we also deface it; and here it is worth remarking on the seem-

19  The volume Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History (Jack Flam and Miriam Deutsch (eds), Berkeley 2003), traces the impact of the mask-encounter narrative for the development of Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism through documentary texts by artists such as de Vlaminck, Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Macke. Yve-Alain Bois links the African mask to the aesthetic discourse around Cubism in the works of Carl Einstein and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in: “Kahnweiler’s Lesson”, in: Painting as Model, Cambridge 1990, 65–97. 20  Frank Willett, African Art, London 2002 (rev. ed.), 160. 21  Willett, African Art, 166.



Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography 

 253

ingly obvious fact that, for all the visual fascination of masks, for all they seem to reveal to the European imagination, they at the same time conceal a person beneath their surface. The mask, whether as a metaphor or a formal construction, presents itself as a visible object only insofar as it simultaneously effaces its wearer, or its maker, from view. Moreover, given the duality of the central image of Mischling as both mask and ethnographic portrait, Höch suggests that both primitivism and ethnography share the same underlying and perniciously appropriative structure. By working so dramatically with a single ethnographic portrait, Höch raises the question of who the real individual person might be on the other side of the mask and what forms of fantasy and fascination might also animate the ostensibly sober and objective knowledge produced by ethnography. According to the visual rhetoric of ethnographic photography (which aligns with a whole tradition in turn-of-the-Century European visual culture of presenting “primitive” peoples as they “really” are),22 the original photograph on which Mischling is based would imply the representative authenticity of the African woman it depicts as well as the transparency of the ideological and technological framework that captures her image. In transforming the “naturalness” of the photograph into a mask (not only by cropping off the head and shoulders, but also by adding that final jagged cut along the jawline), Höch reveals the artificiality of the original image itself, implying that the portrait of the African woman depends upon the same qualities of isolation, impersonality and a projection of authenticity as African masks do for European viewers. In effect, Höch makes a mask out of a photograph that is itself already a kind of mask, and the otherwise gratuitous cut shows that primitivism and its scientific counterpart, ethnography, both depend on imaginative mechanisms of projection and appropriation that disfigure their objects precisely as they attempt to represent them. Höch’s pasting-in of a white woman’s mouth enhances the effect of this cut. The mouth presents an ambiguity of possible meanings: as a white European

22  Such forms of exhibition include the large-scale public exhibitions (like the Paris Fair of 1889 or Berlin’s Colonial Week in 1925), human zoos, postcards, popular illustrated journalism and museum displays. On the German Völkerschau in particular, see: Eric Ames, “From the Exotic to the Everyday: The Ethnographic Exhibition in Germany”, in: Vanessa R. Schwarz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, London 2004, 313–327. In addition to Höch’s exposure to ethnography as it appears in the visual culture of her day, she was almost certainly aware of the work of Carl Einstein on African sculpture and, in 1926, made a visit to the Ethnographic Museum in Leiden with Kurt Schwitters. See: Brett M. van Hoesen, “Performing the Culture of Weimar Postcolonialism: Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum and Its Legacy”, in: Dawn Ades, Emily Butler and Daniel F. Herrmann (eds), Hannah Höch, London and Munich 2014, 78–87.

254 

 Joshua Dittrich

mouth, it seems to suggest that it is the European, not the African, who speaks for the meaning of the mask, who utters the final word on its value, which is otherwise understood to be deficient without the authorisation of a white voice. Yet the mouth is quite distinctly closed, as if also to imply that the intrusion of whiteness onto the surface of the mask amounts merely to laying claim to it – a gesture of appropriation like planting a flag in the earth – but the European has nothing to say (that is, cannot understand) her newly claimed property and remains silent about it. The lips also dramatically disrupt the integrity of the woman’s facial expression, reducing her deeply expressive eyes to yet another fragment on a mask-like surface of pasted images. The jarring contrast between those “real” eyes and the pasted mouth further emphasises the rift between the real woman depicted and the European audience who will never see her as she really is.23 Finally the lips are unambiguously feminine and highly stylised, introducing an element of gender play into the racial puzzle, which may well have been Höch’s initial or conscious interest in manipulating the image in this way: to achieve a shock effect by pasting white against black, arresting the viewer’s attention and prompting a critical reflection on the arbitrariness of traditional notions of feminine beauty. What I want to suggest here is that Höch’s montage works on all these levels at once and that, from the perspective of a contact zone (comprised of visual ethnography, primitivist discourse and European gender stereotypes), the work’s multiple valences are not mutually exclusive, but in fact constitutively related. In a collision of the artificiality of ethnographic photography, the formal fascination of the “primitive” mask and a conventional sign of European feminine allure, Höch brings the distant problem of colonialism into contact with the local question of the instability of new gender roles, not exactly equating one with the other, yet suggesting a similar defacing violence at work in both aspects of the hybrid figure. She shows that the supposedly real or authentic position of the “primitive” cannot be simply seen and grasped, but can only appear indirectly, through the prismatic contact zone of its own distorting discourse, a discourse that also implicates the European viewer in its troubling ambiguity. Höch’s achievement in Mischling is thus not to have made a particular political statement about the violence of colonialism or the subordination of women,

23  Here I disagree with Matthew Biro’s reading of Mischling as the “humanizing” depiction of the “uniqueness and particularity of an individual born of ethnically diverse parents” (The Dada Cyborg, 226–227). I would suggest instead that Höch avoids any overt form of political statement (e.g., an attitude of tolerance toward racial mixing) by the more radical claim that, in the contact zone of colonialism, everyone is “racially” mixed at the imaginative level. Höch’s utopian position, then, would be that a truly inclusive politics could only evolve on the basis of that recognition.



Primitivism, Photomontage, Ethnography 

 255

but rather to have shown the unlikely necessity of thinking these two seemingly disparate problems together. She gives the formal possibility inherent to photomontage (namely, to juxtapose and superimpose radically heterogeneous images in a dizzying, multi-scalar flux) an emphatic, if also open-ended political potential. Höch suggests that the European Self and the “primitive” Other can no longer be regarded as distinct, separate entities, but rather as fragments of individuals who interact and overlap in the contact zone of the photomontage. In an oft-cited statement, Höch in fact summed up the essence of her creative work in precisely these terms: “I want to blur the firm boundaries that we as people tend self-assuredly to draw around all that we can achieve”.24 Besides putting into question the formal boundaries of figural representation, the discursive boundaries that mark the “primitive” off from the modern, and the cultural constructions that define gender and beauty, Höch’s montages work at the broadest possible aesthetic level to contest the very notion of “all that we can achieve” [“das uns Erreichbare”] in a work of art. For, albeit in a very productive sense, a montage like Mischling does not achieve anything beyond opening up a dialogue in the language of photomontage. As our gaze is arrested in a complex play of violence and whimsy, the image prompts our critical reflection on the categories that it simultaneously blurs into an indiscernibility that reflects the impossible proximities of the present.

24  This statement appeared in the catalogue of Höch’s first solo exhibition in 1929 in the Dutch Galerie De Bron. See: Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage, vol. 2, bk. 1: 1921–1945, Berlin 1989, 365. Author’s translation.

Experimentation and Urban Space

Kate Armond

A Paper Paradise Ernst Bloch and the Crystal Chain In January 1919 the German architect Bruno Taut proposed a collaborative project for avant-garde architects and artists alike, inviting them to display their work at the Ausstellung für unbekannte Architekten (Exhibition for Unknown Architects) in the April of that year. Visitors to the exhibition were asked for their responses, and Taut continued to value public engagement by working with the Bund für proletarische Kultur (League for Proletarian Culture) in a non-architectural capacity. By December of that year failure to secure influence for his ideas in the areas of art and politics led him to draw together twelve artists from the exhibition to form the exclusive “Gläserne Kette” or “Crystal Chain” brotherhood, sharing their utopian visions by letter.1 Taut wrote under the pseudonym “Glas”, the graphic artist and architect Wenzel Hablik referred to himself as simply “W.H.”, the painter and toymaker Hermann Finsterlin chose the name “Prometh”, whilst the architect brothers Hans and Wassili Luckhardt became “Angkor” and “Zacken”. A desire for secrecy led Taut to request that members return or destroy all contributions in their possession should they decide to leave before the correspondence had run its course. The public glimpsed only carefully selected designs and fragments of prose that were published in Taut’s magazine Frühlicht (Dawn) and the S. Fischer yearbook Die Erhebung (Revolt). Whilst some of their proposals clearly evolved as a response to the war, my analysis will treat the correspondence as evidence of continuity between pre- and post-war expressionist creativity, suggesting that Taut, Hablik and Finsterlin were influenced by the German poet, inventor and architectural writer Paul Scheerbart and by the drawings and theories of the German zoologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel. This essay will then examine the utopian ideas of the Crystal Chain sodality alongside the writing of their peer Ernst Bloch.

1  Iain Boyd Whyte translates the word “Gläserne” as “Crystal” rather than “Glass” in his translation of the letters: Iain Boyd White, The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and his Circle, Massachusetts 1985.

260 

 Kate Armond

Paul Scheerbart, Glass and Technology Bruno Taut’s friendship with Paul Scheerbart is well-documented and the Crystal Chain correspondence reveals that Finsterlin and the Luckhardt brothers were also familiar with his architectural tales.2 Scheerbart’s most important legacy for these individuals is the innovative use of coloured glass and crystalline forms featured in texts such as the 1910 Der Lichtklub von Batavia. Eine Damen-Novellette (The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies’ Novelette), one of his most extravagant celebrations of glass and light.3 The protagonist, Mrs. Hortense Pline, squanders her entire fortune on the creation of a Light Club, a disused illuminated mineshaft that is transformed by the German architect Mr Hartung into a masterpiece of Tiffany glass, iron and ten metre high lamps, the perfect party venue for a citizen addicted to light. Scheerbart’s 1914 novel Graues Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiss (The Gray Cloth and the Ten Percent White) focuses on the architect Edgar Krug who travels the world in his airship constructing beautiful glass buildings that float and move, as technology is bought to serve his architectural ideal.4 Inspired by Scheerbart, the Chain members produced glass designs that insinuate geometric, intuited, abstract forms into a landscape dominated by organic patterns of nature. Bruno Taut’s 1918 text Alpine Architektur (Alpine Architecture) and the Chain correspondence suggest exposing mountains, glaciers and other geological features to the same formal processes used on an object within a contemporary artwork, as nature is mastered by faceting, shaping, remodelling and embellishing.5 Alpine Architektur was Taut’s response to World War I, a utopian architectural project that was extravagant in terms of scale and design, seeking to destroy the cities and build crystalline buildings that scorn utility and defy practical realisation. Its influence can be felt in almost every Chain letter, nowhere more so than with the vision of a European community uniting to construct a new realm en masse, diverting energies away from war-mongering and bloodshed: “PEOPLE OF EUROPE! FASHION FOR YOURSELVES A HOLY ARTEFACT – BUILD! […] Each man will see his own handiwork clearly in the common achievement; each man

2 For a more detailed account of this relationship in the context of exhibition architecture and Der Sturm see: Kate Armond, “Wyndham Lewis and the Parables of Expressionist Architecture”, in: Modernist Cultures, 9, 2014, no. 2, 282–304. 3 Paul Scheerbart, The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies Novelette, trans. Wilhelm Worthen, Chicago 2010. 4 Paul Scheerbart, The Grey Cloth and the Ten Percent White, trans. John A. Stuart, Massachusetts 2001. 5 Bruno Taut, Alpine Architecture, in: Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart, Alpine Architecture / Glass Architecture, ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. Shirley Palmer, London 1972, 75–127.



A Paper Paradise 

 261

will build in the true sense”.6 In a letter dated 22 July 1920, Hablik’s “Glass House beside the Sea” is also constructed by airships, and his undated letter, “The New City”, envisages a construction project in which all workers are allotted land and a universal sense of industry, cooperation and dedication prevails. Taut intends that “aircraft and airships transport their passengers on pleasure trips to find joy and release from sickness and sorrow through the contemplation of their own handiwork”, a reference to his plan for all citizens to be involved in the construction of new communities.7 The broader context of the Chain correspondence establishes the group’s sense of architecture as a re-negotiation of boundaries, those existing between man and his natural environment, and between buildings and the surrounding landscape. Glass was an obvious choice for a project that aimed to increase the citizen’s understanding of himself as part of his community, his rural surroundings and the wider universe. The materialist definition of technology is associated with the rationalisation of warfare, and this in turn is rejected, as engineering and industry are “no longer […] called upon to serve base instinct, and the senseless by-products of boredom, but to serve the positive strivings of the human spirit”.8 The utopian architect was to be the ultimate force of mediation between the world of matter and Geist, determined to redefine technology’s cultural significance, drawing it away from the grim, passive materialism of modernist movements such as Italian Futurism and towards an aesthetic, emotional, even transcendental role in society.

Ernst Haeckel and Kristallseelen In 1917 Ernst Haeckel published Kristallseelen. Studien über das anorganische Leben (Crystal Souls – Studies of Inorganic Life), a text inspired by the work of Austrian chemist Friedrich Reinitzer and his colleague Otto Lehmann. In 1888 Reinitzer had discovered liquid or “rheo-crystals”, self-organising forms in which growth does not occur incrementally in layers as in solid crystals, but spontaneously throughout the liquid volume. In 1904 Lehmann’s research led to his claim that living liquid crystals are intermediate phenomena occupying a place between organic and non-living worlds. Haeckel believed that until this point

6 Taut, Alpine Architecture, 125–126. 7 Taut, Alpine Architecture, 125–126. 8 Taut, Alpine Architecture, 125–126.

262 

 Kate Armond

in time, mineralogists and crystallographers had practised a merely descriptive science, systematically classifying and detailing the forms and chemical properties of sterro-crystals – those rigid, “true” crystals with inflexible, prismatic external forms. The discovery of these liquid, apparently living “rheo-crystals” had radical implications for monism, the particular brand of natural philosophy championed by Haeckel: “At one blow the artificial boundaries which up to now have been erected between life and death, between natural science and moral science, have fallen down. All substances, inorganic as well as organic, possess life; all things have psyches, crystals as well as organisms”.9 Pre-empting accusations of superficiality and dilettantism, Haeckel conflates the disciplines of crystallography and psychology, claiming “psychic activity” for organic and inorganic crystal matter alike. The disclosures relating to regenerative liquid crystals encouraged Haeckel to go further still, transcending boundaries between morphology, physics, physiology, chemistry and psychology in his argument. Rheo-crystals can be distinguished from sterro-crystals by their soft or “liquid” constitution and their ability to grow and regenerate by both apposition and intussusception.10 This in turn leads Haeckel to talk of copulation and hybridisation in these organisms, and their qualities of feeling and unconscious sensitivity are behind the attribution of soul or psyche, a psycho-physical principle that is established as distinct from energy. Haeckel had long argued that single-celled creatures evolved as crystalline formations in the landscape or marine world, and he analysed his beloved radiolaria using the same formal similarities as crystal structures observed in the study of minerals. Radiolaria are unicellular protozoa discovered by Haeckel during marine expeditions of the mid-1870s. They date back to the Precambrian geological era and their helmeted skeletons provided the inspiration for the crystal aesthetic Haeckel developed in Kristallseelen, their correlation with liquid crystals being particularly significant. This text leaves itself vulnerable to criticism by allowing similarity at the level of organisational principles to confirm equivalent function throughout its exposition of monism, but such discursive leaps did not deter Taut and his correspondents and Haeckel’s philosophy, in particular his Darwinian interpretation of panpsychism, remains a constant in their utopian discourse.

9 Ernst Haeckel, Crystal Souls – Studies of Organic Life, trans. A.L. Mackay, Forma, 14, 1999, no. 1–2, 1–146. 10 Haeckel, Crystal Souls, 36–40.



A Paper Paradise 

 263

Hablik, Finsterlin and Haeckelian Science One member particularly interested in Haeckel’s study of crystals was the artist and interior designer Wenzel Hablik. When, at the age of six, Hablik saw his first quartz in the mountains of German Bohemia the discovery began a life-long fascination with crystals and the science of crystallography. Hablik studied applied art in Vienna and these formative experiences during the period of transition between art nouveau and expressionism led him to promote existing forms in nature and to measure his desire to build against them: “I love and honor nature in every form with a burning heart […] I profess ‘Utopia’ […] as the form nearest to nature of all artistic and architectural energy”.11 For Bruno Taut, with his calls for absolute fantasy and the ascendancy of faith and intuition, using nature as a source of inspiration would lead the group perilously close to the dead, imitative creations of naturalism and Jugendstil. Hablik meanwhile argues that symbols of the minutiae of the universe such as plants and “the hard, sharp-edged, complicated and simple forms of crystals […] evolved according to precise laws” that are themselves expressions of a will to build.12 “This will is bound to no axis, neither vertical nor horizontal, as its power is ubiquitous”, and by this Hablik means that the divine vertical axis of power can be tilted to create a humanistic horizontal axis, allowing the group a messianic identity and unrestricted sublime creativity.13 Haeckel’s texts repeatedly claim the marine world as the medium of Genesis, the sea coming together with geological forces as fluid and crystalline matter began their eternal modification and unrest. As early as 1909, Hablik’s “Schaffende Kette” (Creative Chain) etchings show the influence of this Haeckelian account of evolution, as both the first and fourth artworks bring together the sea and crystalline architecture and rock formations.14 They share the same basic forms – a crystal castle, a rocky, mountainous island and surrounding oceans – but the first etching favours smooth, rounded surfaces for the rocks and the crystal dome. The faceting within this picture forms a dynamic starburst effect radiating outwards from the island, suggesting the explosion of the moment of Genesis. The fourth etching in the series shows jagged, angular rocks and sharp linearity in the castle’s crystalline form. The key motif is again the generative combination of sea and a crystalline geology and architecture, but here the lines are suggestive of ponderous weight as the clouds descend onto the castle whilst

11 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 133. 12 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 131. 13 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 131. 14 “Schaffende Kette”, Hablik Collection, Itzehoe.

264 

 Kate Armond

the rocks are so dense and rigid that the crystal edifice appears to be squeezed up from their midst. Evolutionary energy has moved away from instantaneous explosion to become a momentous but steady ascent from land and waves. Hablik continues this preoccupation with projects involving sea, mountains and utopian crystal buildings into the 1920s. His plan for the “Bau von einem Glashaus am Meer” (The Building of a Glass House beside the Sea) may owe much to Kristallseelen’s exposition of the self-organising properties and instantaneous growth of the “rheo-crystal”. Set in the context of Haeckel’s ideas of morphogenesis, Hablik’s process of construction, with its “special dissolving and bonding fluids”, and metal stars laid in sand, creates a spontaneous universal growth of glass bubbles that become domes before solidifying into the more conventional rigid crystalline shape: “Magnificent structures are already appearing, giant iridescent glass domes drawn out into spikes and points… glittering and shining”.15 Hablik’s July 1920 letter describing “The Ninth Day” of Genesis offers an evolutionary tale of hermit crabs as they turn into young men and set out on an arduous journey, finding themselves inspired to build. They encounter spiders that weave sparkling webs and birds that lay fiery eggs, but the youths’ own attempts to create by building are repeatedly frustrated. They finally reach a utopian setting of precious gems and startling transfigurations: “A radiant worm crawled out of the flames and was transformed. It inflated itself terrifyingly, swelled up into a great reptile […] before it coiled whining into a snake, which hissed as it hardened into crystal. The crystal flowed away to the spring”.16 These transfigurations lead to a moment of revelation for the young men, as they in turn become astral bodies. The significance of the crystalline form in this evolutionary chain, placed between the snake and the spring, confirms Haeckel’s claim that crystals occupy an intermediate position between organic and non-living matter. The hard crystal follows on from the reptile and the crystal then becomes soft matter as it liquefies, passing effortlessly and spontaneously to a non-organic form. The stages of Hablik’s image here represent a neat evolutionary synthesis of Haeckel’s claims in Kristallseelen. The extraordinary structural beauty and complexity of inorganic crystalline forms appear again in Hablik’s proposed “Neue Stadt” (New City), where a self-supporting, five hundred metre dome is suggested as the focal point of a city utopia.17 His 1921 illustration for this dome, exhibited in the Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg, shows faceted pillars like stalactites stretching from floor to ceiling and jagged, crystal orbs suspended from the cavernous roof. For Hablik

15 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 123. 16 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 143. 17 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 152–153.



A Paper Paradise 

 265

the crystal inspires and embodies the artist’s aesthetic impulse, and like Haeckel he sees these forms as evidence of the same spiritual power that manifests itself in organic matter. In his fable, “Der achte Tag” (The Eighth Day), Hermann Finsterlin also defends his imitation of natural forms against the “old camp”, as he calls his detractors: “My models are said to be recruited from snails, fungi, coral and so on”.18 Like Hablik he talks in terms of a will-to-form, a creative force at work across nature from the amoeba to the swan, and refers his critics to long-established tectonic achievements: “Is not the natural world that surrounds us much more immanent in the creations of the old art? […] Does not the dome of St. Peter’s peer out Lilliput-like from the depths of Messina like a giant sea urchin whose spines have been removed?”19 Amoebas and other unicellular organisms, sea-urchins, corals, fungi – these are the vocabulary of the Haeckelian art-world and the focus of this scientist’s research. Haeckel felt the need to illustrate every organism that formed part of his analysis so as to consolidate the truth of his deductions and subsequent monist theories. Not satisfied with sharing his ideas in public lecture theatres and academic text books he published some of his morphological studies in ten portfolios between 1899 and 1904 under the title Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature). The entire collection was published together in 1904 bringing his vivid, exotic interpretation of single-celled organisms, marine creatures and fungi into public libraries and homes. The expressionist aesthetic of hard, angular and crystalline form goes some way to explaining the attraction of Haeckel’s shells, corals and other skeletal structures for the Crystal Chain, but it was Finsterlin who gave the wealth of hydroid polyps, jellyfish, radiolaria, diatoms, echinoidea and corals in Kunstformen der Natur their most extravagant architectural interpretation. His 1920 watercolour “Glas-Traum” (Glass Dream) in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, shows a visionary construction rising from a shell-like base, with the eye drawn to a phallic tentacle or thick stem-like tower set against another shell formation to the rear of the structure. Other paintings and sketches with Haeckelian biomorphic forms include the polyp-shaped “Fantasien” (Fantasies) of 1920 and the obliquely positioned mollusc structures of “Wohnsiedlung” (Housing Estate) that were published in the second volume of Taut’s Frühlicht that year.20 His illustration “Lehre von Bau im Atlantik” (Teaching Building in the Atlantic) goes one step further, with annotations drawing attention to “tentacles platinised” and “colloidal substances” lest the viewer overlook the organic

18 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 89. 19 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 89. 20 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 74,104.

266 

 Kate Armond

inspiration for this design.21 Finsterlin’s Haeckelian vocabulary is nowhere more explicit than in the following esoteric claim for architecture’s advancing utopian evolution: “the architecture of man is a biogenetic phenomenon of human existence that lies beyond the fetal stage; the higher the organisms climb, the more often they accomplish the encirclement of the emissions, and the more completely their primary body-shells disappear”.22 The suggestion is that the current post-war phase of tectonic achievement is one of mutation in which established homogeneity shatters and radical, fluid, amorphous but transitory forms dominate imagination and design. The tensions that characterise these “higher” transitional stages eventually balance themselves to produce more stable prosaic configurations that nevertheless partially assimilate the prior iridescent utopian forms. Within Finsterlin’s complex image the “body-shell” of architectural evolution refers to the practical realisation of construction and design, whilst the more accomplished visionary phase, such as that initiated by the Crystal Chain in 1920, transcends this rigid materiality. Finsterlin’s studies in medicine, philosophy and chemistry enhance and complicate his written contributions to the correspondence. He wrote to his Crystal Chain colleagues under the pseudonym Prometheus and the title was a fitting one on many levels. In Greek mythology the goddess Athene taught the Titan Prometheus many applied and intellectual skills such as medicine, architecture and mathematics and he in turn passed these gifts on to mankind. Prometheus betrayed his privileged position by stealing fire from the gods, making the link more pertinent still given the group’s defiant messianic narrative and their fondness for identifying themselves and their intentions through fire imagery. Finsterlin calls on the Titan in man to rise to the challenge of architecture’s current crisis, whilst Taut sees each innovative idea as a “fire child” – “Only the intense fire is of value. Does not each of you feel himself to be such a fire”.23 It is here that the Promethean utopianism of the Chain members gestures towards the more detailed and politically-inflected messianism of their contemporary Ernst Bloch.

21 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 92. 22 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 86–87. 23 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 155–156.



A Paper Paradise 

 267

Ernst Bloch and Messianic Utopia Ernst Bloch’s most celebrated defence of the avant-garde in general, and expressionism in particular, is his 1938 essay “Diskussionen über Expressionismus” (Discussing Expressionism) in which he challenges Georg Lukács’ article “Größe und Verfall des Expressionismus” (The Significance and Decline of Expressionism) and its ideal of permanent neo-classicism and objective representation.24 Although this particular episode of Marxist debate on the modern art-world is Bloch’s most explicit engagement with expressionism’s humanist stance and its strong connections with Germany’s cultural heritage, his abiding fascination with an expressionist image of utopia continued from the early 1918 text Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia) through to Bloch’s 1954 Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope). In the latter’s discussion of architectural utopias Bloch shows himself to be familiar with the work of both Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut, and their desire to universalise glass architecture, covering the earth in crystalline forms. Bloch discusses the duality of pure functional form and aesthetic exuberance and acknowledges that whilst painting and sculpture have produced interesting results during the expressionist period, the architectural vision of Taut and Scheerbart was bound to fail “because the latter, far more than the other pictorial arts, is and remains a social creation, it cannot blossom at all in the hollow space of late capitalism”.25 Only in the early stages of a new society will architecture that is utopian in terms of construction and ornament begin to flourish. A few pages later, Bloch describes the work of the architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Bruno Taut as secularised astral myths that fit snugly into a geometrically complete cosmos.26 Whilst Bloch was familiar with the finer details of expressionist architectural design later in his career, there are details of the Crystal Chain programme that suggest strong affinities with Bloch’s writings on utopia, if not a degree of influence. Bloch’s prose, in particular that of Geist der Utopie, is as scholarly, difficult and dense as that of Finsterlin’s correspondence, but far more akin to poetry in style. He blends cultural critique with messianic aspiration, moving his analysis away from the orthodox Marxist position on both religion and utopia. Although his argument is clearly indebted to the Marxist view of religion as the flawed creation of man, he does not suggest the overthrow of religion as a necessary stage in

24 Both essays appear in: Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, London 2007. 25 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 2, trans. Stephen Plaice, Neville Plaice and Paul Knight, Oxford 1986, 737. 26 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 2, 742.

268 

 Kate Armond

man’s pursuit of freedom and enlightenment. Religion and God instead become traces or archetypes behind many of his own messianic claims and discursive techniques: “Atheism is therefore so far from being the enemy of religious utopia that it constitutes its precursor”.27 This atheism celebrates transcendent visions of utopia that are the key to orthodox religious faiths: the impulse to defer and yet to anticipate a sublime realisation of that which remains partial, restricted and flawed in the material world. The standard within his narratives is set by those who have resisted divine authority – a Prometheus who will someday triumph against Zeus makes his entrance in Geist der Utopie, and enjoys a more developed role in Das Prinzip Hoffnung. This provocative tradition continues with Job, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, Faust, Don Quixote and the Moses of kabbalistic legend “who […] was able to drive back even the angel of death by means of the great name of God, and [when] Yahweh has had to appear, slaps even him in the face”.28 Judaism is of particular significance for Bloch as it introduces a religious conscience that questions the visibility of God’s world, whilst its inherent sense of expectation, covenant, deferral and rebellion allows glimpses of utopian human consciousness to define a religion seemingly for the first time. In Geist der Utopie he records this “myth of utopia that has immemorially motivated the Jews […] these anxious worshippers of an unseen God, the ultimative absoluteness, makes every theology of a definitive, pictorial factuality seem suspicious”.29 Bloch’s atheism does not view the utopian space once allocated to God as a void, as he is quite explicit that his philosophy here is not one of nihilism: The place that has been occupied in individual religions by what is conceived as God, that has ostensibly been filled by that which is hypostasised as God, has not itself ceased after it has ceased to be ostensibly filled. For it is at all events preserved at the head of utopian radical intention; and the metaphysical correlate of this projection remains the hidden, the still undefined-undefinitive.30

So whilst God and Christ are no longer visible and have lost their power to influence, Bloch’s atheistic religion allows man to step into the once theistic realm of projected hope and latent utopian power, dignifying an intractable but vision-

27 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, Oxford 1986, 1200. 28 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassau, Stanford 2000, 223. 29 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 203. 30 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1199.



A Paper Paradise 

 269

ary individual set forth in terms of “the mightiest subject-magical audacity”.31 Whether they were influenced by Bloch’s earlier utopian text or not, the Chain’s expressionist architects present themselves as the poised and confident heirs to just such a legacy, redefining religion as the opportunity for self-encounter and human realisation. Hermann Finsterlin rallied his colleagues on 3 February 1920 with the claim that: “we are a true brotherhood of knights, joined in the greatest mission on earth”.32 He was not alone in placing the group’s aspirations within a grand messianic narrative. The Crystal Chain responded to the alienating materialism of the post-war period with tropes of totality that they believed would allow art to offer redemptive possibilities, and architecture presented the most powerful cultural matrix for shaping and determining the wider community: “Visible architecture is the simple, inevitable result of a subjective, spiritual adventure. For this reason our form can never be derived from another artistic medium such as sculpture or painting”.33 The group used utopia as an epistemological tool with which to present certain thoughts, feelings, designs and proposals that together are suggestive of an overwhelming religious experience. Their correspondence, however, with its vocabulary of spiritual evolution, faith, intuition and transfiguration, makes no reference to any well-established conformist church, and God is superseded by the sublime visionary architect. On 26 December 1919 Taut went so far as to refer to himself as “Christ”, and as the Chain worked towards a collected volume of their thoughts and designs, Hablik proposed that this text was to “render all the Bibles and Korans and ‘holy’ writings superfluous and forgotten”.34 Their buildings were to be magnificent, provocative and overwhelming in their beauty and sensory impact, usurping the theatre of orthodox religion to become the primary visible form of a new messianic faith. The ideal of the Gothic cathedral dominates many sections of the Chain correspondence, with sketches such as Wassili Luckhardt’s “Kult-Gebäude” (Cult Building) expressing the need for an awe-inspiring Volkhaus, a centre of spirituality where the community might go to meditate as part of their new quasi-secular religion.35 It is here that Wassili’s brother, Hans Luckhardt, questions the genesis of faith proposed by Taut. Luckhardt acknowledges that imported Western values and their attendant financial capital and cities must be destroyed

31 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 183. 32 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 58. 33 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 52. 34 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 25. 35 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 110–111.

270 

 Kate Armond

in Russia in order to build a new and organic culture. This culture will evolve from the nation’s primitive peasantry and from the fact that there is no deeply-rooted existing culture. He fears that “Glas wants to promote architectural development in the direction of the religious and the primitive – that he only has eyes for the coming spiritualisation of man through faith. But the basis for a new faith exists only in Russia”.36 Drawing a clear distinction between Gothic Christianity with its origins in a primitive race who fear divinity instinctively, and Early Christianity which evolved from over-civilisation and a philosophical understanding of life, Luckhardt suggests that the current spiritualisation is to develop from intellectual rather than intuitive striving, a desire to explore the universe to the limit of human perception and analysis. The sort of primitive feeling behind Gothic religion is absent from the world in which Taut looks to re-establish it. This sense of independent, intellectual endeavour and a desire to develop human consciousness as a possible site for the realisation of the divine, has obvious similarities with Bloch’s own messianic faith, and the ambiguous status of intuition and intellect is common to both sets of utopian writing. It might be more accurate to claim that their respective utopias represent unconditional futures, blending genuine mystery, insight and the intense subjectivity of expressionism with the scholarship and rational abilities of an aesthetic leader.

The Paper Paradise In her study of post-war architecture and politics, Barbara Miller Lane observes that Taut rarely pauses to grapple with the mundane, material issues of architectural design.37 Although the visionary element in Taut’s work was balanced by his achievements as a practical architect, at the time of writing Alpine Architektur and the Crystal Chain letters large-scale architectural development was, by necessity, a matter for fiction rather than state-funded reality. Design and financial reality pulled in two opposing directions. Weimar Germany in 1919 needed more than one million new homes, but the economic stringencies imposed by the post-war treaty, shortages of materials and general isolation in terms of trade, all but paralysed the nation’s construction industry. It was perhaps their sense that architectural reform was essential for aesthetic and social reasons, and yet stagnating at the level of practical realisation, that led Taut and his correspondents

36 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 98–101. 37 Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945, Massachusetts 1968, 46.



A Paper Paradise 

 271

to their grand, quixotic parables. They seemed resigned to the fact that the artist was to a large extent trapped within a paper medium. In fact for expressionist architects such as Taut and Walter Gropius, the radical and idealised nature of the print utopia is precisely its guarantee of outlasting the period of paralysis – “ideas die as soon as they become compromises”.38 In one of the first letters to the Crystal Chain fraternity Taut writes: “As a matter of fact, it is a good thing that nothing is being built today. Things will have time to ripen, we shall gather our strength, and when building begins again we shall know our objective and be strong enough to protect our movement against botching and degeneration. Let us consciously be imaginary architects!”39 As a result of this interrupted process of architectural revolution Alpine Architektur and the Chain letters reached their audiences in the same way as a work of literature – through parables of a dream-like world supplemented by prints made from etched plates, paintings in watercolours and oils, letters, manifestos, aphorisms and fragments of explanatory text. Expressionist artists and writers had, in their pursuit of intensity and effect, become adept at combining the graphic and literary. Vasilii Kandinskii’s plays and aesthetic theory were accompanied by woodcuts and paintings, whilst Oskar Kokoschka’s dramas and prose were also illustrated by etchings, woodcuts and other art-works. The Crystal Chain members were no exception and they write and draw as if suspended, stoically, but slightly awkwardly, outside the concrete application of their chosen art-form, architecture. With their startling annotated drawings, and their fantastical panoramas reaching from earth-bound mountains and glass pavilions to the wider cosmos, this body of work draws closer to the expressive forms of an illustrated science fiction novel rather than an architectural portfolio. Architecture’s brief foray into the realm of literature allowed Alpine Architektur its success, and the correspondence draws to a close with Hans Luckhardt acknowledging the significance of this engaging combination of art and prose. He also mentions Glas’ decision to stop displaying his work in exhibitions, with their inevitable focus on graphic art at the expense of cultural ideas. Luckhardt criticises Finsterlin’s contributions as too developed for sketches and yet lacking the artistic maturity necessary for implementation. He feels that the architectural sketch is futile once divorced from its literary counterpart. Taut himself states that if the architect is to awaken demand for building he must use single sketches only

38 Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut and Adolf Behne, “New Ideas on Architecture”, in: Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programmes and Manifestoes on Twentieth Century Architecture, trans. Michael Bullock, London 1970, 46–48, here 46. 39 Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters, 19.

272 

 Kate Armond

as part of a series, a complex, tangible and developed project far removed from studio art. Whilst many of the aims of these expressionist visionaries remain the same as those of Taut’s more fluent literary texts, the group’s conflicting visions, their fragmented presentation and the ascendency of functionalism all meant that by late 1920 the correspondence came to an end. It was clear that a strong and engaging narrative structure was needed to successfully combine utopian fantasy with architectural theory. Bloch’s Geist der Utopie critiques functionalism in architecture as an asceticism that is partly indebted to socialism and Enlightenment rationality. Its ideological purity condemns all ornament whilst securing the demise of the artisan and standardising mediocrity. The sublime visions of the Crystal Chain correspondence went some way to redress those losses, transcending the inert docile qualities of aestheticism with the imperative that architecture should be experimental, extravagant and prophetic, ushering in an entirely new mode of living. As Taut set aside his stellar and crystalline forms and turned to functionalist design, the group’s deterministic and innovative sense of architecture as the catalyst for reform and their passion for colour and new materials continued in their own projects and the Bauhaus school in general. The 1920s saw Taut execute his own brand of architectural determinism through the commissions he received as city architect for Magdeburg and Berlin.40 He built thousands of apartments for proletarian workers decorated with brightly coloured paints on the external walls, claiming that the project would unify the community and integrate individuals after the dislocating experiences of war. Despite the radical nature of their vision, and the obvious catalyst of war, the Chain architects used images and ideas that were very much of the pre-war period. Haeckel’s drawings and ideas had inspired popular science writers such as Wilhelm Bölsche at the end of the 19th Century, and the artist Gabriel von Max and the New German Dance Movement had responded to his monist philosophy in the early 1900s. Paul Scheerbart was also read and loved by early expressionists before 1914, and the group’s familiarity with his fiction makes their choice of building materials and cosmic settings less extraordinary than might at first appear. Bloch and the Crystal Chain architects approach the concept of utopia during this post-war period as secular mystics. The utopian potential of art and religion offers them radical critique of the present and latent images of a future existence. For Geist der Utopie and the Crystal Chain letters the desired utopia is primarily a matter of human consciousness that looks forward to the “not yet”

40  See: Annegret Nippa and Bruno Taut, Bruno Taut in Magdeburg. Eine Dokumentation. Projekte, Texte, Mitarbeiter, Magdeburg 1995.



A Paper Paradise 

 273

through day-dream, wish and fantasy, whilst remaining assured in that particular moment of anticipation. Each individual sets out their ideas through a rewriting of parables from the world of religion and mythology. Bloch appropriates the original challengers of divine authority, whilst the Chain members go further still, producing their own narratives that are biblical in style and yet overlaid with the details of Scheerbart’s fiction, Haeckelian science and monist philosophy. They represent an avant-garde frustrated with the liberal, rationalist tradition in culture, in search of more sweeping, authoritative models of reform, and intent on revalidating utopia as far more than the ideological feint of Marxist theory. Whilst the Chain members achieve this by remaining anti-Marxist in their utopian discourse, Bloch’s more sophisticated analysis attempts a kind of political alchemy wherein Marxism is criticised for reducing history to mere economic relations and for overlooking the utopian potential of philosophy, religion and the arts. By emphasising the significance and revolutionary potential of cultural ideas and experiences, with music given particular value, Bloch is able to transform utopia into one of socialism’s fundamental concerns. The work of Bloch and the Chain visionaries between 1918 and 1920 redefines reason as an analytical faculty strengthened and revitalised by the creative intuition and interpretive mediation of the artist. They succeeded in recording but not resolving the frustration, withdrawal into subjectivity and desire to validate perfection that were inherent in this uncertain period of German history.

Irina Marchesini

A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life Konstantin Vaginov’s Utopian Visions Still a rather obscure figure in the wider context of Russian modernism, Konstantin Konstantinovich Vaginov (1899–1934) was an eclectic writer who belonged to the Russian avant-garde movement Oberiu, the “Union of Real Art”, active between the 1920s and 1930s. His entire literary production shows a continuing preoccupation with several historical events that changed the world, such as World War I (1914–1918) and, most importantly, the Russian Civil War (1917–1922/1923). Indeed, Vaginov saw these upheavals as inevitable yet ambivalent apocalypses for Russian traditions.1 In fact, not only did these events put an end to Tsarist rule, they also threatened to destroy the current cultural system, replacing it with another, which was completely alien to the writer and to his contemporaries. Vaginov, then, manifested his antagonism towards this situation by developing a poetics linked to a cult of the past. His beautiful images of an idealised, Hellenic Petersburg, as well as of multi-coloured collections, stand in deep contrast to the ugliness of the post-war Soviet Leningrad, creating a utopian alternative to reality. As Anthony Anemone maintains: “[if] [c]ollecting […] can represent a heroic defence of cultural continuity at a time of revolutionary cultural shift, it also exhibits a tendency towards hypertrophy or obsession that threatens to eclipse reality itself”.2 On the basis of these preliminary assumptions, the present article analyses Vaginov’s production, and, in particular, his first and last novels The Goat Song (Kozlinaya pesn’, 1928) and Harpagoniana (1934), in order to compare the writer’s utopian depictions of the cityscape with realistic ones, keeping a special eye on the role played by collections in the construction of an alternative solution to reality. Notably, a comparison of the latter text with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (La città del sole, 1602) demon-

1  On Vaginov’s poetics, see: Tat’yana Nikol’skaya, “O tvorchestve Konstantina Vaginova”, in: Materialy XXII nauchnoi studencheskoi konferentsii. Poetika. Istoriya literatury. Lingvistika, Tartu 1967, 94–100; Tat’yana Nikol’skaya, “Konstantin Vaginov: ego vremya i knigi”, in: Konstantin Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’. Romany, Moscow 1991, 3–11. 2  Anthony Anemone, “Konstantin Konstantinovich Vaginov, 1899–1934”, in: Neil Cornwell and Nicole Christian (eds), Reference Guide to Russian Literature, London 2013, 861–862, here 862.

276 

 Irina Marchesini

strates the function of collections as utopian islands, which preserve the memory of a recent, yet unattainable past.

Hellenic Images Already in his first short story, The Monastery of Our Lord Apollo (Monastyr’ Gospoda nashego Apollona, 1922),3 Vaginov revealed his deep interest in Greek and ancient cultures, depicting his protagonist as a Hellenist who objected to the Christian and materialistic visions of the world. As Martha Weitzel Hickey rightly contends, starting from his very first text “Vaginov took up what was becoming an anachronistic position, defending selfless dedication to the ideals of art”.4 He later consistently elaborated the same theme in The Goat Song,5 constructing a metaphor that contrasted an idealised image of the city and its actual, ruinous state. “I don’t like Petersburg”,6 claims a fictitious author, “[m]y dream is over”.7 The first prologue of the book presents discontent with the profound metamorphosis that has overtaken the former Russian capital. These feelings of disenchantment and disillusion are also found in the second prologue, in which the death of the old world is restated: “[n]ow, there is no Petersburg. There is Leningrad. But Leningrad doesn’t concern us – the author’s trade is coffins, not cradles”.8 The distance between the once paradisiac Petersburg, of which Vaginov dreamed, and the “new” city which has succeeded it, is a recurrent theme of the novel, for example in the paragraph where one of the main characters, Teptëlkin, is introduced: [i]n the city there lived a puzzling creature – Teptyolkin. Often times he could have been seen going with a teapot into a public cafeteria for boiling water, surrounded by nymphs and satyrs. Beautiful groves gave off their fragrance for him in the most foul-smelling places, and he thought dainty statues inherited from the 18th Century were radiant suns of Pentelican marble.9

3  Published in the first issue of the almanac Abraksus in October 1922. 4  Martha Weitzel Hickey, The Writer in Petrograd and the House of Arts, Evanston 2009, 323. 5  Written between 1925 and 1927, later published in 1928. 6  Konstantin Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, in: Kozlinaya pesn’. Romany. Stikhotvoreniya i poemy, Moscow 2008, 5–170, here 23. All the English quotes from this book are translated by Chris Lovett, Goat Song, http://www.nnnonline.org/vaginov/index.htm (accessed 28 February 2015). 7  Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, 23. 8  Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, 24. 9  Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, 25.



A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life 

 277

The difference between the actual reality in which the character moves and the past is striking. Indeed, the solemn magnificence of the Hellenic decorations, which were so fashionable in the period of Petersburg’s construction, is juxtaposed with the humble activities that take place every day in those rooms. It is with a mixture of irony and nostalgia10 that the narrator depicts the ornaments, emphasising the subtlety of details in order to increase the effect of the comparison with the present, where fetid malodour coexists with sculpted sweet-smelling groves. As were all the great empires of the past,11 St. Petersburg too was condemned to a destiny of decline and decay from the very beginning, according to Vaginov’s pessimistic vision. The movement from fragrant perfumes, associated with prosperous nature, to nauseating whiffs, alludes to the fact that the city itself is rotting like a corpse. Teptëlkin embodies the then-popular theories of historical cycles and eternal recurrence, as formulated by Nietzsche, Spengler, and later in Russia by Danilevskii and Merezhkovskii: [u]sually, Teptyolkin believed in the deep immutability of humanity: once it has sprung up, like a plant, it bears flowers, turning into fruit, and the fruit scattering in the form of seeds. To Teptyolkin, everything seemed that kind of scattered fruit. He lived with the constant sensation of a decomposing membrane, of rotting seeds, among shoots already sprouting. For him, there rose from the decaying membrane the most refined emanations, which assumed different forms.12

Teptëlkin seems to be disoriented when he moves in this familiar, yet new space, to get some boiling water. His senses – especially smell and sight – are intensively stimulated: on the one hand, odours are connected to the sphere of food, eating and the results of the digestive process, the more earthly and concrete acts. On the other hand, the difficulty of accepting reality finds a refuge in the portrayal of the architectural elements which constitute the city. Such a process indicates a visual dimension, hinting at the mental, even unreal, dimension of the

10  According to Lovett, “[t]he old city is evoked […] without nostalgia, as something shallow, hallucinatory, even chimerical”. Chris Lovett, Afterword, http://www.nnnonline.org/vaginov/afterword01.htm (accessed 28 February 2015). Nonetheless, the accuracy of the descriptions testifies to a sentiment of longing for the past, aptly represented by those architectural details. 11  References to past empires and civilisations, among them the Greek and Roman one, can be frequently found throughout the novel, for instance in the description of Kopylov’s coin collection. As Lovett appropriately claimed in his Afterword, “Vaginov [used] contemporary Leningrad as a window on a larger world extending through space and time, even as far as ancient Rome and the world of mythology”. 12  Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, 25.

278 

 Irina Marchesini

­ escription. Similar associations recur very often in the narration, for instance in d the description of one of Teptëlkin’s dreams: [s]ometimes Teptyolkin was visited by a dream: he comes down from his lofty tower, a beautiful Venus stands in the middle of a pond, the tall sedge whispers, its flowers and the head of Venus turned gold by rising dawn. Sparrows twitter and hop along the paths. He sees – Marya Petrovna Dalmatovna sitting on a bench and reading Callimachus and lifting eyes full of love. “We live”, she says, “between horror and desolation”.13

According to Lovett, for Vaginov “the empire is a dream of greatness, whether as cultural immortality or some notion of Russia’s utopian mission”.14 By the end of the novel, though, “the empire shrinks to the diminished possibilities and compromises of survival, or even a failure to survive”.15 Even though there is “no going back for us to Hellas”,16 and the narrative of The Goat Song gives little room for the hope of a rebirth of that civilisation, every corner of the city stands as a remainder of the great past of Imperialist Russia.

The City of the Sun and Its Shadows Descriptions of the old architecture of St. Petersburg function as dreams about Russia’s imperialist period, conceived as the ideal environment in which to live. Far from being something completely invented, what once was real becomes a utopian chimera for the author, who, like a guardian, sits in defence of this partially lost heritage.17 The unknown poet stands on a snow heap on Nevsky, now hidden by a snowstorm, now appearing once again. Behind him is emptiness. Everyone had left a long time ago. But he has no right to, he cannot forsake the city. Let them all run, let there be death, but he

13  Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, 28. The references to Greek mythology and culture contained in the words “Venus” and “Callimachus” are significant, insofar as they foreground the metaphor linking the history of St. Petersburg to the one of ancient civilisations. Moreover, it should be noted that Callimachus dedicated one of his Hymns to Apollo. 14  Lovett, Afterword. 15  Lovett, Afterword. 16  Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, 39. 17  On this topic, see: Graham Roberts, “The Artist as a Hermit: Konstantin Vaginov”, in: The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU – Fact, Fiction, Metafiction, Cambridge 1997, 57–74.



A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life 

 279

will stay here and preserve the lofty temple of Apollo. And he sees an airy temple of snow forming all around him and he’s standing over a crevice.18

Even though surrounded by death, decay and a cadaverous smell, the cantor-watchman – that is, the unknown poet, a nameless artist on which Teptëlkin was writing a treatise in The Goat Song – cannot abandon his now sterile city, here called the “lofty temple of Apollo”. One of the most important of the Olympian deities in classical Greek and Roman religion and mythology, Apollo was the god of truth and prophecy, healing, art, music, poetry, but also of light and the sun.19 Indeed, among his various epithets, it is possible to find “Aegletes” (“light of the sun”), “Helius” (“Sun”), “Phanaeus” (“giving or bringing light”), and “Lyceus” (“light”). He represents harmony, order, and reason, as opposed to Dionysus, god of wine, who embodies contrary values, such as disorder. Apollo is the god of enlightenment, that enlightenment which, historically speaking, corresponds to the period under which St. Petersburg was constructed and flourished (1703–1796). In this respect, it is possible to agree with Anthony Anemone when he claims that “St Petersburg as a concrete symbol of Russia’s connection to the legacy of classical antiquity is […] central to Vaginov’s poetics. Yet Vaginov’s pessimistic fascination with the world of Roman decadence is closer to C.P. Cavafy’s love of Decadent Alexandria than to the ‘Joyful Hellenism’ of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mandel’shtam”.20 Although in decline, the image of St. Petersburg in its glorious years continues to act as a lighthouse in darkness, an inspiring cultural model that appears to be lost, but which might still come to the aid of civilisation. The reference to Apollo enjoins a constructive dialogue with Tommaso Campanella’s utopian novel The City of the Sun, a book that Vaginov must have read during his life. The circumstances in which the philosophical work was produced are strongly reminiscent of those of reclusion experienced by Vaginov himself: Campanella wrote his major works during the 27 years he spent in imprisonment for heresy and sedition, following his part in a conspiracy to free the southern region of Calabria from Spanish dominion (1599).21 The City of the Sun is the fruit of Campanella’s musings on the epochal changes that were taking place in his land, such as the irreversible decline of the feudal system, new geographical discoveries, scientific progress and the end of an irrevocable spiritual unity. Hence,

18  Vaginov, Kozlinaya pesn’, 34. 19  For further reference, see: Károly Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks, trans. John N. Cameron, London and New York 1951. 20  Anemone, “Konstantin Konstantinovich Vaginov”, 862. 21  Official documents are reprinted in: Luigi Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella: la sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia, Naples 1882, 107.

280 

 Irina Marchesini

this work synthesises his thoughts on the ideal order he desired. As James L. Machor points out, “[i]n other writings Campanella refers to La città del sole as ‘a dialogue on his own state’ – an imaginative model by which the shortcomings of Naples could be delineated and reforms urged”.22 Though not involved in political intrigues, Konstantin Vaginov too put his hopes and remembrances in literary form to escape the tragic reality which, as he saw it, had resulted from abysmal social transformations, technical advancement – Vaginov refused to use electricity – and the methodical elimination of orthodox faith. As Volkov rightly asserts, “[f]or Vaginov […] Petersburg had been a magical stage for cultural tragedy, and he sang the praises of the spectral city in dadaist poems”.23 Most importantly, Campanella’s Solarian city is located in an actually-existing place: the isle of Taprobana. This was the historical name for an island in the Indian Ocean, firstly reported to Europeans by the Greek geographer Megasthenes around 290 BCE, in his Indica. Later – and most famously – Claudius Ptolemy adopted this name in his geographical treatise Geographia to identify a relatively large island south of continental Asia. Renaissance maps mostly place Taprobana between Sumatra and Sri Lanka; today it is generally accepted to have been Ceylon.24 In The City of the Sun, the reader learns about it from the fictionalised account a Genoese sailor, just returned from a journey of many days, gives to a Knight Hospitaler. Hence, this ideal society is located in a real place or, as Machor describes it, “a city blending the best of the New World with that of the Old – a city which, if not yet manifest, nonetheless could emerge in the new-found land”.25 Machor insists upon the importance of the sophisticated geographical accuracy informing the narration, giving it an aura of realism.26 This aspect proves to be particularly relevant in the context of the present discussion, as Vaginov presents, in his poetics, the old St. Petersburg and its culture as a reality that had once existed, but which now exist only as a utopian dream. This is underlined by the fact that the city was in its origin a construction ex nihilo, the utopian project of Peter the Great. Like Taprobana, St. Petersburg materially exists. In this respect, Campanella’s and Vaginov’s works are differentiated from More’s Utopia. The latter is

22  James L. Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America, Madison 1987, 43. 23  Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, New York 1997, 405. 24  Thomas Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia: The Epic Story of Seafarers, Adventurers, and Cartographers Who First Mapped the Regions Between China and India, Singapore 1999, 100–101. 25  Machor, Pastoral Cities, 43. 26  Machor, Pastoral Cities, 42.



A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life 

 281

set in an invented place, Nusquama, from the latin “nusquam” (“nowhere”, “in no place”). The element of denial contained in the word “nusquam” will later be erased by its substitution with “Utopia”, a term that preserves the original meaning of an imaginary paradisiacal environment. Nonetheless, even though invented, the island Utopia possesses the following characteristics, as reported in a poem in six verses written by the poet laureate Anemolius: (1) it is isolated, set apart from the known world; (2) it rivals Plato’s city, and believes itself to be superior to it, since that which in Plato’s city is only sketched, in Utopia is presented as having been achieved.27

These same features can also be attributed to Vaginov’s St. Petersburg: (1) (2)

it is isolated, as it survives in the collections of the characters; it rivals Leningrad, insofar it represents a condition of wealth and well-being that has already been realised, while the new Soviet order still has to demonstrate its validity – let alone it only brought confusion and social disorder.

Many Small Eutopias? Objects, Collections and (Historical) Reality Like many of his contemporaries, Vaginov was not satisfied with the new order of things, and tried, through his art, to transform reality. Significantly, in his last and unfinished work, Harpagoniana, Vaginov “[…] recapitulates the various relationships between collecting and modern culture that were introduced in [his] first three novels”. 28 In this prose, comparable to a cabinet des curiosités, all the protagonists are collectors, obsessive classifiers of banal ephemeras belonging to the Tsarist period, and not only, saving them from oblivion. Indeed, as Catriona Kelly writes, the first period subsequent to the October Revolution, seen as a “clean break with the past”,29 was characterised by the phenomenon of iconoclasm. All the symbols of the old regime underwent a common, unavoidable fate: physical

27  Fátima Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia”, in: Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge 2010, 3–27, here 5. 28  Anthony Anemone, “Obsessive Collectors: Fetishizing Culture in the Novels of Konstantin Vaginov”, in: Russian Review, 59, 2000, no. 4, 252–268, here 267. 29  Catriona Kelly, “Iconoclasm and Commemorating the Past”, in: Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds), Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, Oxford 1998, 227–237, here 230.

282 

 Irina Marchesini

destruction. In particular, she argues that “[e]ager to channel the ‘spontaneity’ of such gestures into a ‘conscious’ legitimating ideology, the Bolshevik regime made the effacement of Tsarist monuments one of its first priorities”.30 The old culture, condemned to be swept away and saved in collections, acted as a substitute for the vulgarity of Soviet reality and a form of escape, as in the case of Zhulonbin: [c]arrying the nails in the Abyssinian carved boxes, the man turned the corner, where there was a low-cost pre-Revolutionary encyclopaedia, and entered his room. […] Near the wall, devoid of wallpaper, stood close his bed, with grey, wet, flat pillows and an austere, not less moist, cover. […] In the cupboard he stored papers, written and blank, decorative bottles of wine, dried drugs with double-headed eagles, dry leaves, dried flowers, beetles covered with spiders, butterflies devoured by moths, wedding cards, children’s, women’s, men’s business cards with and without crowns, pieces of bread with a nail, cigarettes with a rope sticking out of tobacco like horns, rolls with a cockroach, samples of imperialist and Revolutionary cookies, samples of bourgeois and proletarian wallpaper, stubs of public and concession pencils, postcards reproducing world-famous paintings, used and unused pens, engravings, lithographs, John of Kronstadt’s seal, a set of enemas, fake and genuine stones (of course, the latter were very few), invitations to Komsomol’s and anti-religious evenings, a tea party on the occasion of the delegation’s arrival to report on the international situation, a pack of tram slogans, posters celebrating the First of May, an out-of-date premium banner, there was even the Order of turtles for the tyrannical speed of illiteracy’s elimination. […] He had to organise and catalogue all this. All this must be allocated in indexes.31

As this passage illustrates, a colourful gallery of apparently worthless items counter-balances the greyness of the character’s room and life. It seems evident that Zhulonbin’s strongest desire is represented by his work in classifying this confused tangle, mirroring Vaginov’s attempts to create order out of the chaos brought about by the Revolution. Svetlana Boym rightly refers to collecting as a survival strategy: [b]y the late 1920s, when political ideology became increasingly dogmatic and colonised almost every aspect of daily life, any kind of innocuous “useless” activity that evaded ideological correctness became something of a strategy of defiance. In an era of grand projects and mass movements, attention to everyday souvenirs and human singularities is regarded as counterrevolutionary. Konstantin Vaginov believed that the history of the modern age could be written through the history of bric-a-brac and everyday trifles. […] Leningrad writers of the Petersburg tradition treat the obsessive collectors and worshippers of useless things with ambivalence, parodying them and appropriating their collections for their own Petersburg tales.32

30  Kelly, “Iconoclasm and Commemorating the Past”, 227. 31  Konstantin Vaginov, Garpagoniana, in: Kozlinaya Pesn’. Romany. Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Moscow 2008, 377–484, here 380–381. English translation by the author of this article. 32  Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York 2001, 139–140.



A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life 

 283

Inscribed within the frame of monomania and obsession with the cult of an irrecoverable past, Zhulonbin’s Wunderkammer blends private and public space. This sacred place, in which objects designed to be effaced can survive, functions as an encyclopaedia describing the pre-Revolutionary world, much as in Campanella’s The City of the Sun.33 Instead of collections, here the walls protecting the city depict knowledge, comprising illustrations of the heavens and the stars, of mathematical figures, of countries, of mineral, vegetable and animal worlds, and of mankind. Therefore, knowledge is openly available to everyone’s eyes, and not enclosed in books kept in separate places such as libraries. Vaginov’s collections serve similar purposes, although it is also possible to spot differences. Zhulonbin’s archives, as well as those of other characters, are virtually offered to all the people interested in seeing them,34 but at the same time they are not accessible to everybody, as the post-Revolutionary Russian avant-garde was highly criticical of collectors. They were indeed seen as vulgar (“poshlyi”) fetishists of a past culture. Moreover, the expression “perezhitki proshlogo” (“survivals of the past”) was used to vilify their activities. Their activities were considered not only a form of alienation, but also an act openly in conflict with the Revolutionary policy, which looked only forwards – although during the 1920s collecting underwent a major revival, mainly because the cost fell as many middle- and upper-class families were forced to sell off valuable collections. Vladimir Mayakovskii’s poem The Bathhouse (Banya, 1930) attests to this attitude by satirising collectors through the figure of Mr Pont Kitsch, an anti-Soviet character whose name is already telling. Collections were stored in separate, secret places because their existence was not permitted in the “new” Soviet epoch. Yet the possibility of seeing and even touching obsolete objects which represented a dead material culture promoted a quick and easy form of remembering, as in Campanella’s The City of the Sun. Vaginov’s compulsive collectors turn their attentions to modest relics of the past primarily to preserve the last shreds of their cultural patrimony. According to Anemone, they are “like anthropologists studying the disappearing traditions of an obscure culture”.35 Their collections consist not only of material items, as in Zhulonbin’s case, but they can also be made of immaterial traces, as another character, Anfert’ev, shows: “You see, I sell things that no one needs. […] I sell that

33  According to Walter Benjamin, a collection is “an encyclopaedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes… Collecting is a form of practical memory”. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge 1999, 205. 34  In Harpagoniana, collections are private. Notably, in Campanella’s work unequal distribution of goods is condemned. Therefore everything is held in common possession. 35  Anemone, “Obsessive Collectors”, 262.

284 

 Irina Marchesini

which has no value nowadays, but will be immensely valuable in the future. I sell dreams, candy wrappers, street songs, thieves’ jargon, I sell things that have no weight and seem to have no value in the contemporary world”.36 This last aspect is particularly intriguing in order to define the nature of a collectible. Is it really possible to collect something that has no concrete consistency, such as dreams, songs or thieves’ jargon? The merchant has a rather simple, though ingenious answer: he writes them down. Notably, the practice of writing, and the choice of ink and paper as a material support for invisible yet existing cultural expressions have been underlined by Derrida, when he mentions the concept of impression.37 Thus, the written paper enables memory to acquire a concrete form, permitting “a heroic defense of cultural continuity at a time of revolutionary cultural shift, […] an obsessive and fetishistic response to an unbearable present […]”.38 The objects mentioned in the novel, especially those collected by Anfert’ev, suggest the intention of these collectors: they try to re-create an environment that is not available anymore. Hence, the ideal collection is the one that comprises all things belonging to a specific reality, as for Borges the ideal map is the one that covers the entire surface of the world: …[i]n that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.39

Conclusions In Vaginov’s novels the Apollonian characters – misfits, social outcasts – try to struggle with the Dionysian, dystopic reality through collections, attempting to place an order in the new-born chaos. Not surprisingly, in Harpagoniana, classification is described as “one of the most creative activities. […] Essentially classification shapes the world. Without classification there would be no memory.

36  Vaginov, Garpagoniana, 422 [italics mine – I.M.]. 37  See: Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive. Une impression freudienne, Paris 1995. 38  Anemone, “Obsessive Collectors”, 257. 39  Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”, in: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, London 1999, 325.



A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life 

 285

Without classification it would be impossible to imagine reality”.40 In his conception of reality as the result of an image created in and by collections, Konstantin Vaginov seems to apply the principles of Solov’ёv’s philosophy, conceiving art not as mere representation, but as theurgic transformation. According to Solov’ёv’s theory, art aimed at transforming reality and the consciousness producing it, proceeding from realia to realiora, suggesting an aesthetic re-elaboration of reality. Is it possible, then, to isolate utopian elements in Vaginov’s poetics? Collecting as a way of preserving the cultural legacy of the past in order to escape everyday reality constitutes a particular example of utopian construction, if the term “utopia” is conceived in its broader sense. Indeed, as Gregory Claeys has underlined, “[a]lthough its notional point of departure is often Thomas More’s genre-defining work, Utopia, […] the field of utopian literature today encompasses a far wider and ever-expanding domain”.41 According to Vieira, the most important characteristic of utopia is “the desire for a better life, caused by a feeling of discontentment towards the society one lives in”.42 Therefore, continues Vieira, utopia should be seen as “a matter of attitude, as a kind of reaction to an undesirable present and an aspiration to overcome all difficulties by the imagination of possible alternatives”.43 This is exactly the same process followed by the Russian writer, when he uses “the emerging awareness of otherness to legitimise the invention of other spaces, with other people and different forms of organisation”.44 Such attitude disguises a humanist logic, according to which the human being exists to use reason and shape her own future, instead of simply accepting her destiny, which, in this case, is tied to the prevailing ideology.45 Vaginov’s novels could be considered utopian in perspective, insofar as they do not rigorously comply with the narrative model imposed by genre.46 Even

40  Vaginov, Garpagoniana, 435. Order and discipline are prominent features also in Campanella’s and More’s works. 41  Gregory Claeys, “Preface”, in: Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, xi–xii, here xi. 42  Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia”, 6. 43  Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia”, 7. 44  Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia”, 4. 45  On “utopia” and politics, see: Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas (eds), Utopia Matters: Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts, Porto 2005. See also: Vita Fortunati, “Fictional Strategies and Political Messages in Utopias”, in: Nadia Minerva (ed.), Per una definizione dell’utopia. Metodologie e discipline a confronto, Ravenna 1992, 17–27. 46  On “utopia” as a literary genre, see: Vita Fortunati, “Utopia as a Literary Genre”, in: Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson (eds), Dictionary of Literary Utopias, Paris 2000, 634–643; Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, Oxford 2010; Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre, Oxford 2013.

286 

 Irina Marchesini

though a complete description of an imagined society is missing, the narrative structure of Harpagoniana is utopian, as it presents the journeys of collectors set in a nightmarish city made of islands. They all want to reach the “good places” (eutopias) represented by collections, which act as “makàron nésoi”, literally isles of the blessed.47 Through the use of obsolete objects Vaginov, a collector himself, envisions a past reality, wishing it might substitute the new Soviet order. He is perfectly aware of the fact that such a replacement cannot ever take place: his beloved past “civilisation” was bound to succumb to the emergent dystopian present. Within the art of collecting, which is arguably the most subversive element in cultural terms, the author explores the intersection between the mutability of time, and hence of the minds that produce culture. Being specific cultural indexes, objects delineate the perimeter of a reality which once existed, but that is not present anymore, allowing characters to plot an existence beyond the coordinates of their physical time and place. Hence, collections represent an ideal of living as an alternative to the present. The collector dreamed that he was in a world which was not only far-off in distance and time, but which was also a better one, in which to be sure people were just as poorly provided with what they needed as in the world of everyday, but in which things were free from the bondage of being useful.48

However, is “utopian” the right adjective to define Vaginov’s poetics? As a concept, “utopia” contains an oxymoron, since it affirms and denies space at the same time. In fact, it derives from the Greek49 οὐ (“no”) and τόπος (“place”). These words, too, aptly describe collections, as they affirm the space they occupy through their constituents, while entailing something that does not exist anymore. Nonetheless, in the notion of “utopia” there are no temporal indications; the imagined place could well exist now, in the future, or even in the past. Although collections are diachronically connoted, as they remind of something that existed in the past and survives in the present, it is still possible to consider

47  Expression borrowed from Hesiod’s Works and Days. 48  Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, London 1973, 168–169. 49  See: Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford 1940; Robert S.P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Boston 2010.



A Retreat from Everyday Soviet Life 

 287

them as part of a utopian discourse, endorsing Umberto Eco’s view of “utopia” as a parallel world.50 According to Ernst Bloch, hope is the principal engine behind utopia. Vaginov’s case has hopefully demonstrated that there are other forces, among which mourning, activating the fantasy of a utopian world.

50  Umberto Eco, “I mondi della fantascienza”, in: Sugli specchi e altri saggi. Il segno, la rappresentazione, l’illusione, l’immagine, Milan 2001, 173–179, here 175.

Kate Kangaslahti

Utopian Voyages Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Mural Schemes for the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris Remember those magnificent compositions […] for the National Railways at the 1937 Exposition. And the prestigious poem of coloured clouds, of iridescent coils, in which he framed the nosedive of an aeroplane at this same fair. It was to evoke in the least susceptible of eyes a train of dreams and a heavenly loop-the-loop! It was to make a voyager or aviator out of the most sedentary of ordinary ­Frenchmen. – Dr Paul Viard1

The Palais de l’Air, or aeronautical pavilion, at the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne attracted some 30,000 visitors a day. It was one of the most successful realisations of the event’s overarching theme: the integration of art and technology and their application to modern life.2 Its truncated, conical entrance hall was the result of a close collaboration between the pavilion’s architects, Alfred Audoul, René Hartwig and Jack Gérodias, and the group “Art et Lumière”, an association of artists led by Robert Delaunay, his wife Sonia and the designer Félix Aublet. Upon entering, this transparent container both revealed and became its contents: encased entirely in Rhodoïd, a thermoplastic used here for the first time in building, it resembled the cockpit of an enormous aircraft, open to the blue skies above while enclosing within its luminous shell an aerial panorama (see fig. 24). At ground level, engines rested on stands like sculptures on plinths, framed by a succession of oversized wall panels by Sonia Delaunay, Aublet, Albert Gleizes and Roger Bissière, which further transformed these mechanical parts into objects of aesthetic wonder through scale and colour. In the centre of the hall, three French aircraft prototypes, raised off the floor or suspended from the ceiling, floated before the huge “coloured clouds”

1  “L’âme de Robert Delaunay”, undated typescript in the Fonds Delaunay, boîte 50 (10575), Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 2  For a comprehensive overview of the fair and its pavilions, see: Bertrand Lemoine (ed.), Paris 1937. Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1987. For more on the architecture of the Palais de l’Air, see: Gilles Plum, “Aéronautique: Alfred Audoul, René Hartwig et Jack Gérodias”, in: Lemoine (ed.), Paris 1937, 206–209.

290 

 Kate Kangaslahti

of Robert Delaunay’s vast mural on the far wall. He in turn projected the circular rhythms of his painting as a sculptural rainbow into the void. His intersecting rings, also fashioned from futuristic Rhodoïd, formed an iridescent orbit around the central plane, “recalling at once the rings of Saturn and the trajectories of certain aircraft”.3 The largest of these coils was a suspended walkway which allowed visitors to ascend the space around the planes, to see them from above, from below, to perform their own lateral loop-the-loop. A short distance away, the same team transformed the space of the former Gare des Invalides. Occupying the existing architecture of the disused railway station, the Palais des Chemins de fer was less radical than its aeronautical counterpart, but equally monumental and popular.4 From entrance level, the public descended past two works by Sonia Delaunay into a subterranean concourse where another of Robert Delaunay’s murals again occupied the far wall. Air fer eau (see col. fig. 22) brought together motifs which had long occupied the artist to create an imaginary view of Paris, the glorious gare centrale of France. The three graces from his landmark 1912 tribute to the city, La Ville de Paris, stand in miniature below Delaunay’s own muse, the Eiffel Tower, an oblique pylon soaring out of a great, target-like disc. Delaunay likened the sensory impact of his arrangements of concentric circles, the inward-outward thrust of their vibrating colours, to “the palpitating heart of a [modern] man in action”.5 Here, that beating disc signals man’s new heart-racing exploits and his conquest of the air: nine, superimposed spots of different size orbit a central point, the planets encircling the sun, and from these celestial heights a parachute descends into the face of the spectator. To the left of the tower, a second feat of iron engineering looms, a locomotive, advancing down upon the viewer head-on, throwing off semi-circular clouds of steam – evaporated water, the final element of the title – as it rounds the distant Sacré-Cœur. Delaunay’s mural stood above the cross-section of an actual Hudson locomotive type 232, which demonstrated the way power was generated and transmitted through the machine’s gas and electric circuits by means of coloured lights and sonorous effects. It was a display which at once demystified and yet made all the more marvellous this particular mechanical spectacle. Charged with commissions for some 2,500m2, Robert and Sonia Delaunay devised an expansive programme of murals, panels, reliefs and installations

3  Livre d’or officiel de l’Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne. Paris, 1937, Paris 1938, 109. 4  See: Gilles Plum, “Chemins de Fer: Audoul, Bagge, Gérodias et Hartwig”, in: Lemoine (ed.), Paris 1937, 218–221. 5  Robert Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, ed. Pierre Francastel, Paris 1957, 217.



Utopian Voyages 

 291

Fig 24: View of the Hall of Nationalised Industries, Palais de l’Air (Aeronautical Pavilion), Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937. Interior design by Félix Aublet and Robert Delaunay, “Art et Lumière”. Photograph, J. Laval, Bibliothèque des Affaires étrangères.

inspired by contemporary travel and its technologies. Neither wholly abstract nor strictly representational, their designs exploited structural parallels between the forms the artists had long developed and the mechanical forces animating modern transportation. Concentric discs, contrasting semi-circles and sinusoids here conjured propellers, control panels, gearwheels and railway tracks. The compression of space, fragmentation of forms and absence of either narrative description or linear perspective evoked the vertiginous sensation of flight, or disrupted views glimpsed from a speeding train. My premise is that this vast pictorial spectacle marked the apex of Robert Delaunay’s search for a monumental – and popular – expression of “simultanism”, the name he early gave to his organisation of the picture plane according to theories of contrasting colour. In the pavilions, vast swathes of undulating colour galvanised the viewer, the means by which, to reprise the words of the Delaunays’ long-time patron, Paul Viard, the most sedentary and ordinary of spectators became a modern voyager. My objective is to unpick the artists’ projection of their work into the utopia of collective space in relation to three historical threads. Firstly, contemporary discourse

292 

 Kate Kangaslahti

advocating the mural as the only truly social form of art, uniting the painter and architect and reconciling the artist and public. Broader discussion in France of this kind about the social utility of art memorably crystallised around the 1936 “Querelle du réalisme”; my second point will be to consider the Delaunays’ work in response to Fernand Léger’s subsequent call for popular and eloquent art true to the novel forms of the era. Lastly, I will consider their participation in the Exposition internationale in relation to the rise of the Popular Front and its promotion of work and popular leisure. Showcasing two recently nationalised industries, the artists’ arrangements for the aeronautical and railway pavilions enchanted the spectator with technology’s power to transform, even as international hostilities, already visible within the Exposition’s fairgrounds, foretold of imminent catastrophe.

Towards a Monumental “Simultanism” In his early experiments with colour, Robert Delaunay sought to create a painted experience analogous to the intensifying visual sensations punctuating urban life: its mechanical momentum, artificial light, new heights and, in his own words, “iron constructions, airships, and the countless manoeuvres of aeroplanes”.6 Inspired by the chromatic circular diagrams of Michel Eugène Chevreul and his theory of simultaneous contrast, Delaunay sought to electrify the viewer’s gaze, to deliver, as in his groundbreaking abstract Premier disc of 1912, a “punch” to the eye.7 His prewar foray into abstraction was not a categorical break; throughout the 1920s he continued to paint figurative and non-figurative works. Simultanism, Delaunay made clear, did not preclude any and all allusions to the natural world. In 1924, anticipating Fernand Léger’s call a decade later for a “new realism”, he wrote rather of the complete reinvention of observable forms within a “dynamic circular rhythm of colour” which “stripped [objects] of all literature, anecdote and description”.8 Above all, the work had to be brought into being by “a rhythm, rhythms, a movement […] which acted directly upon the spectator’s senses”, for it was by agitating its audience that painting might assume a

6  Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 111. Gordon Hughes interprets Delaunay’s early canvases in relation to contemporary scientific theories of perception in: Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism, Chicago 2014. 7  Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 215 8  Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 98.



Utopian Voyages 

 293

“popular ­dimension”.9 These words looked forward to Delaunay’s pursuit, from the outset of the new decade, of an increasingly monumental and social conception of simultanism. Rythme and Rythme sans fin were the titles he gave to a series of abstract compositions painted from 1930 onwards, in which his simultaneous discs transformed into semi-circular modules, arranged around vertical or oblique axes. The sinusoidal mobility of these contrasting, modular forms along an unending track signalled Delaunay’s search for what he described as painting which continued indefinitely, both within and outside of itself, breaking the bounds of the frame. Foreshadowing the vast Rythme circulaire the artist designed for the far wall of the aeronautical pavilion at the Exposition, these works announced a leap, initially conceptual, later real, out of the confines of the canvas and into the space beyond, the wall. In the rhythmic inversion of segments within a powerfully structured column, the painter believed he had found a form to “marry intimately with architecture”, because “it was itself constructed wholly architectonically”.10 Delaunay’s ambitions to wed art and architecture went beyond the medium of painting. The artist began using the same rhythmic forms in large reliefs, where the surface of the work was animated not only by modulating shapes, but also by a play of textures and materials. Experiments in plaster, sand, gravel, sawdust, glass and wood – mixed, or not, with pigment – and applied to a variety of supports, these works were the antecedents of the large wood and cement reliefs which were to transform the walls and pillars of the railway pavilion. In a review of these “mural overlays in relief and in colour”, shown at the galerie Art et Décoration in March 1935, Jean Cassou anticipated this contribution: “If the 1937 exposition is to fulfill the goal it has set itself, to reconcile art and technology, artists and architects, intellectual conjecture and materials, it must call upon Delaunay”.11 Cassou applauded the way the artist had thrown himself into the technical possibilities of the relief in search of a reconciliation of art and architecture which went beyond superfluous ornament, interrogating the very substance of the wall and its coloration. What the artist sought was a new form of art which transcended conventional divisions between painting, sculpture, and architecture, forged with the intent, as Delaunay himself set forth, of “taking the

9  Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 168. 10  Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 95. 11  Jean Cassou, “R. Delaunay et la plastique murale en couleur”, in: Art et Décoration, 64, 1935, 93–99, here 97.

294 

 Kate Kangaslahti

r­ evolution to another terrain. Into architecture. I, the artist, I, manually, am creating a revolution in the wall”.12 Delaunay’s words were written in response to an inquiry about the direction of painting, published in June 1935 in Commune, organ of the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. In declaring himself here a manual worker and announcing his abandonment of easel painting in favour of “large, architectured murals, expressing a great collective idea”, he was inserting himself into contemporary debate calling for new – renewed – artistic forms woven into the fabric of daily life. At a time of social unrest and economic crisis, many had begun to question the utility of art and the artist’s place in society and invoke a move into the utopia of the collective.13 In 1935 the Delaunays joined the Association Artistique de l’Art Mural, an independent group led by the artists Saint-Maur and Réginald Schœdelin, founded to advocate accessible, monumental art and to familiarise the public with its potential forms. During a speech inaugurating its second Salon de l’Art Mural in 1936, Schœdelin insisted that “mural art [was] the only truly ‘social’ form of art”. “Social in essence”, it marked a move away from individualist pursuits in the studio, towards the collaboration of the artist, artisan and architect; “social by destination”, it signalled a shift away from works intended for private speculation towards the shared value of those embedded in public spaces. “The walls are there”, he went on to suggest. “We must take them back, reclaim them […]. All the walls […] everywhere the crowd passes, waits, learns, prays or entertains itself”.14 Issued during preparations for the Exposition the following year, Schœdelin’s remarks were timely. The event, conceived to foster consensus, stimulate economic growth and relieve hardship, especially among artists, was to provide their occasion to speak to the collective, in the very terms the Association Artistique de l’Art Mural had advocated: allocating public funds for the decoration of popular spaces and in support of the unemployed; assembling teams of artists capable of executing large-scale commissions.15 

12  Robert Delaunay, “Où va la peinture (II)?”, in: Commune, 1935, no. 22 (June), 1124–1125, here 1125. 13  For more on this revival of the mural, see: Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957, New Haven 2009; Pascal Rousseau, “L’Art mural: Le Monumental au service de la collectivité (1934–1938)”, in: Le Front populaire et l’art moderne: hommage à Jean Zay, Orléans 1995, 57–65. 14  Reginald Schœdelin’s speech, given at the Maison de la Culture on 10 June, was published as: “Résponsabilité de l’artiste”, in: Europe. Revue littéraire mensuelle, 1936, no. 166 (15 October), 277–285, here 282–283. 15  The Exposition awarded 718 commissions in total, of which 345 were mural decorations, employing 2,232 artists, and at a cost of 20 million francs. For more on the activism of Saint-Maur and his colleagues, see: René Dauthy, Saint-Maur et l’Art mural, 1935–1949. L’historique et le 1%, Louvenciennes 1999.



Utopian Voyages 

 295

How art, including the new mural, should speak to its audience was a hotly contested issue in the mid-1930s, and hardly one resolved in the course of the Salons de l’Art Mural or planning for the Exposition.16 Style, and more specifically realism, was famously the central question in two debates staged at the Maison de la Culture in Paris the year before the fair opened, by Louis Aragon, erstwhile Surrealist turned devout Communist. Criticising the avant-garde delectation of manner and material to the point of abstraction and at the expense of social relevance, Aragon demanded a return to readily understood subjects of popular appeal painted in a figurative style.17 The 1936 “Querelle du Réalisme” set Aragon and his French incarnation of Socialist Realism against the painter Fernand Léger. Léger blamed the chasm separating modern art from its public not on the artist but on the existing social order which denied people the time and freedom of mind to appreciate it. Leisure, in other words; according to Léger, “everything depend[ed] on it”. He labelled the regressive nature of Socialist Realism an insult to workers capable of recognising the aesthetic qualities of the modern world, which they were manufacturing with their own hands. Citing the aeroplane propeller, the bicycle and the car, Léger struck a familiar chord in articulating his concept of a “new realism, which ha[d] its origins in modern life itself, in its constant phenomena, in the influence of its manufactured and geometric objects; in a rearrangement where the imagination and reality met and intersect[ed], but from which all literary and descriptive sentimentality ha[d] been banished”.18 Peripheral to the debates themselves, the Delaunays’ tribute to transportation at the aeronautical and railway pavilions the following year likewise found its forms and raison d’être in modern life and its machinery. What they shared with Léger was an optimistic belief in a socially relevant art which remained true to the novel forms and freedoms of the era, while speaking persuasively to the people, to those finally granted their leisure by a new political order, the Popular Front. Plans for the Exposition internationale were well underway when an anti-fascist coalition of the Radicals, Socialists and French Communists emerged victorious in the elections of April and May 1936. The Popular Front rose to power following a period of violent factiousness in France, but its arrival also marked a moment of lyrical fraternity amongst the popular classes and left-wing artists and intellectuals. Inheriting the project late, in the face of opposition willing its failure, the new government embraced the event as a platform for its policies and cultural agenda, including the Matignon Accords, which legislated a forty-hour

16  The Salons de l’Art Mural welcomed any and “all aesthetics and techniques”, see: Amédée Ozenfant, “L’Art mural”, in: Cahiers d’Art, 9, 1934, no. 9–10, 274. 17  Aragon elaborated his argument in: Pour un réalisme socialiste, Paris 1935. 18  Fernand Léger, “Le Nouveau réalisme continue”, in: Jean Lurçat et al., La Querelle du réalisme, Paris 1936, 73–79, here 77.

296 

 Kate Kangaslahti

working week and paid annual leave for the working classes.19 The Delaunays’ participation counts among subsequent gauchissements to the fair’s programme, bound to the arrival of the left-wing administration on two counts: firstly, the aeronautical and railway pavilions were to represent industries which the government was in the very process of nationalising and standardising, linked to its new leisure policy and efforts to advance mass travel and tourism.20 Secondly, on a more prosaic level, permissions for the Delaunays’ designs for the aeronautical pavilion had been thwarted by conservative functionaries from the Ministry of Air charged with representing French aviation at the fair. As hostile towards the Popular Front as they were towards the painters, the Ministry’s chief engineer, Étienne Pitois, and former minister, Senator André Laurent-Eynac, vetoed the scheme. The commission remained in doubt up until December 1936, when the Delaunays personally solicited the direct intervention of the Socialist Prime Minister, Léon Blum. It was Blum who finally guaranteed the Delaunays and their collaborators total creative liberty in the completion of the monumental project he deemed “absolutely remarkable from an artistic point of view”.21

The Promise of Work, Technology and Leisure Now allocated 50 artists by the organising committee for the realisation of their plans, the Delaunays leased an empty garage on the outskirts of Paris in January 1937, transforming its lock-ups into bedrooms, creating what Sonia Delaunay retrospectively spoke of as “our own phalanstery”.22 Her allusion to Charles Fourier’s

19  Pascal Ory extensively discusses the Popular Front as a cultural phenomenon, including right-wing opposition to its policies, in: La Belle illusion: culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire, 1935–1938, Paris 1994. 20  Julian Jackson argues “leisure” was the catchword of the age, in: “‘Le temps des loisirs’: Popular Tourism and Mass Leisure in the Vision of the Front populaire”, in: Martin S. Alexander and Helen Graham (eds), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives, Cambridge 2002, 226–239. 21  Letter from the prime minister to the commissioner general of the Exposition, 4 December 1936, Archives Nationales, F12/12428. Blum’s decision was delivered at a meeting on 23 December and minutes from this meeting, signed by his representative, Jean Locquin, Pitois and the architect Alfred Audoul appear in the same archival file. 22  Artists on the team included André Beaudin, Rodolphe Calliaux, Louis Cattiaux, Georges Cheyssial, Géo Colucci, Jean Crotti, André Delauzières, Yan-Bernard Dyl, Maurice Estève, Serge Férat, Albert Gleizes, Jean Marembert, Roger Sby, Léopold Survage, Geza Szobel, Michel Tapie and Jacques Villon.



Utopian Voyages 

 297

19th-Century designs for a utopian community was partly facetious; relations with their collaborator, Félix Aublet, had soured, strikes delayed construction at the site, as she herself stated, “not all was rosy”.23 Yet her words also tacitly referred to the unrealised dreams she and her husband had harboured of founding an artists’ community in Nesles-La-Vallée.24 Surrounded by colleagues in their makeshift workshop in Levallois-Perret, dwarfed by the canvases spread around them, this was the nearest the Delaunays came to ushering in a new artistic era comparable to the age of the great cathedrals, where colour and painting were again integrated into architecture and the artist into a great collective enterprise. “The Middle Ages have been and gone”, Robert Delaunay had written in 1929, “now will come the modern’âge”.25 Contemporary reports describing their preparations for the Palais de l’Air and the Palais des Chemins de fer, two temples to modern technology, echoed this analogy. Louis Cheronnet, in Marianne, applauded the way “with a monastic spirit, they took on hundreds of square metres of painted surfaces […] full of good humour”. The black and white photographs taken at the time attested to the artists’ commitment and joviality (see fig. 25), but the images could not do justice to the brilliance of their giant illuminations: “this seminary of pure colour had to be seen [to be believed]”.26 Or, put another way, here the Delaunays’ quest for a “pure movement of colours” met with a new purity of purpose.27 “If Robert Delaunay poses his brushes for an instant”, wrote Jean Maréchal, in Le Petit Parisien, following his visit, “it is not in any way to initiate me in the mysteries of ‘Abstract art’, as I was secretly hoping, but to celebrate the joy of teamwork, the frank camaraderie reigning between them, ‘tomorrow’s formula, social as much as pictorial innovation, of global significance and which must succeed’, he assures me, with smiling conviction”.28 By the time the artists were throwing themselves into their collective task, this work had acquired, as Delaunay himself suggested, a new imperative, one associated with the ideals of the Popular Front and the success of its social innovations. The railways were pivotal to the government’s politique des loisirs – recently introduced leisure passes offered summer reductions of 40–60% on journeys

23  Sonia Delaunay, Nous irons jusqu’au soleil, Paris 1979, 116. Delaunay alludes to a lack of integrity on Aublet’s part in the distribution of funds. 24  Diverse documents relating to the development of this scheme are in the Fonds Delaunay, boîte 64 (10575), Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou. 25  Robert Delaunay, “Le Modern’Âge [1929]”, in: Aujourd’hui: art et architecture, 1957, no. 11 (January), 28–31, here 30. 26  Louis Cheronnet, “L’Homme et ses transports”, in: Marianne, 18 August 1937, 6. 27  Delaunay, Nous irons jusqu’au soleil, 106–107. 28  Jean Maréchal, “La Section de ‘l’art abstrait’”, in: Petit Parisien, 30 May 1937, 2.

298 

 Kate Kangaslahti

Fig. 25: Sonia Delaunay and her team surrounding one of the panels from Voyages lointains, in the workshop at Levallois-Perret, 1937. Photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

by train – and Sonia Delaunay’s murals for the pavilion, lining the descent into the main concourse, spoke directly to these newly-enabled “holiday-makers”, evoking rail travel as a rhythmic montage of colliding images. Engaged to produce two works according to the themes of “Regional Visions” and “Water”, Delaunay returned to the happy and fruitful years she had spent along the Iberian peninsula during World War I, reprising motifs from her celebrated works of the markets at Minho.29 Her past inspiration, “the market teeming with life, colour, people, animals, vegetables – the landscape dominated by a viaduct in the distance”, exerted itself on a newly monumental scale in Portugal. Bullocks, boats and brightly-dressed locals came into view out of overlapping, simultaneous discs, themselves arranged to suggest that imposing bridge of Delaunay’s recollection.30 In Voyages lointains, the more abstract of the two murals, dominated by blue and yellow rhythms, a succession of parasols, watermelons and stylised

29  Bernard Dorival cites the thematic terms of the Delaunays’ commissions in: “La participation de Robert et Sonia Delaunay à l’Exposition 1937, d’après des documents inédits”, in: Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’art français, 1987, 273–288, here 273. 30  Quoted in: Michel Hoog, Robert et Sonia Delaunay, Paris 1967, 152.



Utopian Voyages 

 299

figures conjured the distant, aquatic pleasures of an unnamed coastal retreat. As visitors walked between the works, as if passing through a train carriage, the more or less figurative fragments on either side must have emerged like illusive forms sighted from moving windows; and, conversely, like glimmers from the recesses of memory. Louis Cheronnet’s contemporary review emphasised the nostalgic, oneiric quality of the murals: “Sonia Delaunay leads us among memories of travel in sunny regions filled with flashes in the manner of Rimbaud […]. Time is but a dream”.31 Stripped of any overtly anecdotal or descriptive character, her landscapes both transported the viewer to places distant and unknown and, in the context of the newly nationalised rail service, held out a promise: of memories still to come, of the journeys yet to be taken, but now possible and more affordable. The arrangement of concentric circles forming the structural basis of each work lent Delaunay’s murals a compositional unity – each was divided into four stepped panels as the stairwell widened into the main concourse – and more plainly tied her designs to the reliefs of her husband and the technology which inspired both: the machinery and momentum of the locomotive.32 For the six pillars overlooking the split staircase to the right of his own mural, Robert Delaunay designed pale wooden panels measuring up to six metres each, great columns of modulating semi-circles, evoking the interlocking wheels of a train moving along their own unending (vertical) track. The culmination of his earlier endless rhythms and reliefs, these serpentine chains melded perfectly with their architectural supports to produce a new type of pilaster for the modern’âge. Seen alongside Air fer eau, the muted reliefs echoed the smoke rings powering his painted locomotive, or, alternatively, appeared as residual traces from the cross-sectioned Hudson model below. Opposite, for the entrance to the Hall des réseaux, where the latest international technologies were on display, Delaunay devised a further four reliefs, 8 x 4 metres each, around the theme of “security, speed, flexibility, precision”.33 Conceived contiguously, but divided by five columns, his dynamic arrangement of concentric circles referred legibly to different elements of mass rail’s machinery (see fig. 26), but translated its clocks, semaphores, signals, wheels, gearwheels and tracks as giant graphic signs in relief. As the new language of this era of rapid transit, it spoke not only to the reliability of the modern railway, but also its potential to delight: together the Delaunays created what the fair’s commemorative volume described as “the atmosphere of the Station of the

31  Cheronnet, “L’Homme et ses transports”, 6. 32  The underlying structure is particularly visible in some of Delaunay’s gouache studies. 33  Dorival, “La participation de Robert et Sonia Delaunay”, 274.

300 

 Kate Kangaslahti

Fig. 26: Robert Delaunay, Entrance to the Hall des réseaux, Palais des Chemins de fer (Railway Pavilion), Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937. Photograph © Gorsky Frères, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Future, adapted to new needs and conveying to the crowds […] the pleasure of journeys in a joyful and lively atmosphere of coloured rhythms”.34 While the state-run aviation industry did not play so immediate a part in the advent of mass travel and tourism, the popularisation of this otherwise elite form of sport and transportation was key. The initial programme singled out the young, who, “in the future, ought not to conceive of any journey but by plane”; and the same brief earmarked the perimeter of the front hall “for showing radial motors, searchlights, dashboards, rev counters, speedometers, testing machines, etc…”.35 Hanging on the wall to the left of the central display, Sonia Delaunay’s three wall panels appealed to young and old alike by playing upon the technological alchemy through which these individual mechanical parts, heavier than air, allied to take flight (see fig. 27).36 In Tableau de bord, Moteur d’avion, and Hélice,

34  Livre d’or officiel, 345. 35  Dorival, “La participation de Robert et Sonia Delaunay”, 275. 36  This paradox equally fascinated her husband. See: Pascal Rousseau, “La Construction du simultané: Robert Delaunay et l’aéronautique”, in: Revue de l’art, 1993, no. 113, 19–33.



Utopian Voyages 

 301

Fig. 27: View of the Palais de l’Air (Aeronautical Pavilion), Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937. Wall panels by Sonia Delaunay (left to right: Hélice (Propeller), Moteur d’avion (Airplane Engine) and Tableau de bord (Instrument Panel). Photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

a different primary colour dominated, but in each case Delaunay offset these robust tones with more delicate, even ethereal notes and contrasts. In Tableau de bord, the round dials of the instrument panel appear within a red semi-circle, arranged around a central hand-wheel, the lower half of which dissipates into a muted, inverted rainbow, mirroring the larger arc of the dashboard above. Within the bright yellow rectangle of Moteur d’avion, the artist casts the central airplane engine in a combination of lime green, pale pink and metallic grey, while to the left, its squat forms emit a stylised wisp of smoke and steam, an intricately traced spiral, half-black, half-white. In Hélice, quasi-schematic machine components, drawn in a fine white line, float among the radiating blue circles, so many diagrams in an elaborate blueprint. At the centre of these discs, the propeller of the title hovers, its blades painted in pastel shades and appearing partly translucent, as if to signify their dematerialisation before our eyes, once they begin to revolve. In their “happy schemes” for the aeronautical pavilion, as Jean Goujon suggested in L’Intransigeant, the Delaunays repeatedly invoked in this way the “beauty of aerodynamic forms, the power of speed, the precision of trajectories

302 

 Kate Kangaslahti

but also the immateriality of space”.37 Above his wife’s paintings, Robert Delaunay’s translucent orbiting walkway was itself a metaphor for the immaterial made tangible, bringing spectators closer than they had perhaps ever been to these flying machines, and the new perspectives they offered in allowing man to escape his earthbound existence. Behind, in the enormous Rythme circulaire he designed, the artist’s simultaneous discs and endless rhythms escaped their own confines – the easel – into the space beyond. In such close proximity to actual aircraft, abetted by the inclusion of a distinct serpentine form, the discs appeared to gyrate like spinning propellers. But more than representing so many turning screws, Delaunay’s pulsating succession of rings, expanding ever outwards and spiralling ever inwards, also nullified the wall, substituting an imaginary and optical void for its planar surface. Nominally abstract, the artist still asserted in this work a clear link to the realm of human experience: he sought to conjure the sensation of a new and infinite space which the technology of flight made possible, an appeal to the senses emphasised by enabling the public’s trajectory up and around the work in a similar defiance of gravity. Here Delaunay arrived at what Eric Michaud has described as a “fusion” between the image and the viewer,

Fig. 28: René Hartwig, Impression of the Aeronautical Pavilion at Night, 1937. Watercolour. Reproduced in Livre d’or officiel de l’Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne. Paris, 1937, Paris 1938. Photograph, Bibliothèque des Affaires étrangères.

37  Jean Goujon, “Au Pavillon de l’Air”, in: L’Intransigeant, 25 June 1937, 7.



Utopian Voyages 

 303

reaching the summit of simultanism’s popular dimension.38 Ordinary spectators, seen from above or from below, at once observing and observed by each other, became an integral part of the spectacle. Their experience of participating in a kind of sidereal space was heightened at night, when three oscillating spotlights shone out through the Rhodoïd dome and the ramps and coloured rings were illuminated, turning the pavilion, when seen from the exterior, “into a colossal lightbulb with its own polychrome filaments” (see fig. 28).39

Forces Unleashed Despite the resistance which initially greeted their involvement, the Delaunays’ designs for the aeronautical and railway pavilions proved a critical and popular success.  Fernand Lot, in Marianne, described the whole as a majestic “orchestration – neither literary, nor anecdotal, a coherently bold, plastic revelry, a circus where colour plainly leaps with delight, and with new agility”.40 These modern means of transport, it was widely acknowledged, demanded novel forms and Yvanhoé Rambosson, in Les Nouvelles des Expositions, rejoiced in the role which “new art, representative of our times, in harmony with the civilisation of scientific miracles” had found within the Exposition.41 In the same publication, Marc Asie paid tribute to “the public [who] was not in the least shocked by the decorations” but rather “captivated by the overall impression of grandeur and homogeneity”.42 The Delaunays’ “geometric pyrotechnics”, to reprise the words of Louis Cheronnet, perfectly complemented the excitement surrounding contemporary travel and the speed associated with its new technologies: “All these iridescent circles, these prisms and these diagonals, these tangents, these multicoloured segments form a victoriously poignant pictorial symphony. It whistles, crackles, grinds, screeches, puffs, whirrs, hums, sings, explodes, like everything that moves, waves, oscillates, shudders, veers, turns and whirls”. Anything else,

38  Eric Michaud, “Art, propagande, publicité autour de Paris – 1937”, in: L’art face à la Crise: l’art en Occident 1929–1939, Saint Étienne 1980, 75–92, here 84. 39  As described in an unsigned, undated note, belonging to either Aublet or Delaunay, in the Archives Nationales (série non numérotée), Archives du Commissariat de l’Exposition, “Pavillon de l’Aéronautique”, projet A. 40  Fernand Lot, “Une grande orchestration de l’art abstrait”, in: Marianne, 7 July 1937, 6. 41  Yvanhoé Rambosson, “L’exposition de 1937 abrite les premières grandes réalisations d’un art nouveau”, in: Les Nouvelles des Expositions, 1937, no. 9 (1 September), 1. 42  Marc Asie, “Au Palais de l’air et des chemins de fer. Une Décoration peinte d’un esprit nouveau”, in: Les Nouvelles des Expositions, 1937, no. 9 (1 September), 2.

304 

 Kate Kangaslahti

Fig. 29: Postcard, view of the fairgrounds of the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937, from the terrace of the Trocadéro. German pavilion, by Albert Speer, left, and Soviet pavilion, by Boris Iofan, right. Collection of the author.

Cheronnet insisted, “would have been but a pale anecdote, a sad image of man crushed by forces unleashed”.43 If, then, the dystopian potential of technology was largely out of sight in the aeronautical and railway pavilions, in 1937, as the writer’s very choice of words intimated, its destructive power could never be wholly out of mind. Even among these geometric pyrotechnics, where the very proportions colour assumed operated as an allegory for the Delaunays’ faith in humanity’s emancipation though engineered progress, one question implicitly – explicitly – hung over the display: why was that central aircraft suspended in a nose-dive, advancing down upon the spectator below and not soaring upwards, into the blue beyond? If the answer was not immediately visible from Robert Delaunay’s looping walkway, a different aerial view, the fairgrounds seen from the Eiffel Tower, offered a compelling clue (see fig. 29). From above the Champs de Mars the monolithic pavilions of National-Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union confronted one another, reflecting their clash on the world stage, and their opposing interests

43  Cheronnet, “L’Homme et ses transports”, 6.



Utopian Voyages 

 305

in conflict already underway, the civil war then devastating Spain.44 In the pavilion of besieged Republican Spain the question that plunging aircraft whispered was answered resoundingly and with one word: Guernica, the Basque capital which the German and Italian air forces had relentlessly bombed on behalf of Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces one month before the Exposition opened.45 In Pablo Picasso’s mural of the same name, designed for the Spanish pavilion, broken figures lift their faces and arms skywards in despair at those dive-bombing planes, invisible in the work but for one suggestive central shadow, cast in the shape of a cross on the severed arm of the dead soldier below. And whereas the sleek plane in Delaunay’s scheme glowed with promise and technological marvel, a beacon within the fairgrounds, suspended in the incandescent filaments of its very own colossal glass bulb, in Guernica a similarly radiating light symbolised the incendiary cargo such machines were really designed to carry: light globe, bombilla in Spanish, a derivative of the term for bomb, bomba, and Picasso’s visual-verbal metaphor for the destructive power of technology already unleashed in Spain. Here, in black and white, lay an inescapable truth, and the unhappy destination for many of those would-be travellers and aviators. In two years time, the trains and planes and technological wonders on display were to transform the lives of the Exposition’s visitors in ways the Delaunays had not imagined. These ordinary and sedentary spectators were soon to become the soldiers, refugees and casualties of war.

44  For more on the schisms and visual confrontations within the Exposition, see: Dawn Ades et al. (eds), Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930–1945, London 1995. 45  On this subject, see also: Catherine Blanton Freedberg, The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair, New York 1986.

Éva Forgács

Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary László Rajk and the Na-Ne Gallery In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. – T.S. Eliot, East Coker, from Four Quartets. I don’t hesitate any more: will shoot myself in the head. […] We have shot, crashed, and destroyed everything that even vaguely reminded of the past. We leaped ahead a thousand years, a thousand years were between us and those we killed […]. Shortly, I fought against space and time, wanted to force the future to be the present. This seemed possible in those years of panic and confusion, when time ceased to exist; but now panic has ceased, and life is moving ahead again in time and space. We may have conquered space, but not time. Life is managed, once again, by the same rules as ever: love, money, glory. – Mikhail Slonimskii, The Emery Machine, 1922–1923.1

On 16 June 1989, weeks before the official collapse of Communism in Hungary, an extraordinary event took place in Budapest. For the first time, the 1956 revolution and its victims were publicly mourned and honoured. The 31st anniversary of the execution of 1956 Prime Minister Imre Nagy, his Chief of Staff József Szilágyi, his government’s Minister of Defense Pál Maléter and journalist Miklós Gimes, was marked by the first public commemoration and the martyrs’ reburial in Budapest. Also commemorated was Nagy’s Minister of Press Géza Losonczy who died in prison in 1957, and an empty sixth coffin was dedicated to the memory of the “unknown 1956 revolutionary”. Nagy and members of his government and staff were executed in April 1958, and their remains had been buried at a hidden location until, weeks before the collapse of Communism in Hungary, they were unearthed for a dignified funeral that would set the historical facts, at least symbolically, right.

1  Published in Hungarian translation by Klára Szőllőssy: “Mihail Szlonyimszkij: Az Emery-gép” [The Emery Machine], in: Kegyetlen szerelem [Cruel Love], vol. 2, Budapest 1969, 209– 242. All translations of quotations are by the author unless noted otherwise.

308 

 Éva Forgács

The commemoration was held in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square, in front of the Hall of Arts. To the surprise of the several hundred thousand strong crowd, which probably expected an overwhelming presence of the Hungarian tricolour, the neo-classicist building was sheathed in a constructivist black-and white textile decoration with a Speakers’ Rostrum on the right side of the building, reminiscent of El’ Lisitskii’s and Il’ya Chashnik’s 1920–1924 design (see fig. 30). While black and white were solemn colours of mourning, the rostrum was made of rusty iron. Rusty and rough hewn, the construction evoked the working class people who had fought in the revolution, but it also referred to the social origins of those Communist leaders who crashed that same revolution. Moreover, the rusty rostrum also stood for the rough reality that replaced Communism’s streamlined dreams embodied by the dynamic diagonal of this constructivist piece. A metal flag was attached to it with a hole in the middle, which was a symbol of the 1956 revolutionary banner from which the Stalinist coat of arms had been removed, leaving nothing but the national colours and airy emptiness in the middle. The metal flag had no colours. Its reference to 1956 notwithstanding, it was the international banner of the one-time working class movement. Bringing the formal language of Russian Constructivism to this national commemoration was a surprise. Constructivism was not what most Hungarians who mourned the defeat of the 1956 revolution and its popular government had expected or identified with. It brought to mind that the martyrs were also Communists, albeit anti-Stalinists, who had been executed by their fellow Communist Party leaders, whereas their memory was associated more with the 1956 revolution as a national uprising, than with Communist idealism. The decoration clearly and literally referred to killed illusions. It was a courageous decision to make the martyrs’ Communist commitment so explicit, because they were respected and commemorated as victims of Communism rather than part – even if reformist – of that political system. The choice of neo-constructivism for this historic event was all the more daring because constructivism was neither widely known nor popular in Hungary. The associations the design raised in the crowd were vaguely technological and politically left-wing, but few were likely to identify it with the pre-Stalinist Communist idea represented by the Russian, and then the international, Constructivists. By 1989 Constructivism had been brought back to attention by the New Left, particularly by some of the 1968 movements, as materialisation of the original idealism of the Communist faith. The mass event of 16 June 1989 was not exactly meant to be the celebration of the victims as Communists, but rather an opportunity for the first national demonstration against the four decades of Communist dictatorship in Hungary. The location was heavily charged with symbolism. Not only was it the Heroes’ Square with statues of the nation’s great kings; it was only yards away from the



Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary  

 309

Fig. 30: Budapest, 16 June 1989. Reburial of 1956 martyrs. Design László Rajk and Gábor Bachmann. Photo Courtesy László Rajk.

site of the former statue of Stalin, violently destroyed as one of the first acts of the 1956 uprising. The remaining stone foundation of the Stalin statue had served as a tribune for the post-1956 Communist Party leader János Kádár and other Communist leaders to wave to the workers mandated to march there on May Day every year. The site, including the Hall of Arts, was picked for the commemoration by the Committee for Historical Justice, founded just a year earlier, that organised the public reburial and chose the Heroes’ Square over the cemetery that the still ruling Communist Party would have preferred as a more distant, smaller and more controllable location. The appointment of László Rajk Jr (b. 1949) as designer and architect was also symbolic. He was the son of another martyr of the Communist system, former Minister of the Interior László Rajk, who was victim of the first series of show trials in Hungary, and was executed in 1949. Co-commissioned with architect Gábor Bachmann (b. 1952), Rajk Jr was already known for his deconstructivist neo-constructivist style. Commanding a professional building crew of the Hungarian Film Studios where he had often worked as set designer, Rajk did not hesitate to confront the crowd with a strong reference to the political origins of those who were being remembered as national heroes. He achieved a shocking effect by

310 

 Éva Forgács

creating an early Communist-style visual environment, evoking the original idealism that had led many, including his father, to join the Communist movement which later betrayed and killed them. By that time Rajk Jr was already member of the Association of Free Democrats, a liberal political party of dissident intellectuals, formally founded a year earlier.

Enter Constructivism The dramatic set of the 1989 event in Budapest was embedded in both the renewed awareness of 1920s Constructivism, and the vehement anti-constructivism of 1980s’ postmodernism. Constructivism was re-discovered on the international art scene in the 1960s as part of the post-World War II efforts to re-conquer the modernism of the interwar period that had been lost to Nazism, Stalinism, and World War II. The unearthing of Russian Constructivism in the West was a complicated process, based on its Western iteration for which Stephen Bann coined the term “International Constructivism”.2 The rediscovery relied on art works and documents that were in the West, and Camilla Gray’s groundbreaking 1962 book The Russian Experiment in Art.3 The interpretation of Constructivism has also been tied to posterity’s views on the Bolshevik Revolution. Correctly or not, Constructivism has come down in history as the face of the 1917 Russian Revolution and what it symbolised over the years during and after Communism. As the youth movements culminating in 1968 were unfolding, increased attention was given to every aspect of the Russian Revolution, and the art of the revolutionary era appeared, for several Trotskyist groups, as the token of the purity and idealism of 1917.4 The social utopia attributed to Communism has proved to be as fascinating as the intriguing difference between the idea and its actual incarnation. The journal October, launched in America in 1976, chose its title “in celebration of that moment in our Century when revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic innovation were joined in a manner exemplary and unique”.5 This vision of the October Revolution has been sustained as faith in a better world in

2  Stephen Bann, “Introduction”, in: Stephen Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, New York 1974, xxv-xlix, here xxvii. 3  Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922, London 1962. 4  For more details, see: Éva Forgács, “How the New Left Invented East-European Art”, in: Cornelia Klinger (ed.), Blindheit und Hellsichtigkeit. Künstlerkritik an Politik und Gesellschaft der Gegenwart, Berlin 2014, 61–84. 5  [Editorial], “About October”, October 1, 1976, no. 1, 3–5, here 3.



Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary  

 311

the West, in spite of historians having revealed the nuts and bolts of the actual dictatorial system the revolution had morphed into. The utopia of a society of liberty, equality and fraternity has had a strong, stubborn hold on the modern imagination and those familiar with Russian Constructivism invested it with the power of that vision. Maybe it did have that vision. The formal discipline prescribed by modernity and, eminently, Constructivism, has also provoked dissent, first of all among those who had basically agreed with the fundamental tenets of Constructivism, modernism, and the “international style”, but found them ripe for a shake-up. A critique of Constructivism, combined with nostalgia for it, came to public sight at the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition of MoMA in 1988. Curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, it showed works by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha M. Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi. The architects, according to MoMA’s press release, “recognized the imperfectibility of the modern world” and, “obsessed with diagonals, arcs, and warped planes, they intentionally violate the cubes and right angles of modernism. Their projects continue the experimentation with structure initiated by the Russian Constructivists, but the goal of perfection through straight lines and rectangular forms as the 1920s were remembered, is subverted. The traditional constructivist virtues of harmony, unity, and clarity are displaced by disharmony, fracturing, and mystery”.6 Of course the original Constructivists favoured diagonals and arcs, too, thus Constructivism was deliberately and incorrectly presented as the visual language of right angles. However, such distortions are part of its afterlife. An introductory section of Constructivist and Suprematist paintings and sculpture drawn from MoMA’s collection was included in the exhibition as well,7 and the presence of such original, utopia-driven works underlined the distance between the illusions of the 1920s and the concepts and practices of the late 1980s. The word “deconstructivism” had such a magic ring to it as had “Constructivism”, both being imperative, enticing, programmatic, and potentially all-inclusive. The term “deconstruction” (déconstruction), antinomy of “construction”, was introduced by Jacques Derrida8 with the intention to overcome the ­hierarchical­

6  Deconstructivist Architecture, MoMA 1988, press release, n.p. 7  A blurring of the profound difference and conflict between these two directions has accompanied their Western reception since the first showing of Russian avant-garde art in the Van Diemen Gallery Berlin, in October 1922. 8  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and London 1976.

312 

 Éva Forgács

binary systems in Western philosophy. Instead, he proposed an analytical – deconstructive – system of discourse in philosophy and linguistics, overthrowing the thesis-antithesis-synthesis trinity of Hegelian, and classic modernist thinking. Antagonism to modernity has been brewing for as long as modernity has existed. With its reductive functionalism, rationalism, discipline, future-bound vision and political commitment, Constructivism was an extreme case of modernity. The actual picture of Constructivism is, of course, more complicated than the received notion that has come down to posterity: Konstantin Medunetskii or Katarzyna Kobro, to mention only two names, took irrational factors into consideration in their work and thoughts, as did El’ Lisitskii, a fellow traveler of the Constructivists, but Constructivism has been remembered as pure functionalism and rationalism. In this paper I will not look back at the long history of anti-Enlightenment currents starting with Romanticism; suffice it to point out that resistance to what Philip Johnson termed “International Style” in architecture, the closest to Constructivism among Western directions, was permanent among even leading progressive intellectuals. Even such prominent figures as Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch admitted their utter dislike of “box houses” in a debate a few years after World War II.9 Robert Venturi’s 1966 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was a major sign of the sea-change forecasting the end of the modernist paradigm.

Flashback: Constructivism in the Hungarian AvantGarde, and the Neo-Avant-Garde of the 1960s and 1970s in Hungary The legacy of the Hungarian Constructivists, and Constructivism in general, was by and large unknown in Hungary except for a few hundred artists, historians of modernism, and professionals who sought out books and exhibitions on the subject. Unlike the West, where Constructivism, during the first decades of the 20th Century, evolved into a more subtle aesthetic radicalism with clear political statements, it intensified into a profoundly messianic movement in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe, where redemption could be expected in the cultural sphere only.10

9  See: Frederick Schwartz, “The Disappearing Bauhaus”, in: Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei (eds), Bauhaus Construct, London and New York, 61–82. 10  For more details about the messianic character of Constructivism in Eastern Europe, see: Éva Forgács, “Between Cultures: Hungarian Concepts of Constructivism”, in: Timothy O. Benson



Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary  

 313

Hungarian artists learned about Constructivism while in exile in Vienna and Berlin respectively after the defeated 1919 Hungarian Commune. In fact, Berlin-based Hungarian art critic Alfréd Kemény, who visited the Moscow INKhUK in 1921, and painter Béla Uitz, who visited the Third International’s Congress in summer 1921, were the first to bring direct information about Russian Constructivism to their fellow Hungarians in Berlin.11 The international crowd of Berlin progressives who expected the World Revolution in the wake of October 1917 saw Constructivism as the art of a Communist future. By 1923–1924 it became the intellectual and artistic vogue in Germany,12 on its way to conquer design as well. As Constructivism was tied to a social and technological utopia, local social and technological conditions played a pivotal part in shaping its regional variations. In contrast to Russia where a social shake-up was under way, Germany’s turn from monarchy to republic did not bring about a similar subversion in the structure of the society. While in Russia, in the midst of such material poverty that designers had to use wood instead of metal13 and architect Hannes Meyer reported even in the early 1930s that nails were so scarce they were worth their weight in gold, Germany’s industrial development was arrested for a few years only by the Great War. The infrastructure and the new technologies underpinning the development of mass production, architecture and design were in place again as early as 1922–1923. Metal constructions, photography, film, design, and kinetic art were the new media associated with Constructivism, even if there was room – as well as market – for “Constructivist paintings” too. Whereas Russian Constructivists attributed a moral and political stance to designing useful objects for the people instead of painting pictures that they considered obsolete and idle luxury, design in Germany – even in the Bauhaus – was part of capitalist business, with few ethical ramifications apart from the duty of delivering good-quality products to the consumers. A further difference was that while Russian Constructivists supported their new political regime until the late 1920s, progressive artists in

(ed.), Exchange and Transformation: The Avant-Gardes of Central Europe, Cambridge, MA 2002, 146–164; Géza Perneczky, “A fekete négyzettől a pszeudo kockáig” [From the Black Square to the Pseudo-Cube], in: Magyar Műhely, 16, 1978, no. 56–57 (December), 27–45. 11  For details, see: Oliver Botar, “Constructivism, International Constructivism, and the Hungarian Emigration”, in: The Hungarian Avant-Garde 1914–1933 [catalogue], Storrs 1987, 90–97. 12  See: Hans Richter, “Towards Constructivism”, trans. David Britt, in: Éva Forgács and Timothy O. Benson (eds), Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930, Cambridge, MA and Los Angeles 2002, 483. Richter’s text was originally published under the title “An den Konstruktivismus” in the journal G, in June 1924. 13  See for example Vladimir Tatlin’s sleigh designs, sparing even wood, calculating how much less material he can use for one chair than the Thonet factory. See: Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism, New Haven 1983, 211.

314 

 Éva Forgács

Germany were in opposition, finding that Weimar Social Democracy fell short of their more radical ideals.14 Lacking both a society in rapid transformation and one with advanced technology, artists in Eastern Europe, for example Hungary, deviated from both models and understood Constructivism as a redemptive doctrine. They associated geometric abstraction with timeless classicism and invested the geometric vocabulary with a majestic and authoritative aura, in contradistinction to the pragmatism of both Russian and international Constructivism. Constructivism in Russia was born out of the realistic need for artistic survival in the Communist state and a new, pragmatic and useful function for the artists in the society even at the cost of permanently redefining the concept of “art”. International Constructivism in the West was created by the desire for a high-tech utopian society, which was symbolised by mobile sculptures, transparent constructions, artificial materials, and spatial compositions like those of Moholy-Nagy, Gabo, and others. The Hungarian concept of Constructivism, represented first of all by Lajos Kassák and Sándor Bortnyik, sought ultimate balance, authority, and order. East Europeans needed the new idiom for the purposes of instant cultural emancipation. As the Berlin-based Hungarian art critic Ernő Kállai phrased it in 1926 when he already saw Constructivism in perspective: It seemed that [Constructivism] would fit immediately, without the detour of evolution through national traditions, into the overall artistic framework of the longed-for new, collective world. For artists coming from the uncertain peripheries of this emerging international Europe, this was bound to seem an extraordinary opportunity: the impact of the utopian prospects presented by Constructivism on the Eastern temperament, with its unfailing capacity for enthusiasm and overactive imagination, had the force of a new Revelation.15

The ideals visualised by Constructivism remained on the faraway cloud of the future in Eastern Europe. The supra-national language of geometry remained symbolic of faith in an unrealisable, universal collective world. Kassák (1887– 1967) was a Constructivist survivor of dictatorships both right and left, and a model figure of modernism, who played a key role in keeping Constructivism alive in the 1960s. In this decade the rediscovery of Marx’s early writings on alienation

14  For a detailed discussion, see: Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 47–72; Hubertus Gassner and Eckhart Gillen (eds), Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischem Realismus. Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowietunion von 1917 bis 1934, Cologne 1979; Hubertus Gassner (ed.), Die Konstruktion der Utopie. Ästhetische Avantgarde und politische Utopie in den 20er Jahren, Marburg 1992; Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, Budapest and London 1995, 182–193. 15  Ernő Kállai, Új magyar piktúra [New Hungarian Painting], Budapest 1926, 181.



Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary  

 315

as well as those of the young, pre-Communist Lukács redirected attention to the early “innocent” phase of Communism and its theories, and ignited a discourse about “what went wrong”. The publication of books on Russian avant-garde artists in Hungary and the GDR16 starting in the late 1960s gave information and visual support to such revival of theories and opened the rediscovery and re-evaluation of the Russian Constructivism of the 1920s.17 The rediscovery of the historical avant-garde’s Constructivism in Eastern Europe was a multi-layered cultural process that could gain some ground in the 1960s and 1970s because it managed to puzzle the official censorship. Since inquiry into this art entailed siding with a left-wing, socialist cultural legacy, it was difficult to ban scholarship and research on it. On the other hand, that art was not the officially approved Socialist Realism, thus its left-wing character – while the official ideology closely kept to Vladimir I. Lenin’s statement on “leftism as the children’s disease of Communism” – was closer to the New Left of the 1960s, which was seen as the main enemy and even rival of the established Socialist dictum. Therefore publications on the progressive classic avant-garde were always borderline cases between what the regime tolerated and what it banned, and the original Constructivist art of the interwar era remained suspect of a radicalism that was not desirable any more. Neo-constructivist art works were frequent in the early 1970s in Hungary and had, for the above reasons, a sharp political edge. They could be seen in the artists’ studios, or at small unofficial, semi-official, or short-time exhibitions only. Sculptor Gyula Gulyás (1944–2008) created a series of cobblestones, one piece of which was dedicated to Kassák. Sculptor Gyula Pauer (1941–2012) caused a scandal with his Pseudo series, which consisted of metal cubes and works on paper, the surface of which was sprayed over with paint. This created the illusion that they were wrinkled, whereas in reality, as viewers were invited to experience by touching them, they were impeccably smooth, proving the difference between matter-of-fact reality and appearance. The thus exposed lie about the surface concerned not only the cube in question, or the lies of the current political system. It was more piercing, questioning the relevance of the historical promise of the illusions connected to it, and symbolised by such elementary geometric forms as, for example, the cube.

16  See, for example: German Karginov, Rodcsenko, Budapest 1967; Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (ed.), El Lissitzky, Dresden 1967; Larisa Zhadova, Suche und Experiment, Russische und Sowietische Kunst 1910–1930, Dresden 1978. 17  Discussion of everything Soviet was taboo in Hungary during most of the Communist regime. The Soviet/Russian avant-garde was also taboo as it represented a left wing idea that had become an alternative to the current one, thus the new, post-Stalin discourse about it was fresh, revealing, and politically almost unbelievable.

316 

 Éva Forgács

Anti-Modernism in Hungary in the 1980 Throughout the 1980s a local incarnation of postmodernism, the “New Sensibility”, dethroned all variations of the modernist paradigm in Hungarian art. This trend constituted the Hungarian version of postmodernism, which, as poet George Szirtes remarked,18 differed from its Western incarnations for many reasons, “one probably being the nature of political opposition, another the separation from a globalised consumerist version of capitalism. Irony, intertextuality and meta-textuality were devices that asserted the rich complexity of human identity under pressure, rather than the erosion of the self through simulacra and other phenomena”.19 The artists of the New Sensibility refused all kinds of ideology, Futurist concepts, and utopias with a markedly antimodernist edge. They were operating on the basis of action gratuite, discarded world-improving contents or poked fun at them, and broke ties with the past. A 1980 document stated that the “era of objectivity is over”,20 and characterised the classic, mostly Constructivist avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde alike as “impersonal, precision-driven, haptic, hard, cold, objective, factual, direct, intense, radical, provocative, expansive, anti-picturesque, anti-narrative, anti-symbolic, paradigmatic, unemotional, and anti-expressive”.21 This statement was critical of the classical avant-garde’s claim to have a grasp of the ethical and aesthetic aspects of reality. By contrast, it was suggested, the new generation of the “New Sensibility” of the 1980s was not interested in objectivity, and, for that matter, in “reality” – least of all in history. Rajk and Bachmann were not painters, so they did not directly adhere to these views, but as architects, and in Rajk’s case an alternative theatre artist and set designer, they by and large shared the above attitude, positing it against functionalist and Constructivist architecture. They had made unrealisable deconstructivist designs already during the 1980s, which revealed that the memory of Constructivism was more personal and more direct – I would say, more scathing – for them, not least for Rajk, than for Western artists. “Scathing” is the adequate word because faith in the ideas that Constructivism represented and the subsequent disillusionment, were, as Rajk’s personal life and loss had demonstrated, in this case profoundly traumatic.

18  George Szirtes, “Converging Lines”, in: The Hungarian Quarterly, 51, 2010, 197 (Spring), 15–26. 19  Szirtes, “Converging Lines”, 18. 20  Lóránd Hegyi, “Szubjektiv bevezető” [Subjective Introduction], in: László Beke, Péter Sinkovits and Lóránd Hegyi, Iparterv 1968–1980 [catalogue], Budapest 1980, 12–15, here 13. 21  Hegyi, “Szubjektiv bevezető”, 13.



Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary  

 317

The term “Új szenzibilitás”, or “New Sensibility”, linguistically half-Hungarian, half-Indo-European in its original Hungarian wording, referred to a specifically Hungarian development that had close ties to contemporary international trends. The term had already been invented in a different context, when Susan Sontag discerned a “new sensibility” on the international art scene already in 1965,22 characterising the antithesis of modernism that would soon be labeled “postmodern”. She described the new tendency as not critical, not narrative, not moralising, and blending high and low cultures. The “new sensibility”, Sontag wrote, preferred pluralism in taste, style, and the perception of beauty. Past representatives of the new outlook included, according to Sontag, thinkers and artists from Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Breton to Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes and György Kepes. Sontag’s essay was directed against C.P. Snow’s book on “two cultures”, published a year earlier,23 that divided culture into two distinct fields: the sciences and the arts. Snow insisted, in the spirit of Matthew Arnold, that the arts have the mission to be socially critical. Sontag however, taking a stance of opposition to the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s, defended visual artworks that give pleasure, and pleasure only, to the viewer. She discerned a trend that had not been named yet. The “new sensibility” she explored did not entirely square with what was considered New Sensibility in the Hungarian art of the 1980s, though. In spite of the identical terms, the announcement of a new, depoliticised and socially and culturally non-critical art resonated very differently in a long censored, oppressed, and politically controlled country like Hungary, compared to the West, where artists were free to take or leave these strategies. While the “new sensibility” was a descriptive scholarly category for Sontag, in Hungary the term was charged with a pathos that had originated from the early 20th-Century poet Endre Ady’s 1906 volume Új versek (New Poems) and his poem Új idők új dalai (New Songs of New Times). The announcement of the “New” in Hungary had gone back a long way as a token of cultural renewal, signalling the appearance of a new generation with new ideas, new sensitivity, and new hopes. By analogy, deconstructivist architectural designs were also new: they manifestly abandoned the rules of the profession and assumed a new freedom.

22  Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility”, in: Against Interpretation, New York 1990, 293–304. 23  C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge 1964.

318 

 Éva Forgács

Na-Ne Gallery, Budapest, 1990 Rajk, Bachmann, sculptor, musician, and photographer Tibor Szalai (1958–1998), ceramicist Judit Vida (b. 1951), and fashion designer Tamás Király (1952–2013) founded a new art gallery in Budapest in 1990 that they called Na-Ne, meaning “come on!” in the sense of disbelief. The name clearly indicated that they expected the audience’s hesitation to take their work seriously, or anticipated even rejection. Indeed, who, in the wake of Communism’s demise, would have been interested in, let alone pleased by, fragmented, deconstructed ruins of a once politically romantic language? Let alone that this left-wing visual language later failed in Hungary and was unpopular. Not to leave any doubt about their orientation and self-reflection on the deconstructivist, neo-constructivist idea, the group parked a clunker in front of the gallery, a rusty Soviet-made Moskvich, a pithy and widely recognizable emblem of the past era.24 Rajk’s and Bachmann’s sculptural works, architectural models, and graphic designs (see col. fig. 23) show similarity to the structures of the 1921 OBMOKhU25 artists’ works with the fundamental difference that they, unlike the young OBMOKhU members, were not at the optimistic beginning of an era, but after its bitter end, the experience of the palpable, visible deconstruction of the Communist system. In their architectural and graphic design works they used Constructivist formal building blocks not as economic, strictly functional elements but as redundant, ornamental and provocatively dysfunctional parts. If early Constructivism underwent its “laboratory phase”, i.e. a period when Constructivist structures were not yet functional, Na-Ne Gallery’s post-constructivism questioned the very possibility and relevance – in 1990 – of any functionalist or constructivist architecture. The free-floating elements of their constructions are only visually evocative of Constructivism. They do not hold the construction together, the individual details are narrative: for example a chess board, a human figure rolling dough that takes the shape of a five-pointed red star, etc., all this with local meanings (see col. fig. 24) – and they are deliberately decorative. Using dysfunctionally what the Constructivists mandated as structural elements,

24  The Moskvich (meaning Muscovite) was carefully chosen over, for example, an East-Germanmade Trabant, a sort of “Ersatz car” that was also symbolic of Communism in Hungary, but more in the sense of the moderate affluence of the middle class that had to put up with it in want of “real” cars. The Moskvich, with its heavily built body, was hardly owned as a private car. It was rather used as cab or the officials’ vehicle; it was seen (along with equally Soviet-made Volga) as the tank among cars. 25  Obiedinenie Molodikh Khudozhnikov, or Society of Young Artists, a society of young Constructivists, Moscow, 1919–1922.



Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary  

 319

brought deconstructivist works close to the absurd. These works pointed back to what appeared to be the absurdity of Constructivism itself, when seen from the perspective of a country that had been through the historical experience of the ideas that had once been the tokens of a better future for the Constructivists. The artists of the Na-Ne Gallery put in hard work to get a grasp of what exactly the once solidly constructed systems consisted of, wondering what exactly becomes revealed in the process of dissecting it. In 1990 not only the young Soviet artists’ sense of beginning was smeared by history, but also several attempts at resuscitating that beginning, such as the New Left of Western Marxists and Communists emerging in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.26 The activists of the New Left, a significant political and intellectual force peaking in 1968, looked at the pre-Stalin era of the October Revolution as a possible starting point to restore left-wing politics,27 and attached short-lived hopes to the Czech experiment to establish a “Communism with a human face” in 1968. The artists of the Na-Ne Gallery, some of them personal friends of such leading Central-European intellectuals as Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, and having processed the lessons of not only the one-time ideal but also the reality of “existing” Communism, worked with a rich medley of historical experience and artistic heritage and were, also on that account, tempted to see the absurdity of it all. Even if they were determined to take seriously the postmodern stance that kept “every era and culture at the same distance”,28 they were, emotionally and intellectually, still determined to fathom Constructivism and provide its analysis, critique, afterlife, and parody. They studied it and turned it inside out: what used to be functional became decorative, what used to be politically committed became a blend of nostalgia and satire. They rebelled against the Constructivist ethics and aesthetics and, at the same time, also against the world that rejected the ethics and aesthetics of Constructivism. This dual rebellion was the basis of their self-irony and formal parody that did not lack bitterness. In a provocatively anti-constructivist stance, many of the Na-Ne Gallery’s artists’ works include deliberately superfluous elements that have formal function only. For example, Rajk’s Beyond Art building design for the Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna puts the ordinary building in the quotation marks of Construc-

26  See: Peter Wollen, “Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of the Situationist International”, in: Elisabeth Susmann (ed.), On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: Situationists 1957–1972, Cambridge, MA 1990, 20–61, here 30. 27  See: Forgács, “How the New Left Invented East-European Art”. 28  Hannes Böhringer, “Posztmodernitás. Gondolatfoszlányok a Kotányi Attilával folytatott beszélgetésből” [Postmodernity: Fragments from a Dialogue with Attila Kotányi], in: Hasbeszélő. Bölcsész index, Budapest 1987, n.p.

320 

 Éva Forgács

tivist motifs. His 2009 Lehel Square Farmers’ Market construction in Budapest (see col. figs 25 and 26) features playful, colourful structural elements most of which are not functional and are closer to Bernard Tschumi’s 1982–1998 Parc de la Villette in Paris than Russian Constructivism. Subverting its original rigour and deliberately freeing the elements from pure function was part of challenging Constructivism. This entailed play with the motifs and exploitation of the rich field of associations they evoke, as well as using their symbolism as part of their function in a broader sense. The Constructivist elements of Rajk’s Farmers’ Market confirm a style that does not particularly belong to farmers or their markets, since Constructivism is more associated with urban design and developing urban architectural technologies. Thus Rajk deliberately misplaced Constructivism, playing on the idealist concept of creating a uniform environment out of the urban and the rural – the rural in the urban. The colours, the dynamism and the playfulness of the design tend to be inviting and all-inclusive, but surprising to vendors, the actual users of the market. This take on Constructivism – its present dysfunction with a nod to the illusions it once embodied – was the core of the Na-Ne Gallery’s deconstructive efforts. They deconstructed the myth of Constructivism, the formal expression of the “Great Experiment”29 and the “Great Utopia” of the 20th Century. The economy principle of Russian Constructivism demanded that no part of the construction could be removed or displaced, and no part could be added without risking the collapse of the whole. The Na-Ne Gallery’s deconstructivists, by contrast, deliberately hide the strictly functional elements and envelope them in artistic compositions that consist of stylish-aesthetic Constructivist motifs celebrating machinery, mighty engineering work and the modernist capabilities of mastering the material. They also bring to mind that Constructivist geometry and streamlined design had already been frivolously fashionable during the interwar period for their new aesthetics.30 The Na-Ne Gallery’s artists are interested in the process of the dissolution of Constructivism and dismantle it by scattering their formal elements in their deconstructive constructions. Dissecting the structure they return from utopia to praxis, from idea to object. Ideology is sceptically rejected or referred to in quotation marks. The original Constructivist concept cannot be resuscitated, so the end product is an ironic collection of formal elements that may have had a function

29  As in Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922, London 1971. 30  See: Richter, “Towards Constructivism”. See also the journal Ermitazh (13, 1922, 3): “Constructivism has become fashionable” – quoted in: Selim Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko: The Complete Work, Cambridge, MA 1986, 91.



Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary  

 321

in an original Constructivist work, but now all they reference is the falling apart and the historic failure of the one-time beauty and one-time idealism of Constructivism.

Back to the Heroes’ Square Bringing Constructivism into the day of national mourning visualised the end of Communism as a world project; the mirage of internationalism and a collective society, as well as the obsolescence of the vision that every part can be functional in a well-oiled, sensible machinery as the model of the society. The 1989 decoration stood not only for the 1956 victims of Hungary’s forcibly reinstated Communism, but for the entire Communist world-project soon to collapse in the Soviet Union as well. Doing justice to the idealism of many of Communism’s adherents and victims, aesthetically the decoration represented the young generation of Hungarian neo-constructivists, spelling mourning, farewell, respect, critique, and an ironic and self-ironic nostalgia at the same time. Hungarian neo-constructivism turned the dead illusions of the Communist era into a source of inspiration. Rajk and his emerging group, informed and inspired by the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the postmodernist philosophy of Derrida, analyzed the deconstruction of the Communist idea in their postmodern neo-constructivist work that parodied the ethics and aesthetics of Constructivism and pulled it apart. Porcelain cups and saucers that were more Suprematist than Constructivist and neo-constructivist fashion design added to the sense of softening the structural rigidity and principles of the Constructivism of old, as well as put on pedestal the deliberately decorative, deconstructive features of this nostalgic parody, both emotional and intellectual.

Konstantina Drakopoulou

Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens A Plan for Utopia in Action It is a truism that the impact of globalisation driven by expanding capitalism and neo-liberal policies has been a long period of recession that deeply affects societies around the world. In the middle of financial uncertainty and political instability, in April 2010 the Greek government was forced to ask the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for help. As a result of the debt crisis, the Greek people are now faced with severe austerity measures, urban poverty, unemployment, deteriorating health services, and cuts to other basic provisions such as education and pensions. In other words, they are deprived of the public good, the “common wealth” – a situation that is bound to have a negative impact on the human capital of the country in the long run. The arrival of the IMF triggered some of the most severe outbursts of civil unrest that the country has seen in its recent history. The mass media have offered a “preferred reading”, an official narrative which stresses that the existing situation is not to be attributed to the widespread political corruption and mismanagement, but to the practice of unrestrained spending combined with the failure to implement financial reforms – the latter left Greece badly exposed when the global economic downturn struck. Of special interest is also Slavoj Žižek’s standpoint arguing that the narrative on the crisis in Greece presented by the media is false. Especially the view according to which “the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country is the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too”.1 On the other hand, according to prominent economists the current crisis should be construed as a systemic crisis of neo-liberal capitalism.2

1  Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, London and New York 2012, 13. 2  There are many studies on this subject to list. The following have been among the most important in my thinking: Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, John Milios and Spyros Lapatsioras (eds), A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and its Crisis: Demystifying Finance, London and New York 2013; Terrence McDonough, Michael Reich and David M. Kotz (eds), Contemporary Capitalism and its Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory for the 21st Century, New York 2010; John Milios and Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, Rethinking Imperialism: A Study of Capitalist Rule, London and New York 2009.

324 

 Konstantina Drakopoulou

The preferred reading has been contested by mass protests, strikes, building sitins, and a profusion of urban art in Athens and other cities. In this paper, I will deal with a specific form of politicised urban art that could be characterised as guerrilla art. In particular, I will approach the creation of images on the walls of Athens following the agonist theory paradigm3 that has proven itself very useful in explaining the nature of the new forms of this recently emerging artistic activism that challenges hegemonic interests. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have stressed the concepts of antagonism and hegemony to address the question of the political.4 Mouffe in particular explains: To visualize the nature of public spaces in an agonistic manner has important consequences in the field of artistic practices because it allows us to envisage how they can contribute to the hegemonic struggle. By bringing to the fore what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate, by making visible what neo-liberal hegemony represses, critical artistic practices can play an important role in the creation of a multiplicity of sites where the dominant hegemony would be questioned. They should be seen as counter-hegemonic interventions which, by contributing to the construction of new practices and new subjectivities, aim at subverting the dominant hegemony.5

Although accepting the hegemonic strategy entails accepting the impossibility of a “perfect realization of democracy”, since antagonism cannot disappear altogether, there is still the possibility, or rather the necessity for organic intellectuals to get involved with critical artistic practices so as to subvert and alter the existing order. Adding to Mouffe’s analysis of agonistic politics, I would like to explore the role and stance of the artists working in the public space; it is my strongly held belief that to struggle over and within space lies in the dynamics of guerrilla and marginalised artists – not of professional ones. It is in this sense that the creators under discussion can produce a space for clear expression; they urge the viewer to ask questions about the financial crisis in Greece, and about everything that informs the narrative of Athens’ decline; they do not provide answers; they do not tell the viewer what to think; they create other forms of consciousness – not simply lifting false consciousness by denunciation – but most importantly they do not approach political discourse in moral terms.

3  Chantal Mouffe has developed the agonistic model in: The Democratic Paradox, London 2000. 4  Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London 1985. 5  Chantal Mouffe, “Cultural Workers as Organic Intellectuals”, in: Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Johannes Schlebrügge et al. (eds), The Artist as Public Intellectual?, Vienna 2008, 149–159, here 157–158.



Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens 

 325

Images on walls in Athens express something more than a generalised stance of disappointment; they have rather evolved into a reclamation of the city. Rooted in a critical understanding of and resistance to the present reality in a time of crisis, they can create effective moments of utopian life that over time can revive the potential for laying out the foundations of social change that is utopian by definition. Furthermore, we might, then, say that for art works to be utopian they need to offer two things that seem to lead in rather different directions: on the one hand, a vision or intimation of a better place than the here and now we inhabit, and on the other hand a kind of insight into what Εrnst Bloch terms the “darkness so near”,6 the contradictions and limitations that drive our will to escape the here and now in the first place. Lyman G. Chaffee argues that “urban art should be viewed as one dimension of the multimedia communication system. It gives expression to groups that otherwise could not comment upon or support current or perceived social problems”.7 During the last five years we have witnessed in Athens a great number of public wall paintings challenging existing reality in the name of a better world to come, and thus insisting on a critical function for utopias within art-activism or “artivism”. The works are to be found particularly in the city centre, in suburbs such as Exarcheia, Metaxourgeio, Psiri and along the Piraeus and Panepistimiou avenues, which are the centres of emerging social conflicts and currently experience the greatest economic and social pressures. The pieces express the artists’ commitment to make art politically; to challenge the passers-by to engage actively with their critique of contemporary life; to stage the impression of a battlefield that concatenates centuries of slaughter in the same vein as the avant-gardist utopian thinking of the mid-20th Century (see col. fig. 27). This artistic activity, which violates urban space, is based on the aesthetics of vandalism and puts forth the conception of the artist as a guerrilla and defacer, not unlike destruction art practices with cheap and ephemeral materials that developed during the 1960s.8 To understand destruction art means to enquire into the intention and a certain ethical stance the artists feel committed to a ­ dvocate.

6  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, Cambridge 1986, vol.1, 12. 7  Lyman G. Chaffee, Political Protest and Street Art: Popular Tools for Democratization in Hispanic Countries, Westport, CT 1993, 3. 8  The violent rhetoric of iconoclasm evident in avant-garde movements of this period is further explored by Dario Gamboni in: The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution, New Haven 1998. Gamboni relates the iconoclastic terminology utilised by radical art movements of the early 20th Century to the fulfilment of auto-destructive art in the 1960s.

326 

 Konstantina Drakopoulou

Kristine Stiles, an art historian expert on destruction art, analyzes brilliantly the principles of designation of a destruction artwork: Destruction art addresses the phenomenology and epistemology of destruction and must be characterized as a broad, cross-cultural response rather than a historical movement. An attitude, a process and a way of proceeding, destruction art is both reactionary and responsive; it is not an aesthetic, nor a method, nor a technique. Destruction art is an ethical position comprised of diverse practices that investigate the engulfments of terminal culture.9

“Destruction art” and terminal culture are identificatory devices – aesthetic as well as political – that posit the visual discourse of the survivor and reveal a society in the process of destruction. Stiles also differentiates between destruction art and “destruction-in-art”, restricting the latter to the processes that determine its practices within the institutions of art. In my view, though, destructionin-art exceeds the institutional frame of the art scene and can be a very fruitful process if employed as an artistic vocabulary to contextualise extremities of survival; consequently it comments directly on destruction in life. Stiles considers destruction art in terms of a survivalist discourse and combines it with the trauma experienced by the survivor, who feels a “sense of debt and responsibility to the dead”,10 as well as guilt because s/he has remained alive despite witnessing death. As death can be considered the literal extinction of the body, suicide can also be understood as the causative principle of a work analysed later in this essay, and the same applies to the deprivation of the basic necessities which sustain life, and the consequent absence of control over one’s own life. The struggle to survive also causes “a ‘psychic numbing’ that incapacitates the individual’s ability to feel and to confront certain kinds of experiences and impairs essential mental functions of symbolization”.11 By contrast, to be out-of-control, to utilise destructive events and uncontrollable activities as another form of creativity means that artists have overcome this crisis of numbing and act proactively. Therefore I would agree with

9  Kristine Stiles, “Schwellen der Kontrolle. Destruction Art und endzeitliche Kultur / Thresholds of Control: Destruction Art and Terminal Culture”, in: Out of Control, Linz 1991, 29–50. Reprinted in: Timothy Druckrey (ed.), Ars Electronica: Facing the Future (A Survey of Two Decades), Cambridge 2000. Available at: http://90.146.8.18/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/ festival_artikel.asp?iProjectID=8900 (accessed 3 February 2015). See also: Kristine Stiles, The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS): The Radical Cultural Project of Event-Structured Live Art (PhD Dissertation), Berkeley 1987. 10  Stiles draws here upon the work of the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton who investigates the trauma survivors have undergone. She quotes from: Robert J. Lifton, The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age, New York 1998, 236–240. 11  Quoted in: Stiles, “Thresholds of Control”.



Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens 

 327

Stiles that destruction art, consistent with guerrilla practices, provides the aesthetic model for artists in order to “recover the social force of art from instrumental reason and the economies of late capitalism”;12 presenting suffering in violent ways contributes to social change and permits culture to function as a political force. This is certainly optimistic and hopeful, therefore utopian; a utopianism significantly important and necessary in face of the current severe crisis. Fredric Jameson, in his influential book Archaeologies of the Future, argues that utopia remains politically significant precisely because it retains something of the holistic revolutionary approach to change. Utopian art, as Jameson conceives it, is politically effective because it focuses the mind on the necessity of a radical (revolutionary) break with what is: Utopia now better expresses our relationship to a genuinely political future than any current programme of action. It forces us precisely to concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right. This is very far from a liberal capitulation to the necessity of capitalism; it is quite the opposite, an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived.13

This might be a controversial claim. It seems to narrow the utopian project to those who aspire to model imaginary but radically other worlds, and hangs on nostalgically to the prospect of revolutionary change. However, Jameson identifies something all utopian artists share: the desire to create alternatives to the way things are in order to force some sort of engagement with them. In this respect, all utopian art is political; it is art oriented either to the future, or to the past. The latter is evident in the re-rendering of Guernica – the renowned painting by Pablo Picasso – by the street artist Cacao Rocks (see col. fig. 28). As is well known the original work was created in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica located in northern Spain by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces, on April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso was commissioned by the official Republican Government of Spain to paint a mural for its Pavilion depicting the atrocious levelling of Guernica but also the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War at the World’s Fair in Paris: “In Guernica Picasso embraced communal values – the Spanish Pavilion being a microcosm of a community united against oppression – and an overt anti-fascist stance”.14 Cacao Rocks’ piece also entails public involvement, and as it is cleverly placed in

12  Stiles, “Thresholds of Control”. 13  Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, London and New York 2005, 232–233. 14  Kathleen Brunner, “Guernica: The Apocalypse of Representation”, in: The Burlington Magazine, 143, 2001, no. 1175, 80–85, here 85.

328 

 Konstantina Drakopoulou

public view for everyone to see, it serves as a form of collective memory, of collective community expression. In Cacao Rocks’ piece motifs are decomposed in a cubist manner, but more schematised and deformed so as to be well adjusted to a hurried, vigorous execution suitable for the urban site. The painter follows the compositional device of the original work: the composition unfolds on the horizontal axis like a panorama so that the spectator envisages the themes in a sequence, tied in a loose structure, ensuring the visual unity of the image. With the exception of the “lightbearer”, all motifs are present, arranged in the same locale as in Picasso’s painting, and keeping their mutual relationships: the shrunken, burning house, the fleeing and the kneeling woman, the broken warrior brandishing his sword, the horse, the electric bulb encircled by a jagged aureole, the bird, the bull and the mother with the dead child. The foci of attention are all placed to the left where the compact shape of the bull dominates the scene under whom the bereaved mother is situated, a Pietà or a “kind of Byzantine fixedness, a flat fragment of wall”.15 The black and white treatment of the actual work has been replaced here by a colourful palette not intended to make the image more pleasant to the passer-by, but rather arising from the artist’s training in graffiti and the influence of comics and Pop art. Cacao Rocks tried to convey the spirit of Picasso’s Guernica by making a parallel between the Basque town and Athens – in his eyes also bombed and in a state of war, as he stresses in one of his interviews.16 It seems that Vincente Marrero’s comment on the timeless significance of Picasso’s work finds here a vivid reverberation: “The canvas today more than ever, is no longer an illustration of the specific bombardment, but the picture of all bombed cities”.17 On the other hand, it should not go unnoticed that the enlargement of the bird motif, presumably the dove of peace, as well as the bright angriness of the screaming women reveal a core of resistance, hope and moral optimism. Guernica speaks of pain, but it also speaks of hope. Many scholars have read pathos and helplessness into the Guernica figures, and, it would seem, little else

15  On the specific comparison related to the original work, see: Frank D. Russell, Picasso’s Guernica: The Labyrinth of Narrative and Vision, London 1980, 125. 16  “I wanted to stress that Athens is like a bombed city in my eyes like Guernica, inhabited by very unhappy people because of the crisis; a country with concentration camps for the immigrants who die from hardships, with unemployment hitting the youth and the police forces to suppress any demonstration, any feeling of indignation. A democracy behind bars prison like our parliament trying to manage finance deal for the bank interests. This is the war now”. Extract from an unpublished interview of the painter with the author of this paper, Athens, 9 December 2012. 17  Vincente Marrero, Picasso and the Bull, trans. Anthony Kerrigan, Chicago 1956, 77.



Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens 

 329

besides. Frank D. Russell, however, sees determination in their gestures and attitudes. He suggests that “the prevailing emphasis in the picture is not so much horror, as resistance and resurrection”.18 The image has a complex symbolism, as it is compounded of polarities and rife with contrary meanings. All the Guernica motifs are open to question, therefore “we must try to guard against one-sided dogmatic interpretation”.19 Cacao Rocks’ position is not another slippery narrative that argues for negotiation as a recipe for improvement; his piece is not the demonstration of a compromise, it is the overt articulation of a problem. Interpreted in this light, I would like to return to Stiles’ comments on trauma, the survivalist discourse and psychic numbing. When faced with suffering and pain, the artist undertakes the responsibility to “put art in the service of survival”.20 This implies that art must encounter the problem of disappearance and consequently bring back into memory “the forgotten”, a term coined by Jean- François Lyotard in his book Heidegger et “les juifs” (1988).21 In line with this concept, I believe that such artworks enable the viewers not only to recall the forgotten or even ignored condition of pain, but more importantly they produce the means to represent a deeper “forgetting” that is not really “forgetting” as such at all, since there was nothing represented to begin with; indeed, this is a past “that is thus not even there as absence, as terra incognita, but it is there nevertheless”.22 Thus Cacao Rocks assigns his Guernica the mission of presenting the memory of people and events that are intended to be left out since “they do not fit into or would upset narrative structure”.23

18  Russell explains the interpretation of the picture as an image of drama, dehumanisation and mutilation as follows: “This is the kind of reading which carries to the mural the reader’s after-image of atrocity-photographs […]”. Russell, Picasso’s Guernica, 322. Likewise, Raynal claims: “The artist has used none of the artistic tricks but has thought only of expressing as tellingly as possible a supreme moment of human paint and revolt in all its disorder”. Maurice Raynal, The History of Modern Painting from Picasso to Surrealism, Geneva 1950, 140. However, the majority of observers see the picture as the embodiment of drama, brutality, the suffering of innocents, the after-effects of wars, a timeless catastrophe. 19  Rudolf Arnheim, Picasso’s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting, Berkeley, 1962, 15. 20  On this quotation see footnote 10. 21  Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andreas Michel, Mark S. Roberts, Minneapolis 1990, 3. 22  Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, 11. 23  Quoted in: Gregory D. Loving, “The Forgotten: Implications of Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews” for Issues of Race in Philosophical Discourse”, in: Philosophical Studies in Education, 39, 2008, 97–106, here 99. Also available at: https://ovpes.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/loving2008. pdf (accessed 10 January 2012).

330 

 Konstantina Drakopoulou

Fig. 31: Paul, Untitled, stencil on metal gate, Athens 2012. Photo by Konstantinos Avramidis.

Another impressive piece is one by Paul in the Monastiraki district (see fig. 31). The stencilled picture painted in just two colours, black and white, as if it were a newspaper photo, has been divided in two sections. At the top we discern a shocked female face while at the bottom we see a neat cursive script that was to become Paul’s “signature” style of writing. The text comprises the last words of a man who committed a politically motivated suicide: “Ladies and Gents, welcome to the metropolis of chaos! Install security doors and alarming systems, lock yourselves in, open your TV and enjoy the spectacle. The next rebellion will be much stronger as our society rots… Get out in the streets next to your children and claim your stolen lives. Remember that when you were young you also wanted to change the world”.24 The picture illustrates aptly how over the last few years Athens’ walls have become “witness surfaces”25 of the political transformations

24  Athanasia Bara, “La violence c’est…, par Savas Metikidis”, 2012, https://initiativegrecqueaparis.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/la-violence-cest (accessed 10 May 2012); Konstantinos Avramidis, “Mapping the Geographical and Spatial Characteristics of Politicized Urban Art in the Athens of Crisis”, in: Myrto Tsilimpounidi and Aylwyn Walsh (eds), Remapping “Crisis”: A Guide to Athens, Winchester and Washington DC 2014, 183–203, here 199–200. 25  Ella Chmielewska, “The Wall as Witness-Surface or, the Reichstag Graffiti and Paradoxes of Writing over History”, in: Lo Squaderno, 2008, no. 8 (June), 24–29.



Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens 

 331

Fig. 32: D!, Eight D!s, enamel paint on metal gate, Athens 2011. Photo by Studio 4.

generated by the crisis; how street artists manage to “invent publics” so as to get their messages across by adopting “transgressive” attitudes. Writing/speech constitutes a central practice in D!’s activity (see fig. 32). The embedded texts in his pieces do not operate as an autonomous or unified object, but as a set of relations with other texts: D! often uses the principle we know as intertextuality, the principle that poststructuralists label Text or Writing.26 Through the recording of the signified, the insertion of word games, Duchampian anagrams, well-known symbols, and allusions to mass culture, he creates visual-verbal hybrids; instances of an intimate inter-medial collaboration between the linguistic and the visual that generates levels of meaning inaccessible to each alone. Thus, by avoiding the trap of binary thinking established by the dominance of language over consciousness he seeks to challenge the conventional scope of language, upsetting and confusing meanings and usage. D!’s pieces reveal meanings and power relations that develop within urban landscapes; simultaneously he takes our political awareness a step further. He provides insight into how rights-claims and economic systems are frequently ­situated in the internal

26  See: Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’ écriture, suivi de Nouveaux Essais critiques, Paris 1953.

332 

 Konstantina Drakopoulou

public spaces of the policy process and how these spaces condition the possible outcomes of such processes. Pieces by Bleeps, one of the most significant creators in the public space, also fall within the horizon of guerrilla art. The objective of his artistic activism does not aim at a certain political goal; rather, it is the willingness to reflect upon current political and economic issues that characterises it. His pictures contain elements from Pop along with a strong sense of the uncanny emanating from Magical Realism. Furthermore, these same pictures allude to multilevelled associations and contextual references, i.e. means of criticality that have dominated conceptual and post-conceptual works.27 Of special interest is his series Window (winter 2014–onwards) that involves mainly interventions in the windows of abandoned, almost derelict neo-classical buildings. The WorShip is a typical work of the specific series; it is constructed with raw and found materials (objets trouvés), while the capital letters W and S stemming from an existing destroyed graffiti have been utilised to create together with the window a word game (see col. fig. 29). The brute strength of the sacking mounted onto the window and dirtying with the artist’s fingers runs hastily through the wet acrylic paint contrasts greatly with the pathetic look of the empty dress. In particular, the found objects such as the anti-asphyxiating mask at the top of the composition along with the second-hand dress and the heels at the bottom evoke the uncanniness of existence. The empty clothing speaks of the imagined presence – albeit in reality the absence – of the real, warm and living female body that once wore it. However, the dress and the shoes in a state of uncleanliness are no longer awaiting the return of the woman, and convey a general sense of trauma and loss. Taking as a reference point the pieces with clothes by Jannis Kounellis shown at the Lelong Gallery (Zürich, November 2008–February, 2009), Bleeps does not merely posit a physical and cultural antithesis of the employed materials, or an antithesis of their textures and their uses; he does not attempt to create a poetic, mystical and even ritualistic condition as is the case with Kounellis. By contrast, his experimentation with unorthodox combinations of disposable and meagre materials aims at commenting on contemporary politics. The discarded objects Bleeps integrated into his pieces exemplify his attempt to withdraw from quality and visual aesthetic; they attest to his refusal of merchandise and of consumer society in general. More importantly, his material vocabulary constitutes a political choice:

27  For a thorough analysis of Bleeps’ work, see: Konstantina Drakopoulou, “Art and Politics: Bleeps’ Politically Charged Paintings on the Walls of Athens”, in: Tsilimpounidi and Walsh (eds), Remapping “Crisis”, 204–220.



Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens 

 333

the ephemeral and the worn respond to the decay of suburban settings where the artist is often working. Indeed, the Window series has been executed in Metaxourgeio, a district in the historical centre of Athens, previously inhabited by a working class population. The suburb was surrounded by industrial buildings, but in the past few decades it has heavily undergone the uncontrolled effects of a gentrification process, making it appropriate for middle-class residents. In Bleeps’ piece, the working out of the presence – not the depiction of the human being – uses substitutes in order to raise important but uneasy questions. The figure in absentia demonstrates the contraction between different realities: the pair of the red leather pumps covered partly by soil communicates a state of decline. At the same time it may be indicative of a fetishised view of class struggle, of a concern with the immediate appearances of that struggle on the part of the leading Greek left parties that fail to deal with their concrete basis. The anti-asphyxiating mask on the top acts as a metaphor for resistance, and for the imagery of mass protests. The viewer is thus required to think: Worship what? An ideology in decline safeguarding his/her position within the frame of existing power relations? Or novel types of resistance and agonism, and consequently new forms of social relations? Or still other quite different conclusions? Additionally, Bleeps’ piece is inviting passers-by to become active viewers not in stasis or passivity but through their efforts at producing meaning, through exploring their own preoccupations and needs in order to interpret the piece. Strong social bonds and networks closely linked to public and communal spaces in cities and neighbourhoods help communities survive these harsh times. Characteristically, the self-managed Navarino Park in the Exarcheia district, right at the centre of Athens, plays a crucial role in enhancing social sustainability. It is worth noting here that Exarcheia is a well-known arena of on-going clashes between citizens and the police – a stronghold against oppressive governmental policies. This happens precisely because of the political symbolism of the area that is adjacent to the Athens Polytechnic, the epicentre of the anti-dictatorial student uprising of 1973, and of extensive riots during the country’s post-dictatorial era (1974–present).28 Accordingly, in response to Paul Virilio’s question “can asphalt be a political territory?”,29 champions of insurgence in Exarcheia would

28  For the political spatial legacy of Exarcheia as manifested in contemporary actions of violence and subsequent uprisings and spatial claims, see: Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou, “Spatial Legacies of December and the Right to the City”, in: Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou (eds), Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future to Come, Oakland 2011, 77–88, here 77–78. 29  Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark. Polizzotti, Los Angeles 2007, 30.

334 

 Konstantina Drakopoulou

certainly respond in the affirmative. In addition, the assassination of a young student by a police officer in this urban site in December 2008 led to the occupation of Navarino Park,30 also known as December Park. The activist-led community group The Exarcheia Residents’ Initiative along with the collective Us, Here and Now and for All of Us squatted in an abandoned parking lot and transformed it into a neighbourhood park. Despite adversities, Navarino Park has managed to stay open during the last five years on a self-organised basis, offering a place for communal gathering and bringing a breath of green air to the neighbourhood. The Park emerged as a result of the communal empowerment gained through the experience of the revolt.31 Navarino Park is thus a political space. It serves as a site where residents can be seen and represented, as a place within which community activism can arise and expand outwards. Precisely, the Park is administered through democratic policies and I would argue that it operates within the frame of antagonism in the political sphere. As Chantal Mouffe has put it, democratic policies require “a vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted”.32 Indeed, by listening to the various actors as they assessed their motives in Navarino Park, we realise that struggles over public space are struggles over opposing ideologies, over the ways in which members of society conceptualise public space. The Park has brought to the fore marginalised groups that can now successfully press claims for their rights over territory and public activity. To make room for community use, the park activists agreed to fund33 the architectural collaboration between Harris Grivokostopoulos (CANarch) and Panagiotis Lianos to design the Container (see col. fig. 30).34 The team worked jointly with the software engineer Nektarios Lianos to develop a software based on the flocking algorithm paradigm.35 The goal was a better understanding of how the

30  For more information on Navarino Park’s history and its objectives, see: About the Park, 2009, http://parkingparko.blogspot.gr/2009/03/blog-post.html (accessed 20 February 2015). 31  See: Vradis and Dalakoglou, “Spatial Legacies of December”, 79. 32  Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London 2005, 3. 33  Financial support and funding to the team – besides the established ways held out from the assembly of the activists (e.g. selling diaries with photos of the Park) – was provided by organising various venues (parties and a self organised tattoo jam) in the Mihanourgeio space, a squat in the historical building of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) at Exarcheia, managed by architecture students. 34  The architectural team designed the Container within the frame of their graduate dissertation under the supervision of the Profs. Stavros Stavridis and Tassis Papaioannou, submitted at the National Technical University of Athens in 2014. 35  The flocking algorithm was first described by the computer scientist Craig W. Reynolds. It has proved very helpful for the architects’ research into exploring crowd dynamics based on local



Guerrilla Art in the Streets of Athens 

 335

Container and possibly other interconnected self-managed venues would affect the flow of movement around the area. In that way, an open source was created, very helpful for the community to make decisions about various organisational issues. The Deleuzian thought of the nomadic and the rhizome finds here its expression, since the Container serves as a module that can be reiterated as an intermezzo here and there in unforeseeable places and moments. The Container is also conceptualised as a parasite, “[a] micro-organism, always compared to the mass that surrounds it, that vitalizes, through piggyback use, and enhances the possibility of exploiting the empty and, until then, inhospitable space in various plots”.36 Specifically, the initial need for the storage of materials and tools was transformed gradually into a space that hosts both the venues and the assemblies necessary for the continuation of the free centre’s function, and has also led to the creation of a temporary structure designed by the architects. The structure, consisting of an old and modified reused container, acts as a self-organised, multi-use space. So, we can say that the Container is “relational” in Nicolas Bourriaud’s sense.37 It permits networking among the local inhabitants, evokes the ambience of a late-night bar, encourages communication, and brings together people from diverse economic, social and racial backgrounds. Both a space of relaxation and a work of art, the Container offers comfortable armchairs, games, reading material, the opportunity of mounting exhibitions and selling several community products to those who visit it. It is not an assertion of an independent and private symbolic space; it creates interactive experiences. But at this point we can recall Claire Bishop’s argumentation in relation to Bourriaud’s preferred artists, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija’s interventions.38 She is afraid that this kind of communicative experience is not enough to address political issues. Unlike the artists that operate under the concept of relational aesthetics, who embrace an idea of open-endedness and do little to address the problem of what a context actually comprises, the aforementioned architectural team determines from the outset its

interactions set in the grid of free spaces and pedestrian roads situated around the Navarino Park. See: Craig W. Reynolds, “Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioural Model”, in: Computer Graphics, 21, 1987, no. 4, 25–34. 36  Harris Grivokostopoulos and Panagiotis Lianos, “The Container Project” [Graduate Dissertation, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Department of Architectural Design], Athens 2014, n.p. 37  Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Dijon 2002. 38  Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, in: October, 2004, no. 110, 51–79.

336 

 Konstantina Drakopoulou

choice of the work’s context. “Context” is a key word for it. Therefore, we should examine the Container’s function through the dual lenses of “relational aesthetics” and “antagonism”, the theory of democracy formulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.39 They argue that for a context to be constituted and identified as such, it must demarcate certain limits; it is from the exclusions engendered by this demarcation that antagonism occurs. By constructing the Container the architects assume a specific position; they try to transform the urban environment, not simply learn to inhabit the world in a better way. The architectural team does not create artificial micro-communities or imaginary spaces predicated on social harmony. On the contrary, it exposes that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony. They provide more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking that our relationship to the world and to one another is fluid and unconstrained as all our interactions are, as public space, ridden with social and legal exclusions. They attempt to reconcile individual and collective life at a time when these seem to be drifting apart. In other words, they react to a given community, a given situation, a given space – their work is site-specific – and they see it both as a social and a political space. However, the Container is more than a finished project in a post-industrial city; rather, it is a paradigm of how marginalised groups can press successfully claims for their rights and win the fight over territory and public activity. In retrospect their vision follows the utopian agenda introduced by the historical avant-garde and reiterated ever since – that art should not be a privileged and independent sphere but instead fused with life. Summarising, as we can see from the above chosen works in urban sites, we can say that politicised public art in Athens is optimistic and hopeful. It is a utopia in action, urgently needed at a time of financial precariousness and the crisis of the political system.

39  Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

Communities and Education

Annebella Pollen

Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts in the Ambivalent Modernism of the Kibbo Kift Kindred As one of a number of progressive English open-air organisations founded in the 1920s, the little-remembered Kindred of the Kibbo Kift had radical ideas for the making of a new society, in their case, based on world peace, handicrafts and camping. Combining elements from an eclectic range of influences, from esoteric spirituality to back-to-the-land impulses, the organisation, under the director of its charismatic leader, artist and author John Hargrave, was more than just another manifestation of the simple life movement. With wide-ranging ambitions including extensive educational and economic reform, Kinsfolk committed themselves to the creation of a new world, combining historical enthusiasms with a notable modernist aesthetic. For the purposes of this essay, the group’s particular entanglement in the complex temporalities of modernity forms a central focus for analysis. Described as both modernist and antimodernist in retrospective appraisals, Kibbo Kift were themselves split between yearnings for primitive experience – always rooted in a static sense of frozen time past – and the various utopian futures that they desired to bring into being. With H.G. Wells on the advisory committee, and as self-styled “Intellectual Barbarians”,1 Kibbo Kift were equally backward-looking and forward-thinking, combining imagined histories with futurist fantasies. Kibbo Kift’s historicism drew freely from the chivalry of Arthurian legend, Anglo-Saxon myth and prehistoric religion, and manifested itself in in the use of Old English terminology, the reinterpretation of folkloric traditions from handicraft to mumming, and the veneration of archaeological sites. These historical compass points simultaneously coexisted with a palpable hunger for new directions; as Hargrave put it: “The Kin is always experimenting with new ideas because it considers this civilisation to be past its zenith and on the decline”.2 As will be discussed, the group’s futurism was most visible in their distinctive material culture, which reveals an eclectic range of aesthetic influences informed by Hargrave’s personal taste in avant-garde art and his professional background

1  “Great Missenden: The ‘Kibbo Kift’. Meeting of a New Kindred Who Aim at a Race of Intellectual Barbarians”, in: Daily Sketch Topical Budget Newsreel, London 1923. 2  John Hargrave, The Confession of the Kibbo Kift, Glasgow 1979 [1925], 20.

340 

 Annebella Pollen

in advertising. Across Kibbo Kift’s striking insignia, regalia and dress, styles borrowed from Cubism, Constructivism and Vorticism interweave with mythological motifs and occult symbolism. This essay disentangles the temporal complexities of its case study through examining the contemporaneous cultural and theoretical ideas that underpinned the group’s idealistic vision, and which were expressed in organisational literature, design, illustration and artefacts. From their adaptation of Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory to the application of ideas from utopian fiction and artistic primitivism, Kibbo Kift offer a unique lens through which to view a period pressured with the urgent need to find new solutions following the demolition of the myth of progress brought by the Great War, and also provide a dramatic illustration of the ways in which the conventions of time could be challenged and manipulated in the practice of everyday life within the crucible of (anti)modernism.

Origins and Aims The Kibbo Kift Kindred began as a splinter group of the British Boy Scouts in 1920. John Hargrave (1894–1982), the young, charismatic and autocratic founder of the group, had joined the Scouts in the year of their founding and quickly marked himself out as a striking talent, rising through the ranks and authoring illustrated books on the woodland tracking and trailing aspect of the organisation while still in his teens. Appointed as staff artist at Scout headquarters by 1914, Hargrave was subsequently made Commissioner for Scouting and Woodcraft under Baden-Powell by the end of the war. Despite his youth, Hargrave achieved high status in the organisation but became increasingly disaffected by what he saw as the shift in scouting towards indoor, paramilitary training that left behind the naturalism, symbolism and adventure that had originally attracted him to join. Hargrave’s harrowing experiences as a stretcher-bearer in World War I, coupled with his Quaker background, further accelerated his desire to found an alternative group based on pacifist principles and he made concerted efforts to orchestrate a schism to separate those with interests in the rustic, woodcraft side of scouting from the imperialist and militarist ideas of the organisation. Rewarded with expulsion on the grounds of disloyalty, in 1920, Hargrave departed with a group of like-minded individuals in tow to start a new movement with a new direction.3

3  Previous studies provide useful overviews of the group’s founding and aims; these include: Mark Drakeford, Social Movements and their Supporters: The Green Shirts in England, ­Basingstoke 1997; J.F.C. Craven, Redskins in Epping Forest: John Hargrave, the Kibbo Kift and the Woodcraft Experience, London 1998 [unpublished PhD thesis]; Matthew De Abaitua, The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping under the Stars, London 2012.



Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts 

 341

Aiming for world peace through a somewhat eccentric combination of rambling, camping and arts and crafts, Kibbo Kift took its name from an archaic Cheshire term meaning proof of strength. As an all-ages and co-educational organisation, Kibbo Kift was immediately radical and attracted to it a range of notable progressives from its inception. Although its total membership may never have swelled much above a thousand (despite prolific exaggerations to the contrary), well-known novelists, scientists and reformers including Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, Mary Neal, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, Havelock Ellis, Patrick Geddes and Julian Huxley were amongst its members, sympathisers and advisory council. Kibbo Kift’s purposes and interests were eclectic – even bewilderingly wide-ranging – but through a mixture of ambitions for open-air education, world disarmament, social justice, cultural development and spiritual ritual, the organisation aimed to fashion “a new human instrument”, capable of resisting and reforming the ills of an excessively urban “Charlie Chaplin civilisation”.4 The models and motifs adopted by the organisation were in part informed by the original inspirations for the Scouts – the “Red Indianism” of Ernest Thompson Seton in particular – but were also inspired by a wider and rather pick-and mix-selection of so-called savage and primitive inspirations inspired by Hargrave’s amateur interests in anthropology. These co-existed with a desire to return to a non-specified and somewhat imagined past, inspired by the chivalry of Arthurian legend and Anglo-Saxon myth, ancient Egypt and prehistoric religion. The language of the organisation was steeped in Old English, and the reinterpretation of folkloric traditions from handicraft and mumming to seasonal rituals was core to the group’s social reform project.

Backward-Looking or Forward-Thinking? Given these points of reference, Kibbo Kift could be (and has been) described as antimodern,5 for modernism has often been characterised as precisely not historicist or embracing of tradition.6 T.J. Jackson Lears’ use of the term antimodernism posits it a “recoil from an ‘overcivilised’ modern existence to more intense

4  Hargrave, Confession, 99. 5  Frank Trentmann, “Civilization and Its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture”, in: Journal of Contemporary History, 29, 1994, 583–625. 6  See, for example: Christopher Wilk, “Introduction: What was Modernism?”, in: C. Wilk (ed.), Modernism: Designing a New World, London 2006, 11–21, here 12.

342 

 Annebella Pollen

forms of physical or spiritual existence”,7 which would fit the organisation very well. It is also true that some elements of Kibbo Kift share characteristics with the rural revival, where a sentimental or spiritual attitude to Old England is seen as a healing antidote to an increasingly urbanised and mechanised life. Reading recommendations for Kibbo Kift members include works by Edward Carpenter, Richard Jeffries and Henry David Thoreau that fit with this nature-mystic tradition. Yet antimodernism, as Lynda Jessup conceptualises it, encapsulates “the pervasive sense of loss that often coexisted in the decades around the turn of the Century along with an enthusiasm for modernization and material progress”. As she puts it, antimodernism is “often ambivalent and Janus-faced […]. It describes what was in effect a critique of the modern, a perceived lack in the present manifesting itself not only in a sense of alienation, but also in a longing for the types of physical or spiritual experience embodied in utopian futures and imagined pasts”.8 Tim Armstrong perhaps encapsulates it best when he notes, “Modernism is in fact characterised by a series of seeming contradictions: both a rejection of the past and a fetishisation of certain earlier periods; both primitivism and a defence of civilisation against the barbarians; both enthusiasm for the technological and fear of it”.9 In a pertinent statement that can be productively applied to Kibbo Kift’s ambivalent Carpenteresque attitudes to civilisation as disease, Armstrong argues that “modernity and anti-modernity as pathology and cure are bound together within the field of the modern”.10

Utopian Futurism As well as being backwards-looking, Kibbo Kift was also hungry for the new. Due to its dynamic coexistence with its historical enthusiasms, the organisation’s utopian futurism is one of its most intriguing aspects. “The aim of the Kibbo Kift Kindred, expressed in a phrase”, as one member put it, “is to bring about Utopian

7  T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, New York 1981, xv. 8  Lynda Jessup, “Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: An Introduction”, in: Lynda Jessup (ed.), Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, Toronto 2001, 3–10, here 3. 9  Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History, Cambridge 2005, 5. 10  Armstrong, Modernism, 4.



Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts 

 343

conditions upon earth”.11 As such, the group felt strong connections to utopian writings. Hargrave’s novels were often fictional searches for social solutions that mapped closely onto Kibbo Kift thinking. In 1927’s The Pfenniger Failing, for example, the protagonist explores historical utopias as models for new societies and thus reveals Hargrave’s extensive knowledge of Plato, Bacon, Campanella and More. These ideas were applied to Kibbo Kift publications, where direct comparisons were drawn between the organisation and imagined futures, such as William Morris’ News from Nowhere. The 1890 book’s English utopia was described by Hargrave as “a far off dream to William Morris, and it is still a far off dream, but it is a dream that is slowly and painfully coming true”. In a temporally complex claim, he stated in 1923, “William Morris, in the vivid vision of his imagination, foresaw the coming of the Kibbo Kift”.12 Perhaps the utopian futurist author of most significance to Kibbo Kift was H.G. Wells, as both the most popular novelist in Britain in the 1920s and the biggest name on the group’s advisory committee. Reviews of his works regularly appeared in the pages of the organisation’s magazines, including Men like Gods, where Kinsman I.O. Evans, under his Kin name Blue Swift,13 noted that the world Wells described “is, in short, the kind of world we of the Kibbo Kift are trying to create. […] certainly it corresponds to the ideal of life of an earthling Kibbo Kifter”.14 Much the same is suggested of Wells’ The Dream of 1924. Members are told to be encouraged by “the resemblance between the characteristics that he attributes to those Citizens of the Future and the methods of the Kibbo Kift of to-day”: They live in that state of world peace and brotherhood which it is our aim to create. Even in details the resemblance holds, for these Folk of To-morrow abjure clothing, and, so far as Mrs. Grundy [figurative term for conventional manners] will allow, do we. The very names given by Mr. Wells to his heroes are like unto ours – Sunray, Radiant, Starlight, Willow, Firefly, are names that would appear appropriate on the Great Roll of the Kin. Let the hardworked Kinsman therefore read “The Dream”, and so obtain renewed energy in his unwearied struggle from this world to that which is to come.15

11  Blue Swift [I.O. Evans], “Book Here: Books for a Kibbo Kift Library. ‘Men Like Gods’ by H.G. Wells”, The Nomad, September 1923, 45. 12  White Fox [John Hargrave], “William Morris Foretells The Kibbo Kift”, The Nomad, March 1923, 129–130. 13  Members of the Kibbo Kift adopted “Kin names” to be used in place of legal names, often drawn from myth or natural history, as part of their ambitions for a more picturesque and egalitarian society. 14  Blue Swift, “Books”, 45. 15  Blue Swift, “The Dream”, The Nomad, September 1924, 191–192.

344 

 Annebella Pollen

The link to Wells was also exploited for the purposes of recruitment; letters to the press, for example, riding on the back of Wells’ publications, suggested Kibbo Kift as the means by which such dreams could be brought to life. One such example, following the publication of The Open Conspiracy, reads: I wonder how many of your readers who, like me, are stirred by his utterances to a desire for action, know of the movement called the “Kindred of the Kibbo Kift”? […] its object is, roughly, to weld its members, by self-training, into a human instrument towards just such a “World Revolution” as Mr. Wells’s “Blue Prints” outline.16

The Pfenniger Failing is run through with references to a wide range of Wells’ novels, showing Hargrave’s extensive familiarity with his oeuvre. Of all Wells’ fictional works, however, the strongest model for Kibbo Kift ideals can be found in the New Samurai of Wells’ A Modern Utopia of 1905. Variously described by critics at its reception and after as the most plausible and most important of utopias, its vision has also been described as “quintessentially modern”.17 Its popularity was broad-ranging and a number of progressive groups in the early years of the 20th Century sought to fit themselves into the philosophical model of its fictional “voluntary elite” as thinking persons, committed to hardihood, teetotalism and austerity, in pursuit of their “better selves”. Yet in their withdrawal from civilisation on a regular basis for the purposes of renewal armed only with a backpack, the New Samurai share particularly striking parallels with Kibbo Kift, not least to their camping practices. Of all attempts to apply Wells’ vision, Kibbo Kift appear the most comprehensive in its embodiment; their utopian vision was so total that all aspects of life were redrawn in pursuit of its achievement, even down to their striking clothing styles, an aspect of the group which has received surprisingly little attention to date.18 The costume of the utopians of Wells’ world are said to evoke the Knights Templar;19 even outside of “the radiated influence of the uniform of the samurai”, dress was dominated by woollen tunics and robes in bright colours and simple shapes, or “costumes of rough woven cloth, dyed an unobtrusive brown

16  Mrs C.S. Chapman, Undated newspaper cutting, 1928, cuttings file, Kibbo Kift collections, Museum of London. 17  Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Oxford 1987, 192. See Kumar also for an account of the book’s critical reception. 18  A section of one chapter provides the only illustrated assessment of Kibbo Kift’s artistic output in: Cathy Ross, Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age, London 2003. 19  H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, London 2005 [1905], 110.



Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts 

 345

or green”.20 Both these aspects of attire (or “habit”, as they preferred to call it) appear in Kibbo Kift modes of dress. The varied camp, council, ceremonial and exercise costumes of the Kin betray too eclectic a range of stylistic influences – from Sherwood Forest hooded jerkins and Valkyrie headdresses to Constructivist sportswear – to be read as a straight transposition. Nonetheless, a Wellsian aesthetic as well as a philosophy forms a key part of Kibbo Kift’s visual repertoire.

The Next Stage of History Idrisyn Oliver Evans was a particularly vocal exponent of Kibbo Kift’s utopian potential. As an amateur geologist and historian, Evans was keenly interested in the long view of the past but he combined these interests with a professional interest in scientific romances and technological predictions.21 In his insightful overview of the woodcraft movement, published in 1930, he explained the centrality of both history and futurism to the Kibbo Kift: In the early days of the Kindred the Outline of History [by H.G. Wells] was just appearing, with its new vision of human development as one great inter-related process. A little later appeared Men Like Gods, that best and most convincing Utopia that has ever been written. With the inspiration drawn from these two books the first Kinsmen set about their work. We tried to spread and to live in the light of the World Ideal, to make ourselves citizens of the “Next Stage in History” [the title of the book’s last chapter].22

Wells’ potted world history was “immediately and overwhelmingly successful” on its first publication in 1919 and by 1922 had sold over a million copies.23 Its broad sweep of time and international outlook provided a companion for Kibbo Kift’s historical enthusiasms, at each stage justified by Wells’ evolutionary biology. His popular teleological account – written as much for the understanding of the present-day of 1920 as it was an account of the past – repeatedly emphasises the transformational role of “the nomad” in shaping world history, and concludes:

20  Wells, A Modern Utopia, 208–209. 21  I.O. Evans was later to become the principal translator of Jules Verne’s scientific romances into English. 22  I.O. Evans, Woodcraft and World Service, London 1930, 70–71. 23  William T. Ross, H.G. Wells’s World Reborn: The Outline of History and Its Companions, Selinsgrove 2002, 13.

346 

 Annebella Pollen

Our history has told of a repeated overrunning and refreshment of the originally brunet civilisations by these hardier, bolder, free-spirited peoples of the steppes and desert. We have pointed out how these constantly recurring nomadic injections have steadily altered the primordial civilisations both in blood and spirit; and how the world religions of to-day, and what we now call democracy, the boldness of modern scientific enquiry and a universal restlessness, are to this “nomadization” of civilisation. The old civilisations created tradition and lived by tradition. To-day the power of tradition is destroyed. The body of our state is civilisation still, but its spirit is the spirit of the nomadic world.24

In Evans’ revisions to Wells’ work, in his simplified and abbreviated 1932 Junior Outline of History for children, he takes the model of the nomad even further, and explicitly links it to woodcraft activities: Throughout history, stagnant civilisations have been revived by nomad conquerors. The world community of the future, safe from outside raids, will have to become nomad itself to avoid the evils of stagnation. Already civilised folk are taking to the nomad life, wandering and exploring and seeing the world […]. The people of a more advanced world will be civilised nomads, getting all the advantages of both the wandering and settled lives.25

The final image in Evans’ book is taken from The Folk Trail, written by former Kibbo Kift member (and founder of the seceding Woodcraft Folk), Leslie Paul.26 Entitled “Hikers: The Nomads of the Modern World”, the photograph depicts two figures, complete with backpack and staff, following a lane towards a wooded horizon. As this image and its positioning makes visual, the path to the future will be a trail laid by historically-informed progressives.

Temporal Complexities and Aesthetics In The Confession of the Kibbo Kift, perhaps the fullest elaboration of the organisation’s philosophy, the group’s distinctive temporal position is reinforced by Hargrave. Despite the popular conception of the press, Hargrave insisted, “The Kindred is certainly not a ‘back to nature’ movement”27 and went on to argue: “It cannot look back for an historic counterpart, it is a new thing”.28 He describes the

24  H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, New York 1956 [1920], 502. 25  I.O. Evans, The Junior Outline of History, London 1932, 260–261. 26  Leslie A. Paul, The Folk Trail: An Outline of the Philosophy and Activities of Woodcraft Fellowships, London 1929. 27  Hargrave, Confession, 76. 28  Hargrave, Confession, 51.



Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts 

 347

group as among those “innovators [who] proclaim themselves the guardians of an ancient tradition and are therefore acting as conservators of something good and right which has been lost. They do not wish to ‘go back’, but rather to reinterpret the spirit of the past in such a way as to bring it into line with modern conditions”.29 He goes on to explain that there are “[t]wo tendencies [that] show themselves clearly in the civilised world today: a going back to Simple Things (a Tolstoy-Ruskin-Morris concept), and a going on to a Mechanised Simplicity (as advocated by Trotsky, and satirised by Capek). One school would have us a haymaker’s wooden rake, and the other a ‘clocking in’ key”.30 Kibbo Kift, however, suggested that a combination of the two was preferable, for mechanisation was, perhaps unexpectedly, part of their pastoral vision. For Hargrave, mass-electrification, the harnessing of mechanisation as a means of liberating workers from drudgery, and even a machine aesthetic co-existed fairly seamlessly with love for all things Arthurian and archaeological. Although its models were drawn from the past, they were always revisions: “a New Gulliver, a New Robinson Crusoe, a New Aesop, a New Don Quixote, a New Red Cross Knight”.31 As I have indicated, this newness manifested itself most particularly in the group’s visual style, which encompassed an extraordinarily wide range of media, from cartoons and printed posters and appliqued banners to totemic sculpture and painted tent decoration, alongside a diverse range of original costume and ceremonial regalia. Across this disparate material a distinctive aesthetic emerges, underpinned by an abstracted, futuristic vision that is recognisably modernist (see fig. 33). Hargrave was a talented artist. Describing himself as “born and bred in a studio”,32 he was the son of a landscape painter and found his first employment selling cartoons and illustrations while barely into his teens. In addition to the income generated by the sale of his non-fiction and (sometimes formally experimental) fiction writing,33 Hargrave supported himself during the interwar period through his role as a commercial artist, including, notably, a longstanding appointment with Carlton, a large and innovative advertising agency who

29  Hargrave, Confession, 37. 30  Hargrave, Confession, 48–49. 31  Hargrave, Confession, 50. 32  John Hargrave, At Suvla Bay: Being the notes and sketches of scenes, characters and adventures of the Dardanelles Campaign, London 1916, 13. 33  For an analysis of Hargrave’s fiction writing in the 1930s, when he had transformed Kibbo Kift into a political economic organisation, the Green Shirts, see: Tim Armstrong, “Social Credit Modernism”, Critical Quarterly, 55, 2013, no. 2, 50–65.

348 

 Annebella Pollen

Fig. 33: Kindred of the Kibbo Kift members at camp, 1928. Image courtesy of Judge Smith, Kibbo Kift Foundation.

boasted an art gallery on the premises and sold their services under a self-consciously artistic and “modern” claims.34 Despite Hargrave’s vocal resistance to urban commercial culture – and his eagerness to bite the hand that fed him – the effects of his profession undoubtedly informed the methods of his organisation, from the incorporation of a range of propaganda techniques, including snappy verbal slogans and performance “stunts”, to the modernist elements in Kibbo Kift’s visual style. Hargrave’s writings demonstrate knowledge of and admiration for contemporaneous artistic movement and styles from Dada to the Ballets Russes alongside the commercial cubism of graphic designers such as Edward McKnight Kauffer. Echoes of artists including Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis, whose work Hargrave knew and admired in the London Group, can be traced in the geometrical dynamism and aggressive abstractions of Kibbo Kift’s striking illustrations and graphic design (see figs 34 and 35). While never at the centre of an avant-garde artistic or modernist coterie – nor ever desiring to be – Hargrave’s wide range of contacts meant that he came to the attention (even if not always favourably) of a range of writers

34  Carlton ran advertisements emphasising their modern and artistic aspects throughout the 1920s in The Advertising World and Advertisers Weekly.



Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts 

 349

Fig. 34 (above): John Hargrave, Spring Festival Hike illustration, 1927. Image courtesy of London School of Economics Library and the Kibbo Kift Foundation. Fig. 35 (right): John Hargrave illustration of a kinsman for Kin Psalter, 1928. Image courtesy of Jon Tacey.

and artists, from D.H. Lawrence to W.H. Auden and Augustus John, each of whom decisively fit modernist frames of reference. Within his own organisation, Hargrave was also surrounded by a range of talented, if lesser-known artists including Winifred Tuckfield, founder member of the Knox Guild of Design and Craft and Angus McBean, the photographer who would later become celebrated for his surrealist theatre portraits. In particular, as one of several dress reformers in the organisation, Hargrave’s designs for clothing display a desire for the theatrical cutting edge. Tall, conical hats, twotone skirts split to the crotch, cubist volumes and geometrical patterning in bold colour blocks compete, in their uncompromising vision and execution, with contemporaneous costume design of European avant-gardes, from Oskar Schlemmer for the Bauhaus to Tullio Crali of the Italian Futurists (see col. fig. 31). Whether Kibbo Kift’s artistic output can be considered as innovations, parallel practices or amateur adaptations of these better-known ideas merits further attention.35 Certainly modernist elements represent only one ingredient of the group’s visual style and purpose; overall the result is a hybrid aesthetic that draws from a broad range of historical and geographical inspirations.

35  For further detail on the role of art, design and dress in Kibbo Kift, see: Annebella Pollen, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, London 2015.

350 

 Annebella Pollen

Primitive Occupations and Tribal Training Art and design was important to Kibbo Kift not just because of Hargrave’s professional background and his desire for eye-catching propaganda for an outlandish organisation. Handicraft, in particular, was given a central role in group policy and practices and was seen to offer a particular value as a so-called primitive occupation. For Hargrave, one of the central ways in which the problems of degenerate civilisation – as he described it – could be counteracted, was to adopt elements of what he imagined was savage life. He outlined the scheme he called “Natural Reconstruction” in a number of his early publications aimed at children and especially boys, with suggestive titles: Wigwam Papers, Totem Talks, and Tribal Training. Hargrave’s educational programme was underpinned by the recapitulation theories of educational psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Hall applied an adaptation of Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law, which proposed that ontogeny (organism growth) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary history of the species).36 In Stanley Hall’s popular theory, children needed to re-enact a sequence of stages of cultural evolution in order to become fully rounded beings; stages of child development were mapped neatly onto points on a linear understanding of cultural history from primitive to modern: The child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best modern school can provide. Rudimentary organs of the soul, now suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune to them in maturer years37

The application of recapitulation theory to youth training was not an innovation of Kibbo Kift; a number of outdoor and scouting groups in Britain and the United States followed the theories for their younger members; indeed, Stephen Jay Gould has argued that recapitulation was pervasive across a range of different disciplines outside of biology, and it “intruded itself into every subject that offered even the remotest possibility of a connection between children of ‘higher’ races and the persistent habits of adult ‘savages’”.38 What Hargrave added, however, was his own interest in artistic primitivism. Together, these elements

36  Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Cambridge, MA 1977, 135–147. 37  G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, New York 1906, 2. 38  Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 117.



Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts 

 351

Fig. 36 (left): Kibbo Kift cartoon by John Hargrave, 1927. Personal collection of Annebella Pollen. Fig. 37 (right): Cover of The Nomad, Kibbo Kift magazine, 1923. Personal collection of Annebella Pollen.

were brought together into a practical method which was particularly visual; the performance that would be enacted would develop what Stanley Hall argued was inherent to the child: its “vivid visual imagination”. As such, “the child may enter upon his heritage from the past, live out each stage of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold tendencies”.39 Hargrave expanded on this core principle – “boy is a primitive man”40 – and used it to model a new solution to the perceived problems of modern life. As he put it: “Primitive man will out; and the mind of man still harks back to the natural and the free, even though the body be confined and crippled by the unnatural servitude of our civilisation”.41 The resulting encounter between a so-called “savage” – interchangeable with a kind of prehistoric “sub-man”, as Wells would have put it – and Kibbo Kift members as forward-looking moderns was repeatedly visualised in a variety of forms in the group’s literature (see fig. 36).

39  Hall, Youth, 3. 40  John Hargrave, The Great War Brings It Home: The Natural Reconstruction of an Unnatural Existence, London 1919, 160. 41  Hargrave, The Great War Brings it Home, 305.

352 

 Annebella Pollen

Hargrave’s primitivism has been described by Joel Kahn as a “primitive mania”, to separate its idealising vision from the more common, denigrating position of “primitive-phobes”.42 However, Hargrave’s attitude to the motif of the primitive – for that is what it is; these are not real people, after all – was ambivalent, to say the least. He noted in 1919: I do not for a moment overlook the evils of the primitive or savage races of the earth; the disgusting practices of “head-hunting”, cannibalism, torture; their revolting rites and ceremonies; their dirtiness and slovenly ways. […] I am not trying to uphold the savage as a model of virtue, nor do I advocate a system of slavish imitation. Let us rather evolve an outdoor life of our own, to suit higher conditions, our intellectual instincts, and our own country. […] In the hope that we may recover something of the skill, cunning and stoic endurance of the savage – in the hope that our youths will fling off the enfeebling swaddling clothes of city habits and city life, the following scheme of Natural Reconstruction is suggested.43

The primitivist aspect of Kibbo Kift is worth lingering over in the context of debates about modernist temporality because it is always understood by the group as part of its “harking back”. As was typical in popular understandings of anthropology in the period, so-called primitive people were understood in parallel with the prehistoric. Such temporal distancing and denial of coevalness to those who are, in fact, contemporaries is of course deeply problematic and has been comprehensively critiqued by a generation of anthropologists following Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, yet Kibbo Kift’s attitudes to so-called savages were contemporary to their period even if their subjects were not permitted to be. To Kibbo Kift, ancient ways of life were idealised and mythologised, and the reverence for “savage ceremony” intermingled co-temporally with the veneration of sites from Stonehenge to reputedly ancient English chalk hill figures and fascination with folklore as, after Tylor and Frazer, cultural “survivals”.44 Yet what is important to the group as modernists is that this cultural and historical recapitulation was always future-directed. As was noted in an article in Kibbo Kift’s regular newsletter of the mid-1920s, fittingly entitled The Nomad (see fig. 37): “The Past is yet alive, and thrilling through us; the Past is not merely ‘at our doors’, but in us; the Past has made us what we are, as we are making the Future”.45 For all of its enthusiasm for the past, however, historical pastiche of any kind was strictly

42  Joel S. Kahn, Modernity and Exclusion, London 2001, 35. 43  Hargrave, The Great War Brings it Home, 107–108. 44  Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, London 1871; James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, London 1890. 45  Ken-Ea [Mabel Barker], “Discovery. Prehistoric Remains”, The Nomad, December 1924, 227.



Utopian Futures and Imagined Pasts 

 353

forbidden. As Hargrave put it: “Revival is taboo”.46 All of Kibbo Kift’s historical engagement was a reinterpretation, and all their understandings of the past were informed by the latest thinking, whether this was mystical, scientific, or indeed, artistic. As Hargrave wrote in his reflection on modern culture and its antidote, The Great War Brings it Home: Every effete civilisation must crumble away. The only hope is that a new and virile offshoot may arise to strike out a line of its own. […] nowadays, owing to the fact that modern civilisation has penetrated throughout the world, there are no “Barbarians” to sweep us away. Therefore the cure must be applied internally – and we must produce the “Barbarian” stock ourselves.47

To modernise, in Kibbo Kift, one needed nothing less than to go back to the beginnings of prehistoric settled culture, to perform cultural evolution and to re-circuit time.

Conclusion Although there appears to be a contradiction between Kibbo Kift’s desire, in the 1920s, for a Wellsian scientific-technological future and its simultaneous yearning for a primitive utopia, both positions are ultimately modernist. To describe Kibbo Kift’s view in this way when it is inflected with a celebration of non-Western small-scale cultures and veneration of the ancient and folkloric – a position which is commonly characterised as antimodernist – may seem to stretch the concept, not least when modernism is commonly understood as a rejection of the historical and as brought by the experience of Western, urban modernity. Modern and traditional, as relational concepts, are “mutually constitutive and constituting”;48 modernism and antimodernism can be understood as two sides of the same coin. In Kibbo Kift’s world view, the so-called primitive inhabits a culture that is believed to exist outside of modernity; such characterisation, positioning and conceptualisation of cultures is, nonetheless, quintessentially modern. Primitivism is never a simple “looking back”; it is only through a p ­ articular ­manipulation

46  John Hargrave, “Letters to the Kindred”, The Nomad, October 1924, 200–201. 47  Hargrave, The Great War Brings it Home, 21. 48  Robin Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk’”, American Historical Review, 97, December 1992, 1400–1408, here 1402.

354 

 Annebella Pollen

of time that contemporary “others” can be made temporally distant and available as mythical motifs. Fabian has argued, persuasively, that time is a politically and ideologically constructed instrument of power.49 Elsewhere, Stephen Kern has used the global standardisation of time at the cusp of the 20th Century, and the related time-space compressions brought by simultaneity, as a heuristic device to encapsulate the experience of modernity. Time was also something of a plaything for Kibbo Kift. 1920 – the date of their founding – became a literal “Year Zero” in the group’s reworking of the Gregorian calendar, where BC was replaced with KK. Kibbo Kift also proclaimed, as part of their wider Wellsian ambitions for World Peace and World Unity under a World State, a complex system for their own World Time; they even invented and patented a new kind of watch which would tell it. The innovations that the group made, not least in art and design, but also in their enthusiastic adoption of a range of new ways of thinking, were typical of a period rich with utopian dreams and an urgent need to find new solutions following the post-war destabilisation of the myth of progress. Armstrong has argued that “the dynamization of temporality is one of the defining forms of modernism: past, present and future exist in a relationship of crisis”.50 Kibbo Kift’s sprawling, complex and paradoxical modernism was marked by dynamic, multiple chronicities as it simultaneously engaged with, rejected and embraced futures, presents and pasts. As such, for all of their future-leaning and past-yearning, their utopian reveries, cultural recapitulations and temporal ruptures, Kibbo Kift were very much of their time.

49  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, New York 1983, 144. 50  Armstrong, Modernism, 9.

Sarah Archino

New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art What a beautiful world this would be, and what a glorious Art we would have, if the little children could grow up and yet remain little children? – Adolf Wolff.1

Amidst the debates of early modernism in America, the role of children’s art as a means of political and aesthetic critique has been underestimated. The most progressive centres of early 20th-Century American art, including the Ferrer Center, Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (better known as 291), Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work, Robert Coady’s Washington Square Gallery and journal The Soil, featured children’s art as a model of artistic and philosophical freedom. The choice to present children’s art was not innocent, nor merely aesthetic: it formed a critique of education based in anarchist rhetoric and demonstrated anarchist beliefs in the larger social promises of art. Its prevalence attests to the broader influence of anarchist ideology, stretching well beyond politicised centres into allegedly apolitical modernist circles.2 This essay examines the influence of anarchism on the study and presentation of art by children to reveal how this radical philosophy framed contemporary discussions of artistic expression, training, and aesthetic freedom. Certainly New York was not alone in its admiration for children’s art at this moment; most notably, Vasilii Kandinskii and Gabriele Münter collected such work and examples appeared in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (1912).3 In New York, however, the tenor of these exhibitions and collections was different, focusing on the freedom and innovation of the untrained, uncensored child instead of the naïve style or simplified forms of the artwork. The lessons were intended to be primarily cultural and political, and secondarily aesthetic. Stieglitz disagreed with the use of children’s art as a model for the modern artist; as he told one reporter who asked about such a possibility, “that is impossible […] you can’t do

1  Adolf Wolff, [reprint of review in the International], in: Camera Work, 1914, no. 35, 24. 2  A cornerstone of studies on anarchism and art in America is: Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, Chicago 2001. 3  Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, London 1974 [1912].

356 

 Sarah Archino

that because you are not a child”.4 Admired as an alternative to professional art practices and academic expectations, these juvenile works and the politicised rhetoric surrounding them were intended to support efforts towards educational reform. Both Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Coady employed children’s art to further their cultural critiques, a decision heavily influenced by the contemporary anarchist discourse. Before proceeding, the specific character of anarchism in early 20th-Century New York must be identified. Anarchism was not a monolithic movement, but varied from city to city and from circle to circle. The political nature of European anarchism was subdued in America by federal backlash in response to the labour clashes of the late 19th Century, culminating in the Haymarket Riots and the assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist sympathiser in 1901.5 Thus confined, anarchists in America tended to be fluid in their alliances, joining with the socialists to work towards workers’ rights and working with libertarians and other radicals in the pursuit of individual freedom. New York anarchists, especially the circle around Emma Goldman (widely considered the most famous anarchist in the United States) maintained a more moderate political and social agenda, designed to attract more mainstream support. While political demonstrations and violence did occur, it was fully possible, and often the norm, to subscribe to anarchistic beliefs without advocating direct action.6 Thus, while certainly we cannot overlook the anarchist dedication to political change and workers’ rights, in this climate these interests were cloaked in language about individual liberties and cultural development. In an interview with Guido Bruno for a chapbook on anarchism, Goldman’s partner Hippolyte Havel explained: “To be an anarchist means to be an individualist. To be an individualist means to walk your own way, do the thing you want to do in this life and do it as well as you can”.7 This emphasis on individualism coincided with contemporary theories on intuition and the irrational, attracting interest among the avant-garde, who saw an alliance between anarchism and their struggles for aesthetic autonomy.

4  Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in: “Some Remarkable Work by Very Young Artists”, reprinted in: Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, New York 1973, 115. 5  For a history of anarchism in America, see: Steven Shone, American Anarchism, Leiden 2013; Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, Oakland, Cal. 2010. 6  For more information on the non-violent character of anarchism in New York, see: Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, New York 2000. 7  Hippolyte Havel, quoted in: Guido Bruno, Anarchists, New York 1915, 9.



New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art 

 357

In New York, the focal point for anarchist activity was the Ferrer Center, founded in 1911. Although the organisation was actually a consortium which spanned a spectrum of radicals, it was dominated by anarchist ideology. Inspired by the martyred Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer, best known for his experimental La Escuela moderna,8 a day school for children was the centrepiece of the Ferrer Center. Upon the school’s opening, its director, Bayard Boyesen, published a pamphlet which described its libertarian educational mission: “The personality of the child, during the sensitive and hazardous years of early youth, must be kept free from the intrusive hands of those who would mould and fashion it according to preconceived models, who would thwart this quality and divert that, in order to fit the child into the ideals of the teacher”.9 This was not new terrain, from earliest anarchist thinkers, education had been a central concern.10 In the 1910s, the network for children’s art education and exhibition in New York was inextricably linked to politically radical organisations such as the Ferrer Center and the People’s Art Guild; these groups saw art instruction as a practical means of conveying and reinforcing anarchistic educational models and offered free classes for adults as well as children. Art was considered an important component of the future utopia, and so it became an important emphasis for activist groups. The People’s Art Guild, which staged exhibitions of modern art in settlement houses and other non-traditional spaces in Lower Manhattan, sought to raise funds to establish art centres in these immigrant neighbourhoods.11 The Ferrer Center featured evening art classes led by Robert Henri and George Bellows as part of the adult programming and the children’s classes were considered a successful element of the day school; as its teacher Will Durant noted: “here perhaps more than in any other field the initiative of the pupils is brought out”.12 Beginning in 1914, the Modern School also began the sporadic publication of

8  Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States, Princeton 1980. 9  Bayard Boyesen, The Modern School in New York, New York [1911], 1–2. 10  As Paul Avrich has noted, they “believed that conventional education restrained the spontaneous development of the child, stunted his growth, and brutalised his character. All were agreed that freedom must be the cornerstone of education, that education was a process of self-development, a drawing in rather than a driving in, a means by which the child’s unique spirit was nurtured rather than shaped or suppressed” (The Modern School Movement, 10). 11  For more information on the People’s Art Guild, see: Sarah Archino, “The People’s Art Guild and the Forward Exhibition of 1917”, in: American Art, 27, 2013, no. 3, 14–19. 12  Will Durant, The Ferrer Modern School, New York 1912, 6. Quoted in: Avrich, The Modern School Movement, 93.

358 

 Sarah Archino

Voice of the Children, edited by the school’s students and featuring their writings and artwork. Stieglitz’s prescience for showing work of the European avant-garde in the years prior to the 1913 Armory Show has overshadowed his contemporary exploration of modernist alternatives.13 Exhibitions of satirical cartoons and caricature by Gelett Burgess, Alfred Frueh and Marius de Zayas and some of the earliest displays of so-called primitive African art in America were part of the work in this “laboratory”, meant to counter the academicism of American art. His groundbreaking exhibitions of children’s art were part of this iconoclastic critique of high culture and an important motif for Stieglitz: from 1912 to 1916, 291 hosted four shows of work by children. He also planned an issue of his journal, Camera Work, dedicated to “Children’s Work, in picture and in words”, but that number never came to print.14 In this focus on children’s art, however, Stieglitz engaged directly with the language and ideology of anarchist education. Stieglitz’s exhortation to the press: “Give a child a brush and a paint box and leave him alone. Don’t bother him with theories, don’t attempt to confine his genius within established limits”15 closely echoed the pedagogical attitudes of such anarchist educators. That Stieglitz and his collaborator and Ferrer Center regular, Abraham Walkowitz, chose to exhibit the art of children from settlement houses, places their first exhibition directly among anarchism’s target audience.16

13  Sarah Greenough lists the precise titles and dates in: Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, Washington, DC 2000: “Exhibition of Drawings, Water-Colors, and Pastels by Children, Aged Two to Eleven” (11 April–10 May, 1912); “Second Children’s Exhibition” (18 February–11 March, 1914); “Third Exhibition of Children’s Drawings” (27 March–17 April 1915); “Water-Colors and Drawings by Georgia Engelhard, of New York, A Child Ten Years Old, Showing the Evolution from Her Fourth Year to her Tenth Year” (22 November–20 December, 1916). 14  [Alfred Stieglitz], “Numbers of Camera Work in Preparation”, in: Camera Work, 1914, no. 46, 52. In the April–July 1913 issue, a poem by Mary Steichen “age not quite nine” had appeared (Mary Steichen, “The Skylark”, in: Camera Work, 1913, no. 42–43, 14). The children and art number was meant to be a collaboration with Dr A.A. Brill, the translator of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams among other works. The two men met at one of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salons, and although the issue never came to be realised, the plans point to the centrality of this idea to Stieglitz during this period – see: Debra Bricker Balken, Debating American Modernism: Stieglitz, Duchamp, and the New York Avant-Garde, New York 2003, 56. 15  Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in: “Some Remarkable Work by Very Young Artists”, reprinted in: Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, 115. 16  Walkowitz is commonly credited with gathering the drawings from settlement houses on the Lower East Side, yet as Sarah Greenough noted in Modern Art and America, Gail Levin has found mention in Josephine Nivison’s diaries that the works came from her students – published in: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, New York 1995, 154.



New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art 

 359

The gallery 291 was an arena for the free exchange of ideas and assaults on the cultural status quo. In 1912, on the occasion of his first exhibition of children’s art, Stieglitz characterised 291 as “the idea of revolt against all authority in art, in fact, against all authority in everything, for art is only the expression of life”.17 While he never officially joined the ranks of any political group, Stieglitz’s philosophy was soundly anarchistic. He was disdainful of authority, eager to promote the individual, willing to discard the past and loath to replace it with new dogma. Later, Stieglitz would explain in a 1935 letter to Waldo Frank: “I have always been a revolutionist, if I have ever been anything at all”.18 Here the quotation is usually ended, but Stieglitz continued: “At heart I have ever been an Anarchist. All truth seekers are that, whether they know it or not. But even that label as label I hate. So I am a man without labels and without party”. Indeed, many resisted the label of anarchism, feeling that to join the movement was to subvert its message of individualism and resistance. The theories of Henri Bergson were popular among the Stieglitz circle, building on symbolist ideas of equivalence and suggestion to champion the supremacy of intuition over intellect. Bergson’s rejection of traditional, positivist notions of experience was quickly associated with anarchism.19 Stieglitz circle artists traveling to France became well-acquainted with his writing and popularised it back home, even publishing two excerpts in Camera Work before Bergson’s well-attended lectures at Columbia University in 1913.20 Bergsonian intuition was complemented among the Stieglitz circle with widespread admiration for the writings of the German expressionist Vasilii Kandinskii, himself highly influenced by anarchism,21 and widely understood by American audiences to be “anarchistic”.22 When Marsden Hartley sent Stieglitz

17  Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in: “Some Remarkable Work by Very Young Artists”, reprinted in: Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, 115. 18  Alfred Stieglitz, letter to Waldo Frank, 6 July 1935. Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 19  For a discussion of interpretations of Bergson’s theories in Europe, see: Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton 1993. 20  [Henri Bergson], “An Extract from Bergson”, in: Camera Work, 1911, no. 36, 20–21; Henri Bergson, “What is the Object of Art?”, in: Camera Work, 1912, no. 37, 22–25. 21  Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction: Kandinsky’s Art of the Future”, in: Art Journal, 46, 1987, no. 1, 38–45. Washton Long has demonstrated the importance of anarchism as part of Kandinskii’s desire to remake society through an exploration of alternative philosophies. 22  Gail Levin, “Kandinsky’s Debut in America”, in: Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz (eds), Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912–1950, Dayton, Ohio 1992.

360 

 Sarah Archino

the Blaue Reiter Almanach during the summer of 1912, New York artists could not have overlooked the anarchism of the almanac.23 Thomas von Hartmann’s “On Anarchy in Music” encouraged stylistic pluralism, claiming: “External laws do not exist. […] In all the arts, and especially in music, every method that arises from an inner necessity is right”.24 This inner necessity was equated to natural law, granting the artist the mandate to revolutionise; aesthetic revolution, it was believed, would eventually lead to greater upheaval. In America, artists reinterpreted both Bergson and Kandinskii, replacing their interest in the collective with a system which privileged individualism. Stieglitz’s first exhibition of children’s work opened in April 1912.25 It is clear from the introduction written by his associate, Paul Haviland, that the show challenged the boundaries of fine art and criticised the conventions of artistic training by “gather[ing] examples of graphic art produced at an age when education has not yet interfered with naive and natural expression”.26 Central to this question was the development of future American artists, as Haviland noted: “This exhibition leads to many thoughts as to the value of art education as practiced today which cannot be included in notes of this character, but which are nevertheless of vital importance if we want to see our children develop into artists and not into artisans”.27 The show received considerable press: an article in the Sunday New York Daily Tribune declared them “The Future Futurists” and Stieglitz granted an interview to the New York Evening Sun, which characterised the show as representative of the gallery’s revolutionary, anti-authoritarian operations and “a reflection of the social unrest of the whole country”.28

23  Marsden Hartley, postcard to Alfred Stieglitz, summer 1912. Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 24  Thomas von Hartmann, “On Anarchy in Music”, in: Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 113–118. Hartmann was also mentioned as an example of anarchist thought in: John Weichsel, “Cosmism or Amorphism?”, in: Camera Work, 1913, no. 42–43, 69–82. 25  While Stieglitz staged his first exhibition of children’s art prior to receiving Kandinskii’s publication, the Almanac certainly would have encouraged further exploration in this vein – both for professional artists and in the consideration of children’s work. 26  Paul Haviland, “Photo-Secession Notes”, in: Camera Work, 1912, no. 39, 47. 27  Haviland, “Photo-Secession Notes”, 47. 28  “The Future Futurists – Things Artistic Revealed to Babies That are Hid from the Wise and Prudent”, in: Sunday New York Daily Tribune (clipping undated), Stieglitz scrapbook, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; Alfred Stieglitz, “Some Remarkable Work by Very Young Artists”, reprinted in: Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, 115.



New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art 

 361

While no work from the exhibition is extant, the show was thoroughly documented in the July 1912 issue of Camera Work. In fact, children’s work formed a theme, connecting several essays in that issue, including excerpts from Kandinskii’s newly published Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) and Marius de Zayas’ essay, “The Sun Has Set”.29 This same issue also featured “In Memoriam” by the anarchist author Hutchins Hapgood, comparing the young daughter of Jerome Myers with the academician Kenyon Cox. In this reprint of an essay originally published in The Globe, printed with a thick black border to replicate mourning cards, he describes Virginia Myers dancing with a “singularly mature artistic sense, one that had formed itself freely but perfectly, recognised its own joy and its own law”.30 He credits her parents, writing: “all they try to do is to encourage the little girl to be her own lovely self; to put her in the right environment for her nature to flower. They are sedulously avoiding any attempt to have her follow their ideas or those of anybody else”. He then compares this to Cox’s academicism, which “gave me that cold compression, that depletion of life, which is the essence of death. And I thought of his spirit and that of little Virginia as direct opposites – death and life. Cox represents uninspired authority, technical but not imaginative law”. A similar lament is found in de Zayas’ essay, which proclaimed “Art is dead”, explaining that “Art, which is a striving toward the Ideal, has succumbed to Industry, which is a striving for the Real”.31 De Zayas wrote extensively about work by children, carefully distinguishing it from art. Clarifying Stieglitz’s characterisation, he explained that children expressed an intense perception and spontaneous nature: “From this, we conclude that those who consciously imitate the work of children, produce childish work, but not the work of children. This confirms, too, the principle that ‘unconsciousness is the sign of creation, while consciousness at best that of manufacture’”.32 The language of modernism was easily transferred to the work of children, which became an exemplar of free expression, intuition, and iconoclasm. A number of reviews, originally published in the mainstream media, were reprinted in this issue of Camera Work. The authors tended to focus on the same main

29  [Vasilii] Kandinsky, “Extracts from ‘The Spiritual in Art’”, in: Camera Work, 1912, no. 39, 34. The text was sent to Stieglitz by Marsden Hartley and most likely translated into English by Stieglitz himself. 30  Hutchins Hapgood, “In Memoriam”, in: Camera Work, 1912, no. 39, n.p. [51–52]. 31  Marius de Zayas, “The Sun Has Set”, in: Camera Work, 1912, no. 39, 17–21, here 18. 32  De Zayas, “The Sun Has Set”, 20–21.

362 

 Sarah Archino

points: this work was visually interesting, worthy of serious consideration, and demonstrated the pure vision that was stifled by conventional artistic training. Multiple reviewers focused on the critical function of this exhibition, as a statement on education and artistic training. Many remarked that this work was not the product of specially-talented children or prodigies, but represented only the unrestricted vision and expression of freedom which was lost in conventional approaches to culture-making. As wrote one: “education is usually a stupefying thing, and […] the process of standardizing in the schools is usually the destruction of genius. We have all been impressed, probably, by the same thing. Why is it that children of seven or eight years are almost always keenly intelligent, while grown-ups are as invariably stupid? It must be the result of education”.33 While the freedom of these children was celebrated, they were also likened to workers. This created a more explicitly political dimension to the reception of this exhibition: allowed the freedom to express their individuality and to enjoy their honest labours, they produced prodigiously and happily. Camera Work published a review by Sadakichi Hartmann in which he noted the “fresh and exquisite virility” of the “honest, humble toil of these little draughtsmen”.34 Hartmann paid special attention to the process by which they worked, writing: “Children draw when they feel the impulse. […] [T]he little craftsmen stop as soon as they feel bored, but while they work they do so with wonderful earnestness and enthusiasm. And after that performance is done and shown to the person nearest in reach, the piece of paper is carelessly tossed aside. It has become valueless in their eyes; it is forgotten like the incidents of a nursery game”.35 In this passage, Hartmann set the actions of the child artist as a model to be emulated, rather than the aesthetics. The second exhibition of children’s art was shown at 291 in February–March 1914. Again, Haviland made clear that “all the drawings shown were by children who had received no guidance in the use of brush or pencil”.36 Further connecting these first two exhibitions, Stieglitz published a review originally written in 1912, which insisted upon the spontaneity and non-preciousness of this work, explaining that “these drawings, we were informed, were almost entirely done without the assistance or guidance by teachers or other adults. A careful viewing of them

33  J. Edgar Chamberlain, [reprint of review in Evening Mail], in: Camera Work, 1912, no. 39, 47. 34  Sadakichi Hartmann, “The Exhibition of Children’s Drawings”, in: Camera Work, 1912, no. 39, 45–46. 35  Hartmann, “The Exhibition of Children’s Drawings”, 45. 36  Paul Haviland, “Second Children’s Exhibition”, in: Camera Work, 1914, no. 45, 18.



New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art 

 363

supported this assertion. To be frank they were the sort of thing that Teacher throws away as of no value”.37 This belated reprint, originally published in The Arts & Crafts Magazine, provided a justification for Stieglitz’s return to the subject of children’s art. The author criticised conventional art education: “How is it that the child with this directness and personality is made to do the most conventional and non-personal things, shortly after being taken in hand by its art teacher? This exhibition is to me a startling and sad commentary upon our art education”.38 He continued with the recommendation that “great deal could be done toward a little self-education by organizing in every town a small exhibition of just such drawings […]. Such an exhibition would show both teachers and parents a new angle of view into the mind of a child. It would also arouse suggestive thoughts upon our present methods of art instruction, methods that obtain with a deplorable uniformity from the Kindergarten to the Art Academy”. As with the first exhibition, critics considered the work visually interesting and politically provocative. Charles Caffin claimed it “not only artistically appealing, but a thing to be studied by every one [sic] who is engaged in psychological and educational problems”.39 Similarly, Henry McBride counseled his readers: “These drawings will pleasantly beguile a half an hour for any art lover, and particularly will please those students who have been considering the lot of primitive artists with envy. These drawings certainly exhibit all the qualities that are so desperately lacking in the art of today; imaginativeness, poetry, decoration and ideas”.40 Indeed, there is very little which separates the rhetoric of these mainstream critics from an overtly anarchist viewer, Adolf Wolff, writing in the radical review International, that the exhibition affected me like the sweet fresh breeze that enters a stuffy room when the windows are thrown open on a bright April morning. Free, frank and joyful are the Little Masters who have made those pictures so striking in color, so delightful in design, so surprising in conception. One is tempted to whisper, “May they never improve!” What a shame that the ogre jaws of industrialism are waiting wide open to engulf most of these little great artists! Will any of them escape? 41

37  Walter Storey, [reprint of review in The Arts & Crafts Magazine], in: Camera Work, 1914, no. 45, 24. 38  Storey, [reprint of review in The Arts & Crafts Magazine], 24. 39  Charles H. Caffin, [reprint of review of the New York American], in: Camera Work, 1914, no. 45, 23–24. 40  Henry McBride, [reprint of review in the New York Sun], in: Camera Work, 1914, no. 45, 24. 41  Wolff, [reprint of review in the International], 24.

364 

 Sarah Archino

Looking back at these first two exhibitions, the editors of Camera Work emphasised individual vision, expression and a lack of self-consciousness but focused on how these qualities were ruined by artistic training. Aesthetic allusions to Bergsonian intuition and Kandinskii’s “inner necessity” were reinforced by a rhetoric commonly associated with the anarchist spirit. The third exhibition of children’s work manifested an important shift in Stieglitz’s strategy. Rather than displaying examples of free and unfettered work, this show featured work produced by public school students. Although a leaflet which accompanied the exhibition carefully explained that this particular work was completed outside of a formal class, a distinction was drawn between the previous shows “entirely composed of unguided work of untaught boys and girls” and the current exhibition of “a collection of drawings done by boys […] under the influence of a system”.42 Camera Work did not reprint any reviews of this exhibition, suggesting that it didn’t garner the attention of the earlier shows; instead, it reprinted in full the text prepared by the children’s teachers, Dr Joseph Cohen and Eda L. Puckhaber. While they were public school teachers (Joseph Cohen would go on to become dean of teacher education for the City University of New York), they are critical of the methods of conventional education, writing: “The goal to which prevailing art instruction aspires is the attainment of a collective mediocrity. A uniformity of result and perfection of finish has been its chief aim”.43 They lament that the “mechanism of instruction has been so perfected that it operates, no matter who the teacher is, or who the learner. It has been rendered fool-proof on the one hand, and genius-proof on the other”, before concluding that the present drawings were undertaken as an experiment in unstructured art education, “the outcome of a frank departure from the scholastic norm, undertaken in the hope that the results might disclose something of what the children themselves might wish to say to us”. The last exhibition of work by children featured paintings by Stieglitz’s own “unguided and untaught” ten-year-old niece Georgia Engelhard.44 Tracing the development of a single child from age four to ten, Charles Caffin argued that the show “uncovers the potentialities of human nature, could it be allowed in Bergson’s happy phrase, to recreate self by self; to evolve out of the mystery of itself in a free and truly sane environment!”45 Caffin celebrates Bergsonian instinct, “the

42  “The Third Exhibition of Children’s Drawings”, in: Camera Work, 1916, no. 48, 9. 43  “The Third Exhibition of Children’s Drawings”, 9. 44  Charles Caffin, [reprint of review from the New York American], in: Camera Work, 1917, no. 49–50, 34. 45  Caffin, [reprint of review from the New York American], 34.



New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art 

 365

natural habit of the child’s mind, before it is clipped and cribbed by convention”, contrasting it with “pernicious forcing of culture” which characterised conventional instruction.46 Marking a departure from Stieglitz’s earlier, emphatic separation between children’s work and professional art, this exhibition paired Engelhard’s pictures with work by the Stieglitz circle. As Camera Work detailed, Englehard’s work was shown in “co-relation” with work by Hartley, Walkowitz, John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe.47 While Stieglitz doubtless meant to highlight the similarities between these advanced abstractionists and the intuitive approach of children, his colleague Robert Coady brought together modernism and children’s art as a means of more direct artistic critique. Like Stieglitz, Robert Coady has often been considered too nationalistic and too celebratory for any connection to anarchism or critical radicalism. Indeed, Coady loudly and enthusiastically championed his vision of American art – one centred away from the studios and galleries (although he also ran the Washington Square Gallery with the sculptor Michael Brenner). Dying young and leaving no archive, little is known of Coady, yet he was tangentially connected to the Ferrer Center. In 1914, he was listed among the contributors to the Modern School’s fundraising efforts.48 He lent images to be published in their journal, The Modern School, and he repeatedly referenced Ferrer Center figures and activities in the pages of his own short-lived journal, The Soil. Coady’s anarchist sympathies underlie his anti-academicism and iconoclasm and doubtlessly also informed his interest in children’s art. Although The Soil lasted only five issues, it was quite successful, offering multiple print runs of its inaugural issue of December 1916. An estimated 5,000 copies of The Soil were circulated to readers in America and abroad.49 The magazine quickly gained notice, with Henry McBride’s review proclaiming: “I love the new publication from start to finish. I wouldn’t have a thing in it altered. I consider it the most perfect art journal I have ever seen”.50 The journal opened its pages with a manifesto, “American Art”, a Whitmanesque account of the sights, sounds, and experiences that Coady celebrated as exemplary of the national culture. The list, spanning a total of five pages over two issues (and ending “to

46  Caffin, [reprint of review from the New York American], 34. 47  “Exhibitions at ‘291’ – Season 1916–1917”, in: Camera Work, 1917, no. 49–50, 33. 48  “Donations to the School Maintenance Fund Received in Response to the Appeal”, in: The Modern School, 1, 1914, no. 11, 15. 49  Robert Alden Sanborn, “A Champion in the Wilderness”, in: Broom, 3, 1922, no. 3, 174–179. 50  Henry McBride, “The Soil, a Magazine of American Art”, in: New York Sun, 17 December 1916.

366 

 Sarah Archino

be continued”) listed stars of vaudeville and movies, dime-store novels, sports figures, Krazy Kat, industrial labourers and their tools – with nary a mention of an American artist. While Coady sought a native artist who could measure up to this dynamic spirit, he identified the American cultural centre to be well outside of fine art production. The pages of The Soil freely mixed high and low culture: Gertrude Stein shared the same space as the first instalment of “The Pursuit of the Lucky Clew”, a dimestore novel by “Nicolas Carter”, an alias for the former Ferrer Center director and anarchist John Coryell.51 Photographs of industrial equipment ran throughout The Soil, which Coady billed as the “Moving Sculpture Series”.52 An article on the Sheepshead Bay rodeo claimed it was “one of the most remarkable exhibitions of art”, where, despite the absence of critics or philosophers, “tens of thousands felt the big spirit of the west”.53 This article, written by Coady, was illustrated with three photographs of Jess Stahl, captioned “He has no ism to guide him”, “It takes guts to do that”, and “Not among the art notes”. Also in this first issue, the vaudeville and movie stars Charlie Chaplin and Bert Williams were profiled, as was the clown Toto, “the most creative artist that has visited our shores in many a day”.54 As Leo Mazow has explored, The Soil was conceived in opposition to the Forum Exhibition, which would often serve as a foil for Coady’s critique.55 In the earliest issues, Coady lampooned modernist art through clever juxtapositions – for example, pairing Stanton MacDonald-Wright’s Organization 5 with a window display of hats.56 In this comparison, both photographs were accompanied by “artist’s statements” which underscored the vitality of the real world and the hyperbole of the art world. The window dresser referred to his work in clear, concrete language while MacDonald-Wright’s description of the “necessity for a formal climax which, though being ever in mind as the final point of consummation, would serve as a point d’appui from which the eye would make its excursions into the ordered complexities of the picture’s rhythm” (taken directly from the Forum Exhibition catalogue of 1916) reads as a parody of art writing. In March 1917, Coady created a double spread comparing A Busted Ford by “P.W. Henderson, 13 years” with Marsden Hartley’s Motion, which had been

51  Jay Bochner, “The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil”, in: Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible (eds), Burlington, VT 2007, 49–66, here 62. 52  George W. Vos, “Art and Machinery”, in: The Soil, 1916, no. 1, 16–18. 53  R[obert] C[oady], “Stampede”, in: The Soil, 1916, no. 1, 24–25. 54  R[obert] C[oady], “Toto”, in: The Soil, 1916, no. 1, 31. 55  Leo G. Mazow, “Soil, Theory, and the Forum Exhibition”, in: American Art, 27, 2013, no. 3, 7–13. 56  The Soil, 1916, no. 1, n.p.



New York, Anarchism and Children’s Art 

 367

included in the 1916 exhibition. The pair was captioned, “Which Has the Motion?” – one of a series of rhetorical questions used throughout The Soil.57 The following issue featured six works by children, presented without commentary or justification.58 Although Coady often reproduced ancient art, African sculpture, and the work of European modernists like Henri Rousseau, these were the only paintings by Americans to be published in The Soil without scathing criticism, suggesting that they fulfilled at least some of Coady’s criteria for a vital, unfettered expression of American culture. Henderson’s A Busted Ford was also featured in an exhibition at Coady’s gallery in November 1917, organised as a fundraiser for the war relief efforts of the American Circle for Negro War Relief.59 Already by this moment, however, the cultural climate for radicals in New York had abruptly and permanently shifted. With the American entrance into World War I, anarchism’s moment of broad cultural relevancy was over. The 1917 Espionage Act passed on 15 June and the anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested on 16 June, sending a clear message to radicals in New York and beyond that open dissent would no longer be tolerated.60 The intervention and subsequent political shift in the United States brought about a nearly complete suspension of avant-garde activity in New York and the scattering of its participants. Shortly following the American declaration of war came the closure of Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, the folding of Camera Work, the end of The Soil, and the exile of Ferrer Center regulars to Stelton, New Jersey. With some artists enlisting for military service and others fleeing conscription, those remaining in the city were forced to abandon their prior radicalism (either because outlets such as The Masses were suppressed, because of economic pressures, or to avoid official attention, censorship, and possible deportation). Few major undertakings were possible during the remainder of the decade, under what historian Richard Abrams has described as “a virtual reign of terror”.61 For a brief number of years during the 1910s, children’s work had been a vehicle to bring anarchist philosophies to a receptive public. In the pure e­ xpression of

57  “Which Has the Motion?”, in: The Soil, 1917, no. 3, n.p. 58  The Soil, 1917, no. 4, n.p. The works included Flag Day by P.W. Henderson, In the Park by G. Saunders (age 12), The Dancers by A. Angelino (age 12), Bacon and Eggs by T. Tuthill (age 11), Two Heads by N. Capello (age 8) and Ship by Andrew Chandler (age 10). 59  Judith Zilczer, “Robert J. Coady, Forgotten Spokesman for Avant-Garde Culture in America”, in: American Art Review, 2, 1975, no. 6, 77–89. 60  This chronology is provided by Jay Bochner, in: An American Lens: Scenes from Alfred Stieglitz’s New York Secession, Cambridge 2005, 182–183. 61  Richard M. Abrams, The Burdens of Progress: 1900–1929, Glenview, IL 1978, 125.

368 

 Sarah Archino

their paintings and drawings, these young artists represented the future, utopian, liberation of the spirit in an anarchist world. The profusion of beauty created by the untrained and unrestricted mind suggested the natural beauty which would emerge from a society of enlightened and empowered individuals. This seemed to be a utopia within reach. The child was likened to a worker, not a trained genius. His brilliance was natural and evident because it had yet to be contaminated by culture. Driven by inner passion, the child-artist operated intuitively and without thought to a final conclusion or external considerations. The actions of child artists were a model to be emulated – not just by artists, but by all who would overthrow barriers to freedom of expression and individuality. Thus in the United States, children’s work presented a native, vital, and undervalued non-academic tradition upon which artists could draw and an insight into the beautiful anarchist world for which so many activists longed.

Sylvia Hakopian

Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia An Analysis of Children’s Textbooks and Subjection under Fascism In a speech given on the occasion of European liberation at the Department of French and Italian at Columbia University on 25 April 1995,1 Umberto Eco ironically recalls participating as a child in the Ludi Juveniles,2 a public sporting event organised by the Fascist government in Italy. Introducing his talk, Eco notes: In 1942, at the age of ten, I won first prize at the Ludi Juveniles (a competition open freely to all participants, compulsory for all young Fascist Italians – that is for all young Italians). With rhetorical mastery, I elaborated on the theme: “Shall we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My response was affirmative. I was a bright child.3

The scholar’s account begs the question: what kind of a Fascist could the “bright” ten-year-old Eco be? How might children of a young age be turned into Fascists? In what did the Fascist education of children consist? Eco does not answer these questions but uses two contradictory terms that allow us to understand at the onset the attributes specific to a Fascist education.4 A key word valued by the regime, “freedom” refers to the way in which children were to arrive at Fascist education wilfully.5 Didactic manuals by the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) as well as the pedagogue, Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice, advise against any use of force and stress the importance of engaging the student

1  Umberto Eco, “Introduzione”, in: Cinque scritti morali, Milan 1997, 5–8. 2  Angela Teja categorises the Ludi as a “competitive sport” in which the Balilla would participate. See: “Italian Sport and International Relations under Fascism”, in: P. Arnaud and J. Riordan (eds), Sport and International Politics: The Impact of Fascism and Communism on Sport, London 1998, 147–170. 3  Italian translation cited here is from: Umberto Eco, “Il fascismo eterno”, in: Cinque scritti morali, 25–48. All translations in this paper are mine, unless otherwise noted. 4  The original Italian terms used are “libera” and “coatta”. 5  Education Minister and author of Origini e dottrina del fascismo (Origins and Doctrine of Fascism), Giovanni Gentile defined freedom as man’s ability to shape his own spirit – thoughts, actions, and attitudes. See: La riforma dell’educazione: discorsi ai maestri di Trieste, Opere complete di Giovanni Gentile, vol. 7, Florence 1955, 30–31.

370 

 Sylvia Hakopian

into obeying his or her instructor.6 Eco’s aside, in which a specific part of the Italian population (the Fascist youth) also refers to the whole, recalls Giovanni Gentile’s philosophies on individual and collective will.7 Here Eco depicts Italian youth as aiming toward a goal shared by the Fascist state. Yet, the term “compulsory” undermines any such possibility of “freedom”, suggesting that coercion played a role in Eco’s participation in the Ludi.8 Still, did the rhetorical question mean something for Eco the child? What does it mean to be a child subjected to Fascism? 9 A further study of Giovanni Gentile’s terminology here in light of his tenure as an education minister enables us to see the ways in which children could become Fascists. Incorporating his philosophy of freedom into his 1923 curricular reforms, Gentile prescribed an academic program that would expose students to Fascist ideology on a daily basis. Obliging children across Italy to attend elementary school up to the age of fourteen,10 Gentile primarily structured students’ day-today activities on reading exercises selected from required textbooks.11 Schoolbooks, hence, became the primary vehicle of providing an education that would

6  Compare the ONB’s Metodo per l’educazione fisica dei fanciulli (Rome 1931, 11–12) and Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice’s La riforma della scuola elementare: vita nuova della scuola del popolo (Palermo 1925, 53). 7  Gentile notes: “In conclusion, I, as a citizen, want what I want: but, when we look into this deeper, what I want precisely corresponds with what the State wants. And my will is the will of State”. La riforma, 25, 26. 8  The relationship between coercion and consent under Fascism is not a new topic and has been considered at great length by a variety of scholars. The following is a sample: Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism, Minneapolis 1995; Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy, Ithaca 1997; Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy, Cambridge 1981; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945, Berkeley 2004; George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, New York 1999. 9  Louis Althusser defines a subject as an “interpellated” individual who submits to and practices “ruling ideology”, imaginary “world-outlooks” conveyed by familial, cultural, legal, and political bodies. See: Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus”, in: Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York 2001, 85–126. For a useful overview of the term, see also: Warren Montag, Louis Althusser, New York 2003; Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio (eds), Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory, Hanover 1996. 10  See: Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice, La riforma della scuola elementare: vita nuova della scuola del popolo, Palermo 1925, 22–23; Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, Education in Fascist Italy, London 1946, 1–3, 68; Monica Galfré, Una riforma alla prova: la scuola media di Gentile e il fascismo, Milan 2000, 45–46; Jürgen Charnitzky, “Il dibattito critico sulla riforma Gentile in Italia e all’estero”, in: Giuseppe Spadafora (ed.), Giovanni Gentile: la pedagogia, la scuola, Rome 1997, 341–367, here 341. 11  See: Franco V. Lombardi, I programmi per la scuola elementare dal 1860 al 1985, Brescia 1987.



Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia 

 371

allow for the establishment of “political order”.12 Yet, to bring this project to fruition, existing books needed revisions. Nowhere do we see the importance placed upon refashioning the textbook more than in Gentile’s establishment of the Commissione centrale per l’esame dei libri di testo. Led by Lombardo-Radice and his team of fellow pedagogues, this committee’s task was to specify the content and structure of the ideal schoolbook. They mandated guidelines for the composition of primers as well as literature, history, geography, science, religion and mathematics texts.13 The choices of the 1923–1924 Commissione notably aimed at offering students an attractive, “Fascist” vision of Italian childhood. Their biases and, hence, utopic ideals of Fascist Italian children, would serve not only to entice students to embrace their schoolbooks but also to adopt the values contained in them willingly.14 In this paper, I concentrate on the way in which the Commissione’s textbooks laid the groundwork for subjecting Italian children to Fascist ideology. Discussing the implications of the terms freedom and will, I ask: what do Italian Fascist textbooks assume about children; what are their utopian impulses; and how might they work to seduce children toward Fascism? My answer to these questions appears on the course of my analysis of the Textbook Commission debates. I argue that the Committee’s ultimate purpose in putting forth such requirements consisted in preparing students to assume jobs that would support the regime both ideologically and economically. Nonetheless, my findings reveal an enigmatic representation of Italian children and lead me to raise scepticism regarding the subjection of children to Fascism. I maintain that the failures of the Fascist project within the educational apparatus ensue from competing national and regional perspectives of Italian identity found within the textbooks.

12  Minio-Paluello, Education in Fascist Italy, 68. 13  Anna Ascenzi and Roberto Sani, “Premessa”, in: Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo: l’opera della Commissione centrale per l’esame dei libri di testo da Giuseppe Lombardo Radice ad A. Melchiori (1923–1928), Milan 2005, xi-xii and 3–32, here xi. 14  In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca 1981, 289–290) Fredric Jameson defines utopia as “the proposition that all class consciousness – or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes – is in its very nature Utopian”. He adheres to a Hegelian notion that utopias function by means of group solidarity rather than such “ethical categories” as right or wrong, good or bad that would distinguish the utopian group from the “other”. I frame my understanding of a possible “Fascist utopia” by applying Jameson’s notion here in my analysis.

372 

 Sylvia Hakopian

Literature Books and Primers: Good for the Fascist Body, Good for the Patriotic Soul An “accurate” representation of Italian children was essential to the Lombardo-Radice Commission. Advising that the textbook provide the means for the Italian child to identify with the protagonist, the Committee’s purpose lay in designing literature that would captivate student attention.15 Language revision in literature texts, thus, comprised foremost concern. Subcommittee Director Maria Pezzé Pascolato, rejected 459 books of literature that lacked exactitude and simplicity. Seen as exaggerated, the books “failed” to provide “real” information that would help students to reason analytically about their surroundings.16 At the same time, Pascolato argued that the texts needed to affect students emotionally and recommended that selections of poetry incorporate such auditory stylistic devices as “assonance”, meter, and rhyme.17 Nevertheless, the Commission placed limits on the kinds of emotions the textbooks could convey. They frequently criticised authors, who used terms that were “overly-sweet”. Convinced that such language belittled students, Pascolato urged compilers to replace such diminutives as “amorini” (“little love”), “cuoricini” (“little heart”), and “tesorini” (“little treasure”), with more “serious” vocabulary.18 Such alterations reveal the Commission’s anxieties about representing Italian children as weak and pampered. In light of such edits, the textbooks could instead portray the Italian child as tenacious and independent. In order to provide a framework of the ideal Italian student, the Commission issued guidelines for depicting characters in literature books. Marked with “conventional descriptions”, selections of readings often portrayed such stock characters as Tonino, Carluccio, Mariuccia, and Ninetta. Lombardo-Radice’s Committee criticised the ways in which such personas functioned chiefly as foils to contrast one another within the plot.19 Demanding the inclusion of more round characters,

15  Giorgio Chiosso notes: “Lombardian reflection delineates a school which intends to overcome the detachment between the school and infantile experience in order to imagine it in function with the needs and capacities proper to childhood”. “Il rinnovamento del libro scolastico nelle esperienze di Giuseppe Lombardo Radice e dei ‘lombardiani’”, in: History of Education & Children’s Literature, 1, 2006, no. 1, 127–139, here 134. 16  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 294. 17  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 303–304. 18  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 296. 19  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 304.



Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia 

 373

the Commission asked for more complex story lines that would appear realistic to the student. Still, members placed limits on the attributes authors could develop. Criticising stories of death and abandonment, they censored texts in which orphaned protagonists possessed “a fear of life” and hence were neither “courageous” nor “hopeful”.20 At the same time, they revised such traits as vengeance, nostalgia for the idleness of summertime, envy, and the preoccupation of making good impressions on people. The Pezzé Pascolato report declared that such stereotypical depictions of the irrational, egocentric, and lazy child thrust a wedge between the readership and the protagonist. Here, we recognise another paradox within the judgments offered by the Commission. On the one hand, members demanded authentic representations of Italian children. On the other hand, they provided a biased view of Italian childhood. Editing tragic narratives and any negative descriptions that would make Italians appear disgraceful, the Commission sought to promote a framework for how the readers themselves ought to behave and view themselves. Correspondingly, they insisted not only on changing characters’ qualities, but also their perspectives on Italy. Final criticisms levied against literature books focused on the ways in which protagonists viewed Italy’s terrain. According to the Commission, no direct contact occurred between protagonists and the land. Appearing as travellers, they only visually acknowledge the beauty of the Italian countryside, mountainside, and beaches. This superficial relationship between Italy’s landscape and story characters thus failed to impart to children a sense of patriotism and conveyed no notions of sacrifice. Pezzé Pescolato continues: “To the new generation, which has to make Italy prosperous and great ‘with the plough and prow’ these books offer nothing that would make them really know and love the life of the countryside and the sacred labour of the land”.21 With the phrase “the sacred labour of the land”, Pezzé Pascolato recommends that children invest themselves in and recognise the value of hard work. At the same time, she markedly communicates that children esteem rural life in addition to agricultural labour. Instead of motivating readers to pursue a higher education, the Commission suggests that children strive for manual work. By means of the text, members therefore attempt to confine children to a less sophisticated lifestyle.

20  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 306. 21  The phrase “with the plough and prow” (“con l’aratro e prora”) refers to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Canto augurale per la nazione eletta, influenced by Giosue Carducci’s Odi barbare. The terms would be used heavily by Mussolini to convey themes of patriotism and sacrifice. See: Lorenzo Braccesi, Roma bimellenaria: Pietro e Cesare, Rome 1999, 168–169.

374 

 Sylvia Hakopian

In like manner, Pezzé Pascolato’s contention that children love “seafaring life” further substantiates that same objective. Recommending materials that would allow children to embrace marine life, she and fellow committee members amend macabre tales, in which protagonists suffer injury or death from fishing disasters. According to Pezzé Pascolato, such a story as Pulcinella’s could instil fear in children.22 Indeed, she hesitated to approach the water when visiting the Italian coast and perceived the sea as a place of destruction. Pezzé Pascolato deems such depictions of marine life as “cowardly” and denies their potential in shaping “the new Italian spirit”.23 Yet, seafaring life for Pezzé Pascolato consisted not only of catching fish for a living. In promoting a life at sea, the Commission similarly prescribes stories praising the successes of the Italian Navy. Such tales, hence, represent revisions that impart a national identity, marked with themes of bravery as opposed to fear and weakness. Admirable virtues and feats serve to motivate students to set their sights on military as well as seafaring life. Though the Committee paid attention to representing “real” Italian character traits in literature texts, they also sought to glorify the Italian body. According to the Committee, the majority of primers and spelling books pessimistically depicted Italian children as deformed. Their report notes: Children in the early stages do nothing else than believe and grow, and those who are lame are only a small minority; but the authors of these texts see the world filled with misfortune and deformity, and they fill these pages with the crippled, mangled, cross-eyed, blind, mute, injured, stutterers; and the first words that the child learns to pronounce are: PIO IS SHORT-SIGHTED AND A DWARF; LINO WAS BORN MUTE; and the first little tales recount bad children, who mock the unhappy, and of good children who happen to be on crutches, etc. Never do these volumes strike out humiliating physical imperfections or compensate with intellectual morale against such misfortune; they do nothing to make [children] admire the strength of spirit.24

Juxtaposing children with physical deformities and speech impediments with those who misbehave, the Committee criticises the texts for potentially defiling the morale of “vulnerable” students. Physical deformities here imply moral disfigurement. Trivialising the existence of deformed children in Italy by marking them as a “minority,” the Committee’s scope appears utopian.25 By means of the primer, they seek to construct an imaginary group of Fascist children who are physically attractive and, therefore, mighty and incorruptible. By virtue of their

22  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 308. 23  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 308. 24  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 300. 25  See note 14 above.



Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia 

 375

beautiful bodies, these exemplary children possess “strength of spirit”. Uniting Italian children under such a false image, Lombardo-Radice’s texts disseminate a “symbol of personal and national regeneration”.26 As we shall see in the next section, such notions of italianness likewise appear alongside typographical emendations in history, geography, religion, and mathematics texts.

Geography, History, Science, Religion, and Math Books as Seen through a Fascist Lens The Committee’s suggestions for history and geography textbooks overlapped that of literature. Examining 317 texts, the Commissione largely criticised structure and language.27 According to the report conveyed by Giuseppe Prezzolini, content in history books differed not from one grade level to the next. Third and sixth grade textbooks, for instance, appeared distinguishable solely by the addition of a chapter. Contextually, the books comprised a series of “anecdotes, biographies, and lists of dates” that only superficially depicted Italian history. Linguistically, typographical errors, convoluted definitions, and awkward expressions typified the material.28 Given these imperfections, the Committee argued that the work risked leaving students confused and disinterested. Yet the inability to spark student interest lay not only in the writing style, but also in the actual presence of the author within the text. Most books lacked an apparatus criticus or glossary that could provide perspective on the problems raised by the text. Here we acknowledge further inconsistencies in the Committee’s argument. While urging students to formulate their ideas independently, Prezzolini and his colleagues simultaneously require authors to editorialise their work with biased opinions. Choosing selections of readings, Lombardo-Radice ironically imposed his own attitudes toward Italy’s history. He recommended that textbooks develop such historical figures of the Risorgimento as Giuseppe Mazzini thoroughly and place emphasis on physiognomy rather than prescribing a list of “useless dates, names, weddings, battles that burden the mind of the child”.29 Demanding more moralistic content, the Commission, moreover, sought to eliminate “tales of

26  Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, 3–4. 27  Ascenzi, “Premessa”, 9. 28  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 313. 29  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 314.

376 

 Sylvia Hakopian

­ assacre and violence” that often characterised the historical narrative present m in textbooks.30 According to the Prezzolini report, history books included numerous accounts of “brutality”, “cruelty”, “atrocity”, and “madness”, which holistically rendered the material profane and offensive. In an example, the report points out the presumably distasteful story of a woman from Ancona, who offers to nurse a famished soldier. Imagining the soldier suckling from a bare-chested woman, the committee associates the crudeness of the tale with that of Carlo Zima, a historical figure drenched in solvent and burned to death by Austrian forces. While acknowledging the woman’s exploit as one of generous sacrifice, the Commissione nevertheless deemed it as violent as they did the latter. In order to maintain a sense of “maternal modesty”, the Committee seeks to censor any references to a woman’s nipple. Here, members notably insinuate that such violent stories could morally corrupt children. By chastising nudity, they prescribe to children their own sense of social ethics in history textbooks; they proceed and next extend their biases into geography texts. Comparable to the criteria for history texts, guidelines for science and geography books similarly focused on structure and content. Examining textbooks of “geography, astronomy, and physics”, they strongly advised compilers to simplify the language and incorporate a great deal of mythical content. They criticised writings, for instance, that did not “push the student to ponder the infinite mysteries of the starry universe”. Providing an anthropocentric point of view on geography books, Lombardo-Radice urged authors to focus on “descriptive elements of human life in the world in relation to the terrain itself”. Rather than exclusively focusing on such natural locales as mountains and lakes, the Commission suggested that authors include descriptions of cities and regions as well as such man-made Italian structures as castles, walls, and buildings. Motivation for the choice lay in the belief that Italian architecture “spoke to” the student and seemed “rather alive”.31 The geography book thus became a means of promoting the country’s growing infrastructure by establishing a link between children and the Italian landscape. Similar revisions appeared in religious textbooks. The Lombardo-Radice Commission reviewed few books instructing religion. Reprints of old editions, the examined texts contained a series of catechisms that lacked colourful illustrations and explanations. Laying out a set of rules, a part of the texts neglected to present the material creatively. Once more, the Commissione asked that such books cultivate morale by offering ways for students to engage with the texts. The committee explains:

30  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 315. 31  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 317.



Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia 

 377

Textbooks of religion need to become “equal to a point of reference of all the spiritual, cultural elements found in [student] learning” and therefore must be able to educate and awaken within the student an apt sensibility toward moral contemplation. The simplicity of dictation exercises and the beauty of its appearance have to reinforce the inspiring virtue of the great truths and the inexhaustible divine goodness in children.32

The terms “contemplation”, “inspiring virtue”, and “beauty” highlight the means by which students were to internalise the Christian doctrine. The first term suggests that students approach and understand the work independently by studying it on their own. Nevertheless, the term “beauty” implies that attractive illustrations bear the burden of “inspiring” a sense of intrigue within the student. Replacing religious dictums with illustrations, the Committee hence sought to entice and persuade rather than coerce the child into his or her studies. The text, hence, becomes an apparatus that allows the student to engage with the Committee’s biased revisions. The task of finding a religious text worthy of use in schools was not as problematic, however, as the mathematics text. Approximately 350 volumes of mathematics books met with the dissatisfaction of the committee. Like its religious counterpart, the texts comprised reprints of the 1849 Compendio di aritmetica, which required updates on its examples, explanations, and definitions. Conveying disapproval, moreover, on the didactics of the text, the group asked that the material communicate with a happy tone. The report notes: “The author needs to express himself gently to the child, speak with grace and composed joy; he must be practical and convincing to the young one who tomorrow will become a manual labourer, clerical worker, or farmer”.33 Without being coercive, authors needed not only to “convince” their readers to study arithmetic, but also potentially prepare them to pursue jobs as manual labourers, clerical workers, or agriculturalists. Here, notably, the Committee reveals its conviction that Gentile’s education system aim primarily at training a majority of children for jobs in industrial and bureaucratic sectors of society. Using textbooks to restrain children to their proper social ranks and securing their own political and economic support, Gentile’s Commissione once again aims at building a utopian class-consciousness.34 Espousing children to “love” the textbooks that taught the knowledge to obtain the “proper” job alongside the ideals of the Fascist regime, the curricula seeks to unite children by stressing their willing participation in lower working classes. This project, I argue, did not

32  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 292; Ascenzi, “Premessa”, 9–11. 33  Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 325. 34  See note 14 above.

378 

 Sylvia Hakopian

end with the 1923–1924 Textbook Commission and rather became the focus of the Education Ministry’s goals following Gentile’s tenure.

The Archetypal Text: Gentile’s Textbook Reforms following the Commissione Lombardo-Radice Four other commissions followed that presided by Lombardo-Radice. The number of books examined by each varied in greater or lesser degree with respect to that reviewed by the first Commissione. For the most part, the textbook requirements did not change as each committee sought to maintain Lombardo-Radice’s ideas and policies.35 With the exception of the Melchiori Commission, all the reviewers required textbook compilers to represent the presumed “real” qualities of Italian children. According to the reports, Italian students were not puerile and infantile, but rather “on guard and mindful”.36 To the commissioners, qualities of weakness defined the Italian child of the preceding decade. Giuliano, for instance, remarked that the textbooks too often emphasised the obsequious and hypocritical “old child”, “who never once ceased to be the consolation of his parents or teachers, who succumbs the poor and preaches at his mates but runs also away”.37 Similarly, the Romano Commission expected the Fascist school to mould the child into the “new man” who possessed such “virile” qualities as “loyalty, courage, diligence,

35  See: Lombardo-Radice, La riforma, 316–317; Italy, Ministry of Public Education, Ministerial Commission, Relazione della Commissione ministeriale per l’esame dei libri di testo da adottarsi nelle scuole elementari [Commissione Vidari], in: Anna Ascenzi and Roberto Sani (eds), Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo: l’opera della Commissione centrale per l’esame dei libri di testo da Giuseppe Lombardo Radice ad A. Melchiori (1923–1928), Milan 2005, 429–441, here 429; Italy, Ministry of Public Education, Ministerial Commission, Relazione della Commissione ministeriale per l’esame dei libri di testo da adottarsi nelle scuole elementari e nei corsi integrativi di avviamento professionale [Commissione Giuliano], in: Il libro per la scuola, Milan 2005, 577–583, here 579; Italy, Ministry of Public Education, Ministerial Commission, Relazione della Commissione ministeriale centrale per l’esame dei libri di testo da adottarsi nelle scuole elementari e nei corsi integrativi di avviamento professionale [Commissione Romano], in: Il libro per la scuola, Milan 2005, 665–668, here 666–667. 36  Relazione della Commissione ministeriale per l’esame dei libri di testo da adottarsi nelle scuole elementari, 430. 37  Relazione della Commissione ministeriale per l’esame dei libri di testo da adottarsi nelle scuole elementari e nei corsi integrativi di avviamento professionale, 580.



Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia 

 379

perseverance, objectivity, honesty”.38 Like their predecessor Lombardo-Radice, Vidari, Giuliano, and Romano participated in constructing and furnishing textbooks with utopian notions of the Italian child. Despite the consistencies, however, a few noteworthy differences remained. Submitted to the MPI in 1926, the Giuliano report, for instance, condemned the lack of emphasis placed on the figure of Mussolini and the Fascist movement. In addition to the “definitive elimination” of “antinational propaganda”, the ultimate Italian textbook was to be ideologically “fascisticised” and decisively marked with the themes of the “culto della Patria” (“cult of the Nation”). These can be seen especially in such subsequent State School issued textbooks as Roberto Forges Davanzati’s fifth grade text, Il balilla Vittorio, and Nazareno Padellaro’s third grade textbook.39 Texts such as these not only incorporated such phrases as “Obey, because you have to”, but also glorified Fascist military life. Doing so, they aimed at motivating students to pursue occupations that would benefit the regime.

Reforms Above and Beyond: Conclusion and Some Further Considerations Gentile and his successors in sum formulated an ideological apparatus in the form of the textbook. Compiling such materials, they provided students with the knowledge that would determine their place in the workforce and in society. Inscribing biased interpretations, they also prescribed emotionally charged notions of Fascist patriotism, nationalism, masculinity, and italianness that served to entice the child’s “willingness” to embrace his or her texts. By means of schoolbooks, Fascist pedagogues thus aimed at constructing an ideological social consciousness. Yet, as Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s analysis of the Montessori school in The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 allows us to see, the Fascists were not the first to seek a utopian project.40 I wonder: how did the themes of the text work to fashion, as Fabrizio Ravaglioli terms, “an apparatus of

38  Relazione della Commissione ministeriale centrale per l’esame dei libri di testo da adottarsi nelle scuole elementari e nei corsi integrativi di avviamento professionale, 666. 39  See: Roberto Forges Davanzati, Il balilla Vittorio: il libro della V classe elementare, Rome 1938; Nazareno Padellaro, Il libro della 3a classe elementare: letture, relgione, storia, geografia, aritmetica, Rome 1936. 40  Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920, Chicago 2007, 6–7.

380 

 Sylvia Hakopian

interiorisation”?41 With the emphasis placed on the visual components of schoolbooks, we could recognise the role that images play in ideologically shaping the child and in communicating a national identity. According to Antonio Gibelli, Fascist propaganda indeed ideologically interpellates children into subjects as a result of its accessibility, simplicity, and emotionally charged images of war and nationhood.42 Referring to such printed materials as postcards and advertisements in his study of children as a “people” in Modern Italy, Gibelli argues that the images are powerful enough to effect children. Nonetheless, we know that children must understand and sympathise with the themes of nationalism so that its message is communicated. And so: how are these children taught to identify with such ideas vested in the images present in textbooks? How might a child’s age, gender, social status, geographic location, or emotional and mental development prevent or allow him or her to grasp and respond to the images conveyed in didactic material?43 Were there different and competing narratives of nationalism that downplayed the ideological formation of Fascist students? Roberto Dainotto’s analysis of regionalism sheds light on Gentile’s “highly problematic” conception of Italian national identity.44 Indicating a dialectical tension between Gentile’s notions of regionalism and nationalism, he writes: “Disguised as love for the local and the particular, the blood and soil rhetoric of ‘local histories’ almost looks like the dissolution and unmaking of nationalism – but only if one does not see in it, vaguely but clearly visible, the risorgere of the same old nationalism that we thought had set in the horizon”.45 Dainotto’s premise allows us to take another look at not only Gentile’s curricular and

41  Fabrizio Ravaglioli, “Gentile pedagogista europeo”, in: Giuseppe Spadafora (ed.), Giovanni Gentile, la pedagogia la scuola, Rome 1997, 75–88, here 76–77. 42  Antonio Gibelli, Il popolo bambino: infanzia e nazione dalla Grande Guerra a Salò, Turin 2005. 43  An incomplete bibliography on developmental psychology might include: D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, New York 1965; Jacqueline Nadel and Darwin Muir, Emotional Development: Recent Research Advances, Oxford 2005; Susanne A. Denham, Emotional Development in Young Children, New York 1998; Henry Dupont, Emotional Development, Theory and Applications: A Neo-Piagetian Perspective, Westport 1994; Jean Piaget, The Essential Piaget, eds Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonèche, New York 1977. 44  Roberto Dainotto, “‘Tramonto’ and ‘Risorgimento’: Gentile’s Dialectics and the Prophecy of Nationhood”, in: Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (eds), Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity Around the Risorgimento, Oxford 2001, 241–255, here 242–243. 45  Dainotto, “‘Tramonto’ and ‘Risorgimento’”, 253.



Children’s Utopia / Fascist Utopia 

 381

textbook reforms but also the publication of the Libro unico. While striving for a national culture, he simultaneously promotes the local, agricultural, and littoral. Despite their attempts at unifying Italians, the Fascist government likewise incorporates regional themes into their Libro unico and circulated different textbooks for children in cities, rural areas, colonies, and abroad.46 My hypothesis, which constitutes the body of my current research, is that the Fascist pedagogues confounded the process of ideologically shaping children by promoting a national identity while still emphasising the regional within these textbooks.

46  Examples of such texts include the following: Giuseppe Fanciulli, Letture di religione (per le scuole elementari italiane all’estero), Verona 1935; Alessandro Marcucci, Sillabario: scuole rurali, Rome 1930; Angiolo Silvio Novaro, Il libro della quarta classe elementare: letture, Rome 1931.

Max Saunders

The Future in Modernism C.K. Ogden’s To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series The modern literary form imagining possible future social life which is most familiar today is science fiction – whether utopian, or, more often, carrying with it hints or elaborations of dystopia. But the prominence and spread of science fiction – in comics and films as well as in pulp and literary fiction – has tended to obscure another mode in which modernism and the avant-garde mapped the form of possible futures for humanity: namely, by speculating about such futures in the overlooked genre of expository prose. This chapter focuses on the book series “To-Day and To-Morrow”, edited by polymath C.K. Ogden, and published by Kegan Paul from 1923–1931. The series consisted of over a hundred short volumes on a broad range of topics, including sciences, arts, politics, society, sexuality, education, and everyday life topics, in which authors were expected to delineate the contemporary state of the field, then project its future.1 This futurological rationale distinguishes the series from comparable popularisations of science and culture. What sets it apart from the futurology pervading journalism is first the collaborative nature of the exercise, and second that many of its writers were experts. While some of the authors were already established (such as Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee and Sylvia Pankhurst), many were younger figures, making their mark as representatives of the avant-garde across a range of fields. They include Dora Russell, J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, Robert Graves, Basil Liddell Hart, and Hugh MacDiarmid. In contributing their futuristic projections the authors might be said to be doubly avant-garde: not just ahead in their present views and beliefs, but ahead in thinking ahead. A unique experiment in concerted futurology, the series includes both utopian and dystopian imaginings. Sometimes these feature as a debate between authors, as when J.B.S. Haldane’s buoyant advocacy in Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923) of the potential of science to enhance human reproduction or

1  107 To-Day and To-Morrow volumes were published by Kegan, Paul, Trench and Trübner in London from 1923–1931, and in the U.S. by E.P. Dutton, who added a further three titles not published in the U.K. All the U.K. volumes were reissued by Routledge (with Edition Synapse), collected into a 25-volume library edition in 2008, with the exceptions of the two titles by Bertrand Russell and the one by Dora Russell.

384 

 Max Saunders

devise new fuel economies is countered by Bertrand Russell’s cynical caution in Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924) about how power will use such knowledges. Sometimes the mix occurs in the same book, as when Aeolus, or the Future of the Flying Machine (1927) by Oliver Stewart first imagines air travel improved by a combination of airships and autogiros, then anticipates London being blitzed from the air.2 To-Day and To-Morrow exemplifies the claim – elaborated by Marshall Berman out of Marx – that modernity is essentially future-oriented.3 The series assumes life in the future will be different; that it has the potentiality to be better; and that no aspect of life – however intimate or apparently essential it may seem – should be excluded from its speculative transformations. After World War II and the Holocaust such confidence appeared misplaced, especially to the Frankfurt School’s critique of the enlightenment and of instrumental reason.4 Whereas many major literary texts of the 1920s – whether modernist or testimonies of the war – express an earlier version of this loss of faith in, or even a horror at, modernity, To-Day and To-Morrow remains more balanced about the future, and especially about science and technology. The series shows a generation, many of whom had experienced the war on the Western Front and elsewhere, not disillusioned, but all the more determined to assert utopian future lives as possible and worth imagining. Rather than causing them to reject technological modernity, their experience of how the advance of scientific knowledge can cast a nightmarish shadow appears to have left many of these writers all the more determined to exercise human ingenuity to avert future catastrophes. To hazard a generalisation possibly modernist in its diagrammatic reduction: where postmodernism views utopia in the knowledge of the disastrous totalitarianisms of Nazism and Stalinism, as something that can only slide into dystopia (and sees Zamyatin and Huxley as its prophets), the futurological modernism of To-Day and To-Morrow aspires to move in the other direction: to turn the dystopia of World War into a utopian future. As for so many of the war’s survivors, the problem was not the new – the technology that mechanised slaughter – but the old – the political, imperial, social and religious status quo that seemed to have brought the war about.

2  See: Clare Brant, “Aeolus: Futurism’s Flights of Fancy”, in: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 34, 2007, no. 1 (March), 79–90. 3  See: Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, New York and London 1988, 96. 4  See: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford 2002 [1947]; Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lectures and Essays Since the End of World War II, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, New York 1976.



The Future in Modernism 

 385

These notes were sounded by the biochemist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane in the first volume, Daedalus. This had been a paper “read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923”, and was published by Kegan, Paul, Trench and Trübner as a small hardback pocket-book of 93 pages.5 The President of the Heretics (a title he must have relished) was C.K. Ogden, a bookseller, collector, and freelance intellectual probably best known in literary studies for his close association with I.A. Richards, with whom he wrote The Meaning of Meaning (1923). Ogden had recently started working with Kegan Paul, first as one of the founders of the journal Psyche from 1920, then as a consulting editor for the firm from 1922 for the rest of his life. That year, British modernism’s annus mirabilis, he launched the first of five book series for Kegan Paul: The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, starting with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which Ogden had helped translate. This series outlasted its editor, eventually running to over 200 volumes, and presented an extraordinary range of mainly contemporary thinkers. Haldane’s imagining of possible futures for science appears to have led Ogden gradually towards the idea for another series. First, Bertrand Russell produced a companion volume, or rather, his pessimistic counterblast, Icarus. The design of the volumes was changed, and two more added with deep maroon boards and elegant cream labels: F.G. Crookshank’s The Mongol in our Midst (a eugenicist argument, doubly disturbing now, for its use of Downs Syndrome to argue that the African, Caucasian and Asian races are derived from different species of ape); and Wireless Possibilities by A.M. Low. None of these first four volumes bore any indication that they were part of a series; nor were their lengths or the form of their titles standardised; but by the fifth – Gerald Heard’s Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes – they had all been gathered together into a new series, “To-Day and To-Morrow”. This would run for eight years. Most of its volumes would bear a classical title, with an explanatory subtitle (as with Daedalus and Icarus) mentioning the future and the topic. If Daedalus inspired the series, it also inspired many of the subsequent contributors. It is the volume most referred to by the others (though – predictably – works by H.G. Wells are in the minds of many of the authors). Daedalus is certainly one of the most audacious, visionary and witty of the volumes. It is written in part as a parody of a mediocre undergraduate essay of the future describing as well-known scientific advances that hadn’t yet taken place by 1924: what Haldane calls “ectogenesis”: not just the fertilising, but the full gestation babies outside

5  The first edition bears the date 1924, but it was probably forward-dated for the New Year to let it appear to keep up to date. Later impressions date the first as November 1923.

386 

 Max Saunders

the womb; and cloning and other forms of genetic engineering. Haldane gives the book what Joyce called “the name of the fabulous artificer” not for Daedalus’ most famous talents as a physicist (achieving flight) or an architect (designing the Labyrinth) but as a proto-geneticist, devising the wooden cow which King Minos’ wife, Pasiphaë, used to mate with the white bull sent by Poseidon, producing the Minotaur as a result.6 His friend Aldous Huxley clearly drew on Haldane’s ideas for Brave New World (as he had earlier in Crome Yellow). The fact that the biological developments Haldane imagines are no longer entirely the science fiction they must have appeared to Daedalus’ original readers indicates the shrewdness of his predictions. Daedalus starts, chillingly, with a contrast between two scenes from the war. The first actually juxtaposes two visions (one autobiographical, the other speculative) of troop movements on the Western Front. I quote at some length to let Haldane’s modernity and his imaginative and stylistic energies manifest themselves: As I sit down to write these pages I can see before me two scenes from my experience of the late war. The first is a glimpse of a forgotten battle of 1915. It has a curious suggestion of a rather bad cinema film. Through a blur of dust and fumes there appear, quite suddenly, great black and yellow masses of smoke which seem to be tearing up the surface of the earth and disintegrating the works of man with an almost visible hatred. These form the chief part of the picture, but somewhere in the middle distance one can see a few irrelevant looking human figures, and soon there are fewer. It is hard to believe that these are the protagonists in the battle. One would rather choose those huge substantive oily black masses which are so much more conspicuous, and suppose that the men are in reality their servants, and playing an inglorious, subordinate, and fatal part in the combat. It is possible, after all, that this view is correct. Had I been privileged to watch a battle three years later, the general aspect would have been very similar, but there would have been fewer men and more shell-bursts. There would probably, however, have been one very significant addition. Then men would have been running, with mad terror in their eyes, from gigantic steel slugs, which were deliberately, relentlessly and successfully pursuing them.7

Haldane offers these images as “a part of the case against science”: Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon which is already beginning to turn against him, and may at any moment hurl him into the bottomless void? Or is Samuel Butler’s even more horrible vision correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite of machinery, an appendage of the reproductive system of huge and complicated engines which will successively usurp his activities, and end by ousting him from the mastery of this planet?

6  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson, Oxford 2000, 169. 7  J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus; or, science and the future, London [1923], 1–3.



The Future in Modernism 

 387

The creators of The Matrix had perhaps read Daedalus, if not “The Book of the Machines” from Butler’s satirical utopia, Erehwon (1872). Haldane’s second scene is even more apocalyptic: The other picture is of three Europeans in India looking at a great new star in the milky way. These were apparently all of the guests at a large dance who were interested in such matters. Amongst those who were at all competent to form views as to the origin of this cosmoclastic explosion, the most popular theory attributed it to a collision between two stars, or a star and a nebula. There seem, however, to be at least two possible alternatives to this hypothesis. Perhaps it was the last judgement of some inhabited world, perhaps a too successful experiment in induced radioactivity the part of some of the dwellers there. And perhaps also these two hypotheses are identical, and what we were watching that evening was the detonation of a world on which too many men came out to look at the stars when they should have been dancing.

Haldane gave another of his books – a collection of essays – the title Possible Worlds (1927); and his language here of “possible alternatives” plays across the differences between hypothetical worlds. His speculative imagination is both what makes science progress, and what gives hope that it may progress in ways that offer humanity other possibilities than abjection or suicide. The contrast between the two scenes on the Western Front is comparably neutral. The image of men terror-stricken by the unforeseen manifestation of tanks is appalling in its vision of man helpless in the face of his own machine creations. Nonetheless it figures an advance, offering the hope of breaking out from the more appalling deadlock of trench attrition, in which men are at the mercy of the more appalling high explosive bombardments. He might stand accused of lacking empathy for the infantrymen had he not been one of them. Similarly, if his later volume for To-Day and To-Morrow, Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare (1925), with its argument that weapons like poison gas might actually prove more humane, is unfashionable now, it is not because Haldane was insensitive to the sufferings involved. Not only had he witnessed the brutal horrific injuries caused by conventional weapons, but he had actually been subjected to gas asphyxiation in experiments performed with his father, the scientist John Scott Haldane (with his sister, Naomi, later Naomi Mitchison, and Aldous Huxley, as helpers ensuring the gas chamber was effectively sealed) during the war, in an attempt to analyse and devise defences against the chlorine gas being used by the Germans in 1915.8 Though Daedalus considers the “hypothesis” of “the last judgement” Haldane was an atheist. The book ends with a dismissal of any religion which

8  On Haldane, Callinicus, and the problems of futurology, see: Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, Cambridge, MA 2011, 305–314.

388 

 Max Saunders

cannot “frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional”. That is followed by a spirited acceptance of the need for science to meet its challenges head on: “The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it”.9 Haldane has already noted that were he to learn how to unleash the power of the atom man could destroy his world: a possibility envisaged in the speculation about the birth of a new star. The book closes on an equally Nietzschean-sounding verse-epilogue (though written before the announcement of the “death of God” in Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra)), slightly misquoted from Robert Buchanan’s “Homunculus; or, The Song of Deicides” from his 1870 poem The Book of Orm: All through his silent veins flow free Hunger and thirst and venery, But in his eyes a still small flame Like the first cell from which he came Burns round and luminous, as he rides Singing my song of deicides.10

This comes from a section of Buchanan’s poem titled “The Devil’s Mystics”.11 But one senses here that Haldane is seeking to overturn the tradition of moralised science epitomised by Frankenstein, say, in which hubristic scientific curiosity interferes with the mysteries of life and suffers as a result. His “scientific worker” is a deicide not out of diabolic rebellion but because the prospect of the power to create new forms of life renders gods unnecessary, irrelevant. The terminology of “scientific worker” signals Haldane’s Marxism too, though he seems no more utopian in his political philosophy than his science: because the scientist’s “ghastly mission” isolates him from his fellow men rather than confirming their solidarity. After all, they are human, whereas what he is ushering in is effectively the post-human. The Devil appears in the To-Day and To-Morrow volume by another great British Marxist scientist of the period, J.D. Bernal – who was a crystallographer at the time, and another pioneer of molecular biology. This was first announced as “Possibilities” – again indicating the speculative energy of the best of these books. When it was published in 1929 it had been retitled The World, the Flesh and the Devil, with the subtitle: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the

9  Haldane, Daedalus, 91–92. 10  Haldane, Daedalus, 93. 11  See: http://www.robertbuchanan.co.uk/html/bookoform.html.



The Future in Modernism 

 389

Rational Soul. Another brilliant, visionary, disturbing and influential volume, it takes each of the three categories as expressing limits of human rationality. Faced with the finitude of the world’s territory and resources, and the limit it places upon the human desire to explore, travel, and appropriate, Bernal imagines life-supporting space stations as initiating man’s colonisation of space. Turning to the flesh, he considers the limits of our senses and our longevity, arguing that we might enhance our bodies by adding extra senses, such as the ability to communicate directly through radio waves with people at a distance (including those travelling in space); and that we might similarly replace the body with prostheses to enhance our physical capabilities and to keep the brain alive for longer. To many readers this is another chillingly dystopian vision; one of an alienated cyborg future. Like Haldane’s, Bernal’s volume has proved one of the more inspirational for science fiction writers; and to philosophers, since it offered one of the first, if not the first, instance of what has become known as the “brain in a vat” thought experiment. Though just as in vitro fertilisation has fulfilled part of Haldane’s prophecy, so today’s space stations and neuroscientific experiments in controlling machines directly with thought processes are beginning to make Bernal’s a reality. His vision of humanity communicating en masse at great distances electronically can also be taken as anticipating the internet; all the more strikingly since the one thing neither Bernal nor any of the other contributors were able to predict was the computer. Reading Haldane and Bernal reminds us that what has become known as “the new atheism” of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens is nothing new; but rather, a legacy of this science-inspired intellectual avant-garde. Bernal’s title is of course ironic: his message that the problems facing humanity are not those posed by theology, of worldliness, appetite, and temptation; and that they have to be reconceived in terms of a scientific concept of rationality: our notion of “the world” placed in the context of the universe and the opportunities that offers us; “the flesh” understood as something we might conquer through scientific intervention rather than denial. Similarly, his devil is a very secular one, standing for everything that jeopardises our rationality: our destructive desires, aggressions, self-deceptions and so on. In short, the irrational, the unconscious. He opposes to theology the emerging science of psychoanalysis as the method that will enable mankind to overcome such threats. One can only imagine the dismay of such writers at the current return to the dark ages of religious fundamentalisms and New Age calls for “re-enchantment”. These books by Haldane and Bernal stand out even in this generally well-written series. The intensities of their speculative imaginations are breathtaking. To that extent they are not entirely representative of To-Day and To-Morrow, three quarters of which were not concerned with fields of science and technology, but

390 

 Max Saunders

with politics, the arts, and everyday life topics such as clothes, food, leisure, homes, wine, and sport. But there are five related ways in which they could be seen as representative of the whole series, and of Ogden’s designs for it. First, they embody its predominantly radical, leftist, intellectual cast. Second, they are markedly polemical. The university debating society from which they sprang was a model Ogden drew upon as the architecture of the series developed. As Russell debated with Haldane about science, so the series would pair up volumes taking opposing or at least contrasting positions on some topics – feminism, The United States, Canada, Scotland, eugenics, architecture, music, humour, religion, education, Oxbridge and so on. Or volumes would stage debates internally. Some do this by juxtaposing different positions, as do both Hamilton Fyfe, in Archon; or, the Future of Government (1927), and Edgar Ansel Mowrer in Sinon; or, The Future of Politics (1930). Others stage the debates literally, in dialogue form, as do Winnifred Holtby in Eutychus; or, the Future of the Pulpit (1928); J. F. Roxburgh in Eleutheros; or, the Future of the Public Schools (1928); and Douglas Woodruff in his entertaining Plato’s American Republic (1929). Some volumes incorporated sections of dialogue within them. Third, this debate model of rational enquiry testifies to the series’ commitment to, and belief in, education. Several volumes explicitly address education – not just Eleutheros, but also Hypatia; or, Woman and Knowledge, by Dora Russell (1925), Procrustes; or, the Future of English Education, by M. Alderton Pink (1926), or Chiron; or, the Education of a Citizen of the World, by M. Channing Pearce (1931). Other volumes address education in passing, concerned with how their subjects are taught – as when Haldane imagines a student of the future. Fourth and fifth, these books are representative of a pair of concerns that run through the series, and which were especially close to C.K. Ogden’s heart: language and communication on the one hand, and psychology on the other. Ogden is perhaps best-known now for his invention of and campaign for “BASIC English” – the name a punning acronym for “British, American, Scientific, International, Commercial” – a regularised form of English for use as an auxiliary language, reduced to 850 core words. Ogden devoted much of his considerable energy to this utopian project, himself writing some twenty books on the subject, and commissioning others to write about it, and to translate classic and contemporary works into it.12 He was developing BASIC through the 1920s, in collaboration with I.A. Richards – their book The Meaning of Meaning (1923) can be seen as

12  See: W. Terrence Gordon, C.K. Ogden: A Bio-Bibliographic Study, Metuchen, N.J. and London 1990.



The Future in Modernism 

 391

a ­ nticipating it.13 By the beginning of 1928 he had articulated the idea of simplified English as the future.14 But he only began publishing intensively on it from 1929, towards the end of the run of To-Day and To-Morrow.15 By this date even the later volumes would mostly have been drafted, so they do not discuss it directly; though one – Automaton, or the Future of the Mechanical Man, by H. Stafford Hatfield, refers in 1928 to “the plan for the simplification of English proposed by Mr C.K. Ogden”, and to the Orthological Institute Ogden set up to propagate BASIC.16 Interestingly, this section of the book is about the possibility of machines being able to type from dictation; and Hatfield sent this passage to the Institute, printing its “translation” into what is effectively BASIC as an appendix.17 But the To-Day and To-Morrow volumes certainly discuss language. Basil de Selincourt’s blithely imperialist Pomona; or, the Future of English (1926) was countered by J.Y.T. Greig in Breaking Priscian’s Head; or, English as She Will be Spoke and Wrote (1928), which argues against the ossification of a “Public School Standard”.18 Robert Graves contributed the surprising Lars Porsena; or, the Future of Swearing and Improper Language (1927). Archibald Lyall’s It Isn’t Done; or, the Future of Taboo Among the British Islanders (1930) is similarly exercised over what cannot be said in Britain, at least by the middle classes. But it is Delphos; or, the Future of International Language (1927) by Suffragette and communist Sylvia Pankhurst that is closest to Ogden’s own interests: a lucid and scholarly account of the rival systems on offer before BASIC, such as Esperanto, Interlingua, and Volapük.19 Volumes focusing on other subjects introduce the topic of language, sometimes in surprising ways. Bonamy Dobrée’s Timotheus; the Future of the Theatre (1925) worries that the theatre (like the cinema), in trying to move beyond language, was in danger of abjuring the potentialities of verbal communication in favour of immersive rhythm and sensation. George Godwin’s Columbia; or, the

13  Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 22. 14  C.K. Ogden, “Editorial”, in: Psyche, 8, 1928, no. 3 (January), 1–2. See: Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 84. 15  In his “Editorial” for the third issue of Psyche in 1929 (9, 1929, no. 3 (January), 1–9), Ogden “[i] ntroduces the first publication of the 850-word list under the name of ‘The Universal Language’”. Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 85. BASIC was named in print for the first time in: Psyche, 9, 1929, no. 5 (July), 1–30. Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 86. 16  H. Stafford Hatfield, Automaton, or the Future of the Mechanical Man, London 1928, 45, 93n. In Psyche (7, 1927, no. 29 (July), 1–7), Ogden announced “An Orthological Institute”, and discussed “The Future of English”. Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 84. 17  Hatfield, Automaton, 93–100. 18  J.Y.T. Greig in: Breaking Priscian’s Head; or, English as She Will be Spoke and Wrote London 1928, 9. 19  See Morag Schiach, “‘To Purify the Dialect of the Tribe’: Modernism and Language Reform”, Modernism / Modernity, 14, 2007, no. 1, 21–34.

392 

 Max Saunders

Future of Canada (1928) is mostly a lacklustre argument that Canada will inevitably be incorporated into the United States; that is, until its startling closing section, “Phantasmagoria”, which begins: “Let us borrow Mr H. G. Wells’ time machine […]”. Like a number of the To-Day and To-Morrow volumes (from Daedalus on), this casts its prediction in the form of history written from the distant future about the period still ahead of us. Godwin imagines looking over the shoulder of a future historian, writing in Saskatchewan, correcting the proofs of a book, United America: A Retrospect; this footnoted as Kegan Paul, “To-Day and Yesterday Series”.20 He quotes a passage ostensibly as an example of “the American language”, which is a sort of inter-language: “Drawing upon English, German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish and Italian, it fused those languages into something unlike any of them, but flexible, vigorous and rich”.21 One short quotation must suffice, he teases: “riverrun brings us to Howth Castle and Environs, Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’ over the short sea has passencore rearrived from North Amorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war”. How many of his readers would have recognised this as the most avant-garde form of contemporary English, from the “Opening Pages of a Work in Progress” that had begun to appear in the Paris magazine transition from April 1927, and would later be heavily revised, and re-titled as Finnegans Wake?22 For some of its early readers (as for many of its later), Joyce’s portmanteau style seemed less a crafted inter-language than “the universal language of nonsense”, to quote from another To-Day and To-Morrow volume concerned indirectly with words, meanings, and universal communication (and perhaps making a dig at Ogden-type utopian schemes for universal languages): Pons Asinorum, or The Future of Nonsense (1929) by George Edinger and E.J.C. Neep.23 But Ogden was fascinated by Joyce, and got him to record a reading of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Finnegans Wake in 1929.24 Nonetheless he also felt the need to counter Joyce’s Babelised experiment in maximising linguistic complexity, ambiguity and

20  George Godwin, Columbia; or, the Future of Canada, London 1928, 80–95, here 80. 21  Godwin, Columbia, 87. 22  James Joyce, “Opening Pages of a Work in Progress”, transition, 1 (April), 1927, 9–30, here 9. 23  George Edinger and E.J.C. Neep, Pons Asinorum, or The Future of Nonsense, London 1929, 24. 24  See: Eleni Loukopoulou, “The Anna Livia Plurabelle Gramophone Disc (1929)”, in: Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau et al. (eds), The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, The Avant-Garde, and Material Exchange, Berlin 2013, 118–127. The recording can be heard at: https://archive.org/details/JamesJoyceReadsannaLiviaPlurabelleFromFinnegansWake1929. The recording was made under the auspices of Ogden’s Orthological Institute.



The Future in Modernism 

 393

difficulty with his customary attempt to demystify and simplify: he translated part of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” into BASIC.25 It was, then, while Ogden was reading and editing the To-Day and To-Morrow books that he was increasingly focusing in his own work on the future of language. He got the inventor and thinker Richard Paget to contribute the volume Babel; or, the Past, Present and Future of Human Speech (1930).26 Ogden’s own volume of 1931 is his response: Debabelization: With a Survey of Contemporary Opinion on the Problem of a Universal Language. The Benthamite title announces the utopian and postwar programme: a panoptic language that will offer the hope of eliminating confusion, ambiguity, and misunderstanding. Thus, although I have argued that Haldane’s belief in scientific knowledge is not unambiguously utopian, the To-Day and To-Morrow series overall, and Ogden’s work as a whole, does evince utopian attitudes to education and communication. True, the experience of the war lent a panicky edge to the insistence that greater interconnection and communication are humanity’s best hope of avoiding similar and worse conflicts. But the hopes of faster travel and better communication technologies; of the development of an international language; and of an improved understanding of psychology are all predominantly optimistic. Such views may seem antithetical to modernism’s foregrounding of fragmentation, disconnection, incommunicability and language as in crisis; as well as its proffering of tradition, myth, and difficulty as salves for such predicaments. Yet from another point of view, it is precisely the radical focus on language, psychology, and change that makes the series avant-garde. Debabelization appeared in another of Ogden’s series, “Psyche Miniatures”. Over a third of the main (“General”) series of just under a hundred volumes of these (there was also a “Medical Series” of at least a further fifteen) was devoted to BASIC, in the form of monographs by Ogden and others, and also translations of classics of “world literature” into BASIC. Many of the Psyche Miniatures were written by contributors to the journal Psyche, which Ogden had also edited, from 1923 for three decades, the magazine ending in 1952. This brings us to the final strand of Ogden’s many interests: Psychology. Psyche – presumably pronounced “C.K.” – was originally titled the Psychic

25  C.K. Ogden, “The Orthological Institute”, in: Psyche, 12, 1931, no. 2 (October), 92–96. Reprinted in: transition, 21 (March), 1932. Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 90–91. 26  Ogden had published Paget’s “The Origin of Language” in: Psyche 8, 1927, no. 3 (July), 35–39. His book, Human Speech, also first appeared in 1930. His theory of the pantomimic action of the tongue and lips is also said to have influenced Kenneth Burke’s gestural theory of expression. See also: Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Joyce and Jolas: Late Modernism and Early Babelism”, Journal of Modern Literature, 22, 1998–1999, no. 2 (Winter: Joyce and the Joyceans), 245–252.

394 

 Max Saunders

Research Quarterly, but changed its name after only a year to “Psyche, a quarterly review of psychology, in relation to education, psychoanalysis, industry, religion … & c.” This “& c.” in the journal increasingly included language among its broad range of topics (alongside subjects such as entomology, astronomy, anthropology, class, and statistics) from the later 1920s: the same shift we have seen in its Miniatures. Nevertheless, the centre of Ogden’s entire project was the psyche, its thought, and the symbolic systems in which that thought was expressed. He took the term “orthology” from Karl Pearson’s The Grammar of Science (1892), to designate “the science of correct symbolism”.27 Symbolism was how the mind created meaning, and the orthological project of BASIC was the net with which he hoped to catch “the meaning of meaning”. Ogden’s view of language, in short, was always a psychological one. As he put it in his excellent ABC of Psychology (probably the best guide to his vision of this field and its vastness), characteristically riffing effortlessly on his literary knowledge: “the proper study of mankind is ‘mind’”.28 In particular it was the psychological effects of language that concerned him – what he sometimes described as “word magic”,29 and the reason he was so influential on literary thinkers such as I.A. Richards and William Empson. Ogden’s work on psychology is too vast a topic to treat further here – not least because, in addition to books like the ABC, and the thousands of pages of the journal Psyche and its Miniatures, it includes his most enormous venture: The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. As its title indicates, this was another exercise in thought translation, introducing pioneering European works to British readers by Alfred Adler, Rudolf Carnap, Carl Gustav Jung, Bronisław Malinowski, Karl Mannheim, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, and others, alongside equally visionary British writers such as T.E. Hulme, G.E. Moore, I.A. Richards, W.H.R. Rivers and Solly Zuckerman. Lord Zuckerman later described how from an early stage the books in the series were “required reading”; he thought Ogden “a man of giant intellect, and a person whose general influence on the intellectual world of his time was almost without parallel”.30 Psychology doesn’t loom large in To-Day and To-Morrow – presumably so as to differentiate it from the International Library, from Psyche, and especially from the Psyche Miniatures, published in a similar format. M. Jaeger’s Sisyphus; or, the limits of psychology (1929) is the only volume addressing the topic directly. Others

27  Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 146. 28  C.K. Ogden, ABC of Psychology, London 1929, 33. 29  See: Gordon, C.K. Ogden, 45, 79. 30  Zuckerman, “Talent Scout and Editor”, in: C.K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir, London 1977, 122–132.



The Future in Modernism 

 395

come at it obliquely, as in The Passing of the Phantoms; a study of evolutionary psychology and morals (1924) by C.J. Patten; Apollonius; or, the present and future of psychical research (1927) by E.N. Bennett;31 and Janus: The conquest of war: A Psychological Inquiry (1927) by the eminent psychologist William McDougall. But the conception of the series is itself psychological, and in two ways – both arguably characteristic of Ogden’s thought-style. They are thinking about the power of human thought; what it is already capable of, and what it might yet be capable of. And in doing the latter, they are themselves exercising human thought in one of its most characteristic modes, though one curiously neglected by intellectuals: speculation about the future. Perhaps neglected because its associations with prophecy and fantasy and error make academic thinkers nervous. The sense of exhilaration in the writing of much of the series comes from a new sense of possibility in thinking about possibility. As the volumes concerned specifically with foresight make clear,32 one impulse animating the series is the feeling that prophecy’s days are numbered. Advances in science, the human sciences, and statistics, have provided a new basis on which to predict future developments, rather than belief in gods, fate, or a stable tradition. Modern foresight thus needs to sound scientific, rationalist, and evidence-based in order to be more credible than the products of visionary inspiration and oracular pronouncements. This is bound up with a belief that it is scientific rationality that is going to be the chief agent of change in the future; and that since science itself proceeds in rational steps, working out the direction it is likely to take, at least in the short to medium term, is not difficult; or at least is less difficult than with unpredictable humans or natural phenomena. Once Einstein had theorised that matter could be converted into vast quantities of energy, one didn’t have to be Einstein to realise that that energy could be used as a power source or in weapons. But the transformative effect of science on foresight goes further than using science to predict the development of more science. Arguably the more significant claims were those being made increasingly by the emergent human sciences of sociology, anthropology, psychology, psycho-analysis, and economics to be able to identify laws and quantifiable patterns in natural and social phenomena. From one point of view they have made us better at predicting our own behaviour. We are now more future-oriented than ever; constantly trying to anticipate trends through foresight, scenario planning, horizon scanning, forecasting, assessing risk and threat, genome analysis, mining big data etc. Yet from another

31  See: Maurizio Ascari, “From Spiritualism to Syncretism: Twentieth-Century Pseudo-Science and the Quest for Wholeness”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 34, 2009, no. 1 (March), 9–21. 32  See: C.A. Mace, Sibylla; or, the revival of prophecy, London 1926.

396 

 Max Saunders

point of view, what has been lost is precisely the imagination of the future. The attempt is often to replace “psyche” with the predictablilty of algorithm. That, ultimately, is the value of the To-Day and To-Morrow series. Many of these books – including many not discussed here, by writers like Vera Brittain, André Maurois, C.E.M. Joad, Vernon Lee, or John Rodker (on The Future of Futurism; 1926) – are themselves imaginative works of a high order; not just because of what they predict accurately, but also because their imaginations set the agenda for other writers – and other scientists and engineers as well as creative writers. To-Day and To-Morrow reminds us of the human (as opposed to the economic) value of speculation; of the need to exercise our minds to free ourselves from the bonds of “word magic”, as from the spells of fates and figures; and to realise our freedom to make the world different; to make it better; to “make it new”.

Dmitrii Tokarev

Escape from Utopia The Metamorphoses of Utopian Dreams in the Russian AvantGarde in Exile (Il’ya Zdanevich, Boris Poplavskii) The early years of Soviet rule signalled the arrival of a new utopian era, where it seemed as if even the most outlandish avant-garde projects might be realised. Many avant-garde artists contributed to the construction of this brave new world, which quickly degenerated into a nightmarish dystopia. Ironically, many avantgarde poets and painters emigrated from Soviet Russia in the early 1920s just at a time when the range of possibilities still seemed enticing. Among the artists who turned their backs on this seeming opportunity were Il’ya Zdanevich (Il’yazd; 1894–1975), Aleksandr Ginger (1897–1965), Boris Poplavskii (1903–1935), Boris Bozhnev (1898–1969), Georgii Evangulov (1894–1967) and Dovid Knut (1900– 1955). In Paris, they joined Marc Talov (1892–1969), Valentin Parnakh (1891–1951) and Serge Charchoune (1888–1975) who had left Russia earlier. Thus was born, mainly in Paris, the Russian avant-garde art in exile, an extraordinary cultural phenomenon which by its very nature implies the use of the concept of utopia. If the avant-garde longed for a radical transformation of life, society and art, did it make sense to continue or even to start such avant-garde developments so far removed from the country where these transformations were supposedly taking place? For example, the invention of trans-rational language or zaum1 was purely a utopian project, but why print this new language in the Cyrillic alphabet (as Il’yazd did in 1923), rendering it inaccessible to the French Dadaists unless read aloud? Aleksei Kruchenykh declared that zaum could provide “a universal poetic language born organically”,2 but this very language produced in a foreign linguistic environment could not help but lose its utopian aura, leaving it at best a form of pure artifice. The abrupt end of the “heroic times” (a notion coined by Knut) of Russian avant-garde poetry in Paris demonstrates that the young émigrés had yet

1  Zaum is “a Russian Futurist neologism used to describe words or language whose meaning is ‘indefinite’ or indeterminate”. Gerald Janecek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism, San Diego 1996, 1. 2  Aleksei Kruchenykh “Declaration of Transrational Language” [1921], in: Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (eds and trans.), Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestos, 1912–1928, Washington DC 2005, 182–183, here 183.

398 

 Dmitrii Tokarev

to elaborate their own alternatives, both to the art of their Russian predecessors as well to the new leftist ideology of art.3 In this perspective, the heritage of Boris Poplavskii4 – the young émigré poet called by Russian exiles “the prince of the Montparnasse kingdom” – is of particular interest. In 1920, the seventeen-year-old Boris left Russia and settled with his family in Istanbul and later in Paris. In Istanbul, he studied mysticism and anthroposophy. An intense religious feeling, sometimes leading to ascetic self-restriction, was characteristic of the whole of his life. In Paris, he became a faithful follower of Zdanevich and qualified himself as a “rough Futurist”, writing sometimes pure trans-rational verses. Later, he drifted away from Zdanevich and contributed to the modernist review Chisla (Numbers), where he chronicled artistic life, wrote reviews, and published his poems, as well as fragments of the novel Apollon Bezobrazov (literally, Apollo the Ugly, 1926–1932) that described the life of Russian émigrés in Paris. The only one of Poplavskii’s books to be published in his lifetime – the verse collection Flagi (Flags) – appeared in 1931. He also wrote a mainly autobiographical novel, Domoi s nebes (Home from Heaven, 1934–1935), which was not published in its entirety until 1993. Depressed, he died tragically in 1935 from a heroin overdose. In the novel Apollon Bezobrazov, Poplavskii describes an informal community, modelled in part on the circle of avant-garde poets grouped around Zdanevich.5 This community, which had the characteristic features of a utopian society (cut off from the rest of the world, with its own language), nevertheless functions in the quite real world of France between the wars, and is essentially a small-scale model or miniature of emigration. Miniatures are not, as Lévi-Strauss emphasises, “just projections or passive homologues of the object: they constitute a real experiment with it”.6 Thus, this structure is not – from the sociological point of view – a copy of the Russian émigré community, though it reflects some important social positions in Diaspora (an intellectual, a peasant, a degraded noblewoman, a Jew who has a somewhat marginal status in this community, and finally the main character, Apollon Bezobrazov, who looks like a former officer).

3  On this period, see the fascinating edition prepared by Leonid Livak and Andrei Ustinov: Literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha: Istoriya, Khronika, Antologiya, Dokumenty [The Russian Literary Avant-Garde in Paris, 1920–1926: History, Chronicle, Anthology, Documents], Moscow 2014. 4  On Poplavskii, see: Dmitrii Tokarev, “Mezhdu Indiei i Gegelem”: tvorchestvo Borisa Poplavskogo v komparativnoi perspektive [“Between India and Hegel”: Boris Poplavskii’s Literary Work from a Comparative Perspective], Moscow 2011. 5  On Zdanevich, see numerous articles and publications by Régis Gayraud, including eight volumes of Les Carnets de l’Iliazd-Club (Paris 1990–2014). 6  Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Chicago 1966, 24.



Escape from Utopia 

 399

It functions as a small-scale model only if one takes into account its relationship to an external structure, French society, into which it was incorporated by a quirk of fate, while remaining in relative self-isolation. The history of the community, headed by the enigmatic character named Apollon Bezobrazov, in whom some contemporaries recognised Aleksandr Ginger, is especially interesting from the standpoint of how the avant-garde utopian project, in attempting to realise itself in the present time and in a foreign linguistic environment, loses its avant-garde spirit and is transformed into a project of survival and adaptation to an alien milieu. The novel, which Poplavskii began to write in 1926, that is at a time when he still considered himself a Futurist, and completed in 1932, when there was no trace left of his previous enthusiasm, essentially records the process of transition from an avant-garde mind-set to an émigré mind-set. The entire group lives in an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of Paris, next to a peripheral railway line. The isolation of the mansion from the rest of the space signals that it functions as a typical utopian space, the characteristic features of which are “spatial and temporal remoteness and an expressed marking of boundaries”.7 Also, the mansion is surrounded by a garden, which is perceived as a reduced copy of the heavenly garden. The Latin word paradisus, derived from the Greek παράδεισος, has its roots in an Old Iranian word, signifying an enclosed garden. In Poplavskii’s novel, the rooms of the mansion, bathed in sunlight, “create the impression of an unworldly calm and balance, as if they were located somewhere far above the earth and the clouds, hanging there together with the garden by some unknown power”.8 On the other hand, unlike other utopian loci, the mansion is not separated completely from the historical and geographical context: it has a past (someone used to live in it) and a future (the characters will be driven out by the new owners). The mansion is in fact a metaphor of the peculiar space of emigration in which Poplavskii and his characters exist. Emigrants move to a foreign country where someone else already lives, but create in this country their own closed space, the door to which they are however forced to leave open. The mansion is seemingly empty and they are the masters of it, but at the same time they feel that they are outsiders, and at any moment they may be driven out of their refuge. The

7  Hans Günther, Po obe storony ot utopii: Konteksty tvorchestva A. Platonova [On Both Sides of Utopia: A. Platonov’s Literary Work in Context], Moscow 2012, 12. All translations of quotations in this article are by author unless noted otherwise. 8  Boris Poplavskii, Apollon Bezobrazov, in: Boris Poplavskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2, eds Alexander Bogoslovskii and Elena Menegaldo, Moscow 2000–2009, 139.

400 

 Dmitrii Tokarev

conflict is thus produced not only by the conflict between the avant-gardists and the “traditionalists”, or between old and young, the so-called “unnoticed”9 generation, but also by a conflict between the emigrants and the local population. Unlike the inhabitants of the utopian space who cannot exist outside their locus amoenus, the inhabitants of the mansion go out into the world from time to time, flaunting their exclusiveness and attracting everyone’s attention: It seemed to us at that time that we had invented everything anew: a way of talking, a way of keeping silent, a special way of walking, and a completely unique system of remaining motionless. It seemed that some mystical light shone over us. Later I was told what people said about us, about each of us – “one of those”, people mocked us when we appeared in public, but we didn’t notice any of this.10

It is important that the observers of this society are not French people, but Russian emigrants, who perceive it as something completely alien. The members of the society, however, do not notice their compatriots at all. Thus, a paradoxical situation is created: at first glance, the inhabitants of the mansion exist outside of history and outside of real time, as it were. At the same time, for some reason they go into town, leaving their heavenly garden. The utopian project gradually merges into a completely non-utopian context. The same paradoxical situation arises with the language of communication. The new way of talking that was invented by the inhabitants of the mansion corresponded to the realisation of the avant-garde idea of a new language which would not be understood by contemporaries, but would be the language of the

9  This term was coined by Vladimir Varshavskii in his book Nezamechennoe pokolenie (The Unnoticed Generation) edited in New York in 1956. As Maria Rubins has clearly demonstrated, “most of these writers were born in the early twentieth century, left Russia as adolescents in the aftermath of the revolution, completed their educations in the West, and began to publish in the 1920s. Their group identity is best assessed in terms of Karl Mannheim’s classic study The Problem of Generations (1928), in which a generation is defined not so much by the proximity of birth dates as by similar reactions to specific outside influences, especially traumatic events that shape common values, behavioural patterns, mentality, aesthetic tastes, and, ultimately, a sense of solidarity. From this perspective, the ‘unnoticed generation’ can even be viewed as a specific Russian émigré variation on the ‘lost generation’, the transnational community of expatriates who settled in Paris in the 1920s and whose sensibilities and uncompromising creativity were informed by the trauma of a global war, an ensuing existential crisis, and the abrupt break with the prewar aesthetic tradition”. Maria Rubins, “Transnational Identities in Diaspora Writing: The Narratives of Vasily Yanovsky”, in: Slavic Review, 73, 2014, no. 1, 62–84, here 65–66. See also: Irina Kaspe, Iskusstvo otsutstvovat’: Nezamechennoe pokolenie russkoi literatury [Art of Absence: The Unnoticed Generation of Russian Literature], Moscow 2005. 10  Poplavskii, Apollon Bezobrazov, 149–150.



Escape from Utopia 

 401

future. This language consists, as we may assume, of words devoid of meaning, and therefore close to zaum. Apollon Bezobrazov writes on the dust of the mirror “strange words devoid of meaning”11 and accompanies them with triangles and pentagrams. It is important that this writing includes both verbal components (which can be read aloud) and visual components (which can only be seen); it ceases to be a word and becomes a hybrid sign, which brings to mind Futurist typographical inventions. The narrator claims that the writing is a certain word that Bezobrazov repeats aloud for hours. Although the narrator is able to read it, evidently he not only perceives it with his eyes, but also cerebrally, not only recording the drawn figure, but also the intelligible idea. At the same time, he reads it “to himself”, and the reader remains in complete ignorance about the meaning of this word, if of course it has any meaning. We may assume that this word is connected with the magical movements, which the main character of the novel practices, and which generally relate to the occult and cabbalistic tradition. At the same time, this may be an echo of the avant-garde projects for the radical desemanticisation of the word, which is subsequently to be loaded with new meanings. While the poetic projects of the Russian zaum poets Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Zdanevich or Tufanov were ultimately directed towards attaining the pre-Babelian unity of languages,12 the trans-rational word of Apollon Bezobrazov, which continues these projects, paradoxically bears witness to their failure. This is primarily linked with the ambiguous linguistic situation in which the residents of the mansion find themselves. Let us return for the moment to Aleksandr Tufanov and his poem “Sôol’af”, which is cited in various sections of his book K Zaumi (To Zaum, 1924) as an example of “phonic music”, and is printed in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The use of two alphabets is of particular interest to us because it reflects some weak points in Tufanov’s argument. Indeed, according to the poet:

11  Poplavskii, Apollon Bezobrazov, 156. 12  For example, Khlebnikov asserts in “Our Fundamentals”: “If we take a combination of these sounds in an unrestricted order, such as bo beh o bee, or dyr bul shchyl, or manch! manch! Or chee breo zo!, then we obtain words that do not belong to any particular language but that do say something; something elusive but real nevertheless. […] Beyonsense language is thus the universal language of the future, although it is still in an embryonic state. It alone will be able to unite all people. Rational languages have separated them”. Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, vol. 1: Letters and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas, Cambridge, MA 1987, 383–385).

402 

 Dmitrii Tokarev

in the process of trans-rational creation, simple morphemes are chopped up, and simple sound complexes are made, fragments of English, Russian, Chinese and other words. A kind of “descent of the holy spirit” (or nature) occurs, and we receive the gift of speaking in all languages. Here is a specimen of a musical work made of English morphemes. As phonic music is equally “understandable” to all people, I use transcriptional writing in my work.13

Here Tufanov reproduces his poem transcribed in Latin letters but with a surprisingly Russian title “Vesna” (Spring): s’ii’n soon

s’ii

siing s’eelf

s’iik signal

l’ii

l’eviš

l’aak l’ajs’iin’l’uk

l’aa

luglet

l’aa

vlil’iinled

saas’iin’

soo

sajl’ens

saajset

suut

soon

rosin

saablen

l’aadl’ubson

l’iil’i

l’aasl’ub

sool’onse

seerve seelib

siik

selle

soong seel’

s’e s’in’

In order to facilitate the perception of “music” to his followers, Tufanov gives a Cyrillic version at once: Сиинь

соон

сиий

селле

соонг

се

Сиинг

сеельф

сиийк

сигналь

сеель

синь

Лиий

левиш

ляак

ляйсиньлюк

Ляай

луглет

ляав

лилиин лед

Соасиинь

соо

сайленс

саайсед

Суут сиик

соон

росин

сааблен

Ляадлюбсон

лиилиляаслюб

Соолёнсе

сеервесеелиб

13  Aleksandr Tufanov, K Zaumi: Stikhi i issledovanie soglasnykh fonem [To Zaum: Poems and a Study of Consonant Phonemes], Petrograd 1924, 12.



Escape from Utopia 

 403

However, Tufanov does not stop here and gives two more versions: one bears the trans-rational title “Sôol’af” and is included in the part “Phonic Music”, another illustrates the part “Breakdowns” and accurately reproduces the entirely Cyrillic version cited above. One can argue that Tufanov intuitively guessed one of the acoustic classifications of speech sounds that were developed later, and thanks to the use solely of high-pitched sounds, a recognisable, decipherable sound pattern is thus created. If this poem is identically comprehensible to both Russian and English speakers, a natural question arises, or rather two questions: firstly, why give the poem the Russian title “Vesna”, as the Russian reader should be able to understand anyway, listening to the music of the trans-rational verse that it is about spring? For the word “spring” in the title inevitably programs the perception of the poem, as it has quite definite semantics. The author must therefore not be certain that the poem will be perceived correctly without the title. Secondly, the supposedly English title “Sôol’af” is in fact purely trans-rational and does not possess semantics that are understood by English or Russian speakers. In other words, neither an English nor Russian speaker will understand from the title that the poem is about spring. This, despite the fact that Tufanov tries to choose those English morphemes which could be semanticised, albeit wrongly, by a Russian speaker. For example, two trans-rational morphemes “s’iin’ soon”, which take their roots in “sing soon”, will be probably recognised as “blue dream” (“sinii son” in Russian); both are therefore supposed to provoke a “sensation” of spring, as Tufanov insists. The same would not apply for “sajl’ens”, which will be recognised only by an English-speaking person; most morphemes present in the poem are even less recognisable and especially for a Russian reader because they have no (for example, “siing s’eelf” which means “sing self”) or few specific association with Russian words (for example, “l’aadl’ubson” which can be identified as a contamination of three Russian roots: “lad” [tune], “lyub” [love] and “son” [dream]). Thus, despite the orientation towards language transgression, the text may only be more or less clearly semanticised on the condition that it is placed in a completely definite linguistic context, in this case the Russian context that is set by the title of “Vesna”.14 If the title is removed, this text inevitably ceases to be associated with a definite language code, and thus falls out of normal communication. It is no accident that Eugène Ionesco’s play La Cantatrice chauve (The

14  Shortly after, Tufanov moved to a more “historicist” zaum based on the Old Russian roots. See: Geoff Cebula, “Aleksandr Tufanov’s Ushkuiniki, Historicist Zaum’, and the Creation of Oberiu”, in: Slavic and East European Journal, 58, 2014, no. 1, 93–112.

404 

 Dmitrii Tokarev

Bald Soprano, 1950), built on the gradual destruction of the postulates of normal communication, ends with trans-rational speech that signals the complete collapse of communication. Tufanov, experimenting with foreign words and with transcriptional writing, was nevertheless oriented towards the Russian reader; Zdanevich was in a completely different cultural and linguistic environment, which could not but influence the tactics he chose. First of all, he had to convince those who were closest to him in terms of poetic methods, the Dadaists, of the organic nature of zaum for Russian poetic culture. In a long paper that he read in French on 27 November 1921 immediately after his arrival in Paris, Zdanevich insisted on the Russian roots of zaum, appealing to the authority of Lermontov and Tyutchev, and tracing the poetry of Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov and his own not to Italian Futurism, but to the hymns and prayers of Russian sectarians, who in religious ecstasy gained the gift of speaking in many languages.15 However, the Russian roots of zaum did not mean that it was only interesting as an ethnographic phenomenon. When he read out fragments from his trans-rational pentalogy Aslaablichia (that is, deformed “features of the donkey”) at various events together with the Dadaists, Zdanevich of course counted on an adequate perception of them from writers who also worked with the sound envelope of the word. Unfortunately, these readings were not successful, and not only because Dadaism was yielding its position to the increasingly popular Surrealist movement, but also because of the inevitable language barrier, which Zdanevich’s sound writing could not overcome. Indeed, every émigré poet seeking for recognition in a foreign milieu had to surmount this barrier, which was even higher for the avant-garde poets with their unconventional texts, sometimes too obscure even for a Russian speaker. Unsurprisingly, a French critic noted that Marc Talov’s and Valentin Parnakh’s self-translations were harming their poems.16 The case of Dadaist Serge Charchoune was doubly difficult, since he tried to apply to his French translations some specifically Russian grammar rules. As Annick Morard quite rightly points out, “by applying to the French language an operating mode typical of the Russian language, Charchoune camouflages the meaning of the text, erects barriers to straightforward understanding and demands of the potential reader that

15  See: Iliazd [Ilia Zdanévitch], “L’avant-garde russe racontée aux dadas”, in: Pleine marge, cahiers de littérature, d’arts plastiques et de critique, 2001, no. 33 (June), 97–120. 16  See: Géo-Charles, “À Montparnasse: au Caméléon”, in: Montparnasse, 1921, no. 6, (1 December), 7.



Escape from Utopia 

 405

he should participate not in a reconstruction but rather in a creation of meaning, by filling in the blanks”.17 Even compared with these striking examples, Zdanevich’s case would appear to be the less common one. In contrast to Talov, Parnakh or Charchoune, Zdanevich did not address French poets neither in a conventional, although imperfect, French nor in French based on the principles of Russian, but in a new universal language, conceived to be comprehensible for everybody. Yet, the French remained mainly indifferent to zaum because they perceived it as desemanticised verbiage. The remark by Surrealist Robert Desnos after the Cœur à barbe (Bearded Heart) evening organised by Tzara and Zdanevich on 6 July 1923 is characteristic: “Yesterday I listened to the verbiage of a Russian for a whole hour. These people with their politics and their poetry should be shot”.18 Zdanevich’s glossolalia was perceived by Desnos as verbiage, and as not having any meaning whatsoever – neither poetic nor sacred. Maurice Donzel, a French poet, critic and translator who was married to a Russian woman and was signing his texts “Parijanine” (the Parisian), also felt confused about Zdanevich’s recitation at this evening performance; as he put it in a chronicle, “Zdanevich rinsed his mouth out with a ‘trans-rational’ (?) language”.19 Another French modernist critic, André Germain, ironically proposed – in a speech introducing a lecture by Zdanevich pronounced in Russian in Paris on 28 November 1922 – to call this language “transanimal” because it could serve as a common language for human beings and animals: When I am looking at Mr. Zdanevich, it seems to me that he is not a human being but a demon or a little genie, coming of evil spirits rushing about the Russian steppe; he is a devil which is conceived and born under a fly agaric, and he is a cousin to that very devil which fell in love with a she-tapir and gave birth to Stravinsky. And since he is not a man, it should come as no surprise if the words which are born in his lips, are not of this world. So, let us listen to the screech of this evening with a well-wishing politeness which is proper to those who are greeting a guest from a different realm, be it a spirit, a seal or a tawny owl.20

17  Annick Morard, De l’émigré au déraciné: la “jeune génération” des écrivains russes entre identité et esthétique (Paris, 1920–1940), Lausanne 2010, 63. 18  As cited by Régis Gayraud, in: Iliazd, “L’avant-garde russe racontée aux dadas”, 102. 19  Parijanine, “Le Dadaïsme boxé par les siens”, in: Clarté, 1923, no. 39 (13 July), 323–324, here 324. 20  André Germain, “Ilia Zdanévitch et le Surdadaïsme russe”, in: Créer [Brussels], 2, 1923, no. 1 (January–February), 135–139, here 136.

406 

 Dmitrii Tokarev

It is most revealing that Germain stresses the Russian origins of zaum, locating it at best in the domain of curious ethnographic or natural phenomena. For him, zaum is in fact as meaningless as the screech of a tawny owl. Unsurprisingly, Raymond Cogniat, the Parisian critic who attended Zdanevich’s lecture of 27 November 1921, warned poets against practising a trans-rational language which cannot boast of clarity of meaning.21 Even Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, whose Dadaist activity contributed to his greater intimacy with Zdanevich, could not but hint at a mostly Russian destiny of zaum, despite its international ambitions. In a preface to Zdanevich’s trans-rational drama Ledentu le Phare published in Paris in 1923, Ribemont-Dessaignes argues: Zaum is a language of Russian appearance whose words and onomatopoeias are such that are capable of being the vehicle of the meaning of several words with neighbouring sonorities. Invented by Russians, it has a fatal Russian appearance. But there may be a French zaum, an English or German zaum, or even an international zaum, which, moreover, would be less accessible. The Russian is probably the most supple language, the most rich in interferences, in sound and verbal games, in sounds which, apart from the catalogued sense, seem to absorb the meanings or the seeds of meanings which stem from the outside world. That is to say that the sound figures are infinitely more expressive in the representation of the meaning of the word and of the verbal object, in Russian than in French or English, for example.22

A sentence is imposed: zaum is fatally Russian,23 and even if the possibility exists of creating a French or an English zaum, it would have a limited dissemination determined by its national confines. On the other hand, an international zaum, albeit in theory possible, would not be easily accessible by the very fact that it moved beyond national linguistic boundaries. That is properly Tufanov’s case with his allegedly English morphemes. As to Zdanevich, his pretension of cultivating Russian zaum on the basis of French faces the problem in translating that very sense which is supposed to be hidden behind the earthly words. It seems quite natural then that Ribemont-­

21  Raymond Cogniat, “Un laboratoire de poésie. L’Université du Degrée 41”, in: Comœdia, 1921, no. 3276 (4 December), 4. 22  Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, “Préface”, in: Iliazd, Ledentu le Phare, Paris 1923, 1–6, here 2. See also the 1995 reprint with an important afterword by Régis Gayraud. 23  As demonstrated in an article by Gerald Janecek and Garrett Riggs, the coinages in the drama adhere to normal Russian stress entropy toward the middle of the word, despite some non-Russian (German or Georgian) influences: “II’ia Zdanevič’s Zaum’”, in: International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 1989, no. 35–36, 217–237, here 235–236. See also two important collections of scholarly articles: Marzio Marzaduri (ed.), Dada russo: l’avanguardia fuori della Rivoluzione, Bologna 1984; Korneliya Ichin (ed.), Dada po-russki [Dada in Russian], Belgrade 2013.



Escape from Utopia 

 407

Dessaignes, who has enough courtesy to praise “this wonderful and mysterious language that we understand more easily than any other ordinary comprehensible language”,24 chooses however to retell the “plot” of the drama, proving its absolute incomprehensibility for the French reader. This opacity of the meaning happens to be doubled by the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, whose strange typographical signs, printed in a most fantastic way, imply once again a comparison with wild animals: “these little typographic fawns, snow foxes and sand jackals, snakes and ibis, peacocks, lions, pumas, hummingbirds, giraffes, duckbills, catslynxes and gazelles, storks and kangaroos, butterflies, green woodpeckers, crocodiles and marabous”.25 In his French lectures and interviews, Zdanevich repeatedly emphasises the primogeniture of Russian zaum as well as its fundamental disagreement with Dada. If the latter destroys, the former constructs, seeking a pivot in “peasants’ songs”26 and national poetry. According to Zdanevich, “in its core of resistance, Russian poetry is natural and national: Kruchenykh and especially Khlebnikov, Rozanova, Lotov, Bolshakov, Kamenskii and others have devoted half of their labour to trans-rational poetry”.27 If that is the case, could this Russian-based new language be accepted as a universal one? As Gerald Janecek quite rightly puts it: “Zdanevich creates for given instances and characters a sonic, quasi-verbal texture or style that is perceived as a stream of incomprehensible speech. […] When a recognisable word or morpheme suddenly emerges, it comes as a surprise: one does not expect to encounter something one can understand”.28 We should note that Janecek is speaking here about a Russian-speaking reader or listener; it goes without saying that the text will be even more incomprehensible for a foreigner. This makes it easier to understand why Zdanevich, who in 1921 was still full of enthusiasm, noted bitterly immediately after the release of Ledentu le Phare: “But this book is dead. Because its time has passed. Not long ago, when I was writing it, it was full of life. By now, it is only a testament of irreversibly disappeared times”.29

24  Ribemont-Dessaignes, “Préface”, 5. 25  Ribemont-Dessaignes, “Préface”, 6. 26  Cogniat, “Un laboratoire de poésie, 814. 27  Iliazd, “L’avant-garde russe racontée aux dadas”, 115. 28  Janecek, Zaum, 285. 29  See: Régis Gayraud, “Promenade autour de Ledentu le Phare”, in: Iliazd, Ledentu le Phare, Paris 1995, 83–159, here 155. This did not stop him editing a collection of phonetic poems, Poésie de mots inconnus (1949), where he put together texts by Akinsemoyin, Albert-Birot, Arp, Artaud, Audiberti, Ball, Beauduin, Bryen, Dermée, Hausmann, Huidobro, Il’yazd, Jolas, Khlebnikov,

408 

 Dmitrii Tokarev

Thus, the utopian space of the new language, organised by the Russian inhabitants of the mansion by Porte de Champerret, in fact ends up being a linguistic reservation, in which trans-rational babbling becomes its apparent opposite – silence. When Apollon Bezobrazov endlessly repeats the same word deprived of meaning, this suppresses a speech reaction from other participants of the conversation. They mainly keep silent: “We kept silent in a special way, chuckling and making special pauses. So many things had already been defined, and so much time was economised by our habitual language. Or even more: a simple variation in the voice could make so much understood, for we were not in a hurry, we did not trample each other with words, we did not try to prove things”.30 On the one hand, this type of silent communication seems to show that meanings can also be conveyed by non-verbal means; on the other hand, this silence may be interpreted as recognition of the defeat of language, which in itself is incapable of expressing the entire wealth of meanings. It is curious that Zdanevich, in his lecture of 27 November 1921, talks of the “orchestral” poetry he invented in 1913, in which a final liberation of language takes place.31 “Orchestral” verse is read by several readers at once, or each one has a part. This once more involves the trans-rational pentalogy. Essentially, the manner of speaking in a “variation in the voice”, which was practiced by the residents of the mansion, in some ways resembles polyphonic poetry which requires the presence of several readers. In his lecture, Zdanevich does not succeed in demonstrating how this absolutely “free” poetry “works”, because of the absence of other participants. At the same time, he cannot invite any of those present to take on the role of one of the readers, as he understands that “entering zaum” requires a certain type of linguistic intuition, and even preliminary preparation. Zdanevich contents himself with reading excerpts from his trans-rational dramas, and showing his printed publications. As we said earlier, this experience could not be considered a success, and above all from the standpoint of the French, who found themselves in a situation of dual incomprehension: the glossolalia of Zdanevich, deprived of any meaning for them, did not find its graphic embodiment in a printed text, which used the Cyrillic alphabet, and was instead

Kruchenykh, Picasso, Poplavskii, Schwitters, Seuphor, Terent’ev, Tzara. However, that was mainly an attempt to prove his priority in discussion with the Lettrism movement. See: Françoise Le Gris, “‘Poésie de mots inconnus’ et le débat lettriste: prétexte et contexte”, in: Les Carnets de l’Iliazd-Club, vol. 8, Paris 2014, 13–176. 30  Poplavskii, Apollon Bezobrazov, 149–150. 31  Iliazd, “L’avant-garde russe racontée aux dadas”, 115.



Escape from Utopia 

 409

perceived by them not as a succession of graphemes, but as a selection of glyphs and geometric figures, that is of typographic fawns. Thus, Zdanevich’s attempts to graft Russian zaum on to the “tree” of French Dadaism proved unpromising. The residents of the mansion also experience failure, and the trans-rational language of their society proves to be equally incomprehensible to both the French and their compatriots. Indeed, the emigrants sitting in Montparnasse cafés are concerned with completely different problems than the creation of a new language. It is characteristic that the explicitly autobiographical narrator of the novel, although he belongs to the zaum society, is on the whole prepared to move to a new role – a Russian émigré forced to communicate with the surrounding environment with its other language. When he talks of the famous café La Rotonde on Boulevard de Montparnasse, without noticing he moves from the pronoun “we” to the pronoun “I”: he sits in the café alone, having left his friends somewhere, and thinks that many years later he will also sit at this table, “fat, sleepy, washed-up, well-known”.32 This prospect seems shameful to him, and he once more returns to the mansion, to the utopian space, in which a new language creates new meanings. However, this return will only be temporary, and soon the Montparnasse café will become his home. It cannot be said that the rebirth of an avant-gardist as an émigré comes easily: Poplavskii at any rate wrote in 1934, regretting that he could not write incomprehensibly: Why is it that I write so tediously, moralistically, monotonously, so verbosely, is it because I cannot write incomprehensibly, because I am not free from fear of the public, and even from fear of criticism, because I am not sufficiently devoted to myself, not sufficiently bold, but I am also resigned, to walk naked, smeared with tears and dung, like the Biblical adventurers, I am so ashamed to read my slavish literature that a bewilderment, heavy like sleep, ties my hands. Моnstre libèrе-toi еn éсrivant, nоn jе рréfèrе рrеndre un саfé сrèmе.33

It is from the fear of the public and criticism that the writer is primarily liberated, which the last phrase clearly shows (“monster, free yourself by writing, no, I prefer to have a саfé сrèmе”). It is interesting that it is in French, and its first part seems like the writer addressing himself. Why does he do this in French? Could it be to mark the ambiguity of his position as a writer, which lies in the fact that an émigré writer, writing in Russian and aiming to write incomprehensibly, inevitably loses Russian readers (already few in number) and at the same time does not gain French readers, who on the one hand perceive this text as incomprehensible

32  Poplavskii, Apollon Bezobrazov, 152. 33  Poplavskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, 382.

410 

 Dmitrii Tokarev

(and is this not the author’s intention?), but on the other hand are incapable of reading it in the full sense of the word. This reader does not perceive the meanings contained in the text, but only the present of a message as such. The first part of the phrase thus is not only an appeal of the writer to himself, but an appeal to the writer that is made from the outside, as it were, from the position of a “foreigner” incapable of reading the text and giving a reply to it. In this situation, all the writer has to do is descend from the “crystal road”, located on “the mountain” of zaum, to a “big road of men”; that is to make himself comprehensible and… disgusting, as Poplavskii states in a letter to… Zdanevich.34

34  Poplavskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, 468–469.

Sexuality and Desire

Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism Wilhelm Reich’s Influence on Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen’s Danish Surrealism In the first decades of the 20th Century, new theories of children, upbringing and sexual education evolved in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s writings on children’s sexuality. Also Expressionist, Dadaist and Surrealist artists took an interest in the child, glorifying its unspoiled spontaneity and open-mindedness. Common to both theorists and artists of the period was a focus on liberation; this, however, could be understood in many ways and to different extents. German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich held one of the most radical beliefs, that a sexually free upbringing would ultimately lead to a perfect socialist society. The aim of this article is to investigate and contextualise the role of the child in some of the revolutionary utopias of the 1930s. Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen (1909–1957) was a Danish artist with a cosmopolitan outlook and an extensive international network. 1930–1931 he went to the Bauhaus school, and a couple of years later became a driving force in communicating the ideas behind Surrealism to a Nordic audience. He published magazines and curated exhibitions with contributions by well-known European Surrealists, and in 1934 he published the first comprehensive introduction to Surrealism in a Nordic language, Surrealismen. Livsanskuelse. Livsudfoldelse. Kunst (Surrealism. Outlook on Life. Conduct of Life. Art).1 The book is in many ways close to the concept of Surrealism found in André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism” (“Manifeste du surréalisme”, 1924);2 one key difference, however, is that Bjerke-Petersen was inspired by Reich, who fled to Denmark in 1933. The article will address how Reich’s psychoanalytical and socialist theory influenced

1  All translations into English are my own, except quotations from André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism”, Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo and, in part, Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. 2  For more about Bjerke-Petersen’s international network and his relation to French Surrealism, see: Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam, “Surrealism in Denmark: On Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen’s book Surrealismen, 1934”, in: Benedikt Hjartarson, Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg and Tania Ørum (eds), A Cultural History of The Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925–1950, Amsterdam and New York 2016 [forthcoming].

414 

 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

Bjerke-Petersen’s Surrealist utopia, especially regarding the role of the child. Reich’s writings will be contextualised by means of writings by child theorists Albert Moll, Hans Zulliger and Nelly Wolffheim as a way to understand how radical Reich’s theories were in comparison to the more pragmatic approaches suggested by other – otherwise progressive – thinkers of the time.

Childhood as Lost Origin It is well known that the French Surrealists valued eroticism very highly. Inspired by Freud’s emphasis on sexuality, they wanted to investigate sexuality – both in almost scientific round table sessions, aimed at revealing the true nature of sexuality, and in texts and artworks with symbolic or literal sexual content. In the Surrealist attempt to free the mind from all norms and cultural restrictions, children and women were idealised, as they were believed to be closer to nature and the unconscious, and thereby to have easier access to a forgotten and repressed origin.3 Freud writes in Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900) that childhood retrospectively seems to be a paradise and that dreams can return us to this paradise.4 It seems to be this paradise of childhood that the Surrealists sought. When Breton in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” writes about the child, it is mainly in terms of a nostalgic longing for a free and unrestricted mind and life. In the very first paragraph in the manifesto, Breton thus writes about man that: […] all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.5

3  For more on this topic, see: Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam, Surrealistiske collager. Underfulde billeder i kunst og litteratur, Aarhus 2011, 181–226. 4  Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900), in: Studienausgabe, vol. 2, eds Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachy, Frankurt am Main 2000, 250. 5  André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)”, in: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor 1969, 1–47, here 3–4.



Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism  

 415

Breton acknowledges that the unrestricted spontaneity of the child is being spoiled by authorities, but he nevertheless holds on to a romantic, illusive idea of childhood, one in which children have no worries. The connection between the child and a forgotten or repressed origin also found support in Freud’s Totem und Tabu (1913). Here, Freud suggests a parallel between the child and the “primitive”, and compares the phases in the development of man’s views on the universe (animism, religion and science) and the stages of an individual’s libidinal development.6 The animistic phase corresponds to narcissism; the religious phase “to the stage of object-choice of which the characteristic is a child’s attachment to his parents; while the scientific phase would have an exact counterpart in the stage at which an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires”.7 In animism, “magic” is fundamental to the way of thinking. Everything that is created by magic is created because man wants it, and “primitive” man has great confidence in the power of his desires: magic is ruled by the principle of the “omnipotence of thoughts”.8 For the adult in our culture, the omnipotence of thoughts has, according to Freud, only been retained in art: In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effects – thanks to artistic illusion – just as though it were something real. People speak with justice of the “magic of art” and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be. There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art’s sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses which are for the most part extinct to-day. And among them we may suspect the presence of many magical purposes.9

Exactly this was of great importance to the Surrealists. Their aim was the liberation of the repressed, modern individual, who had let go of the pleasure principle and adjusted to reality. In Freud’s account of art, the omnipotence of thought is preserved, and the “magical” experience of the artist is compared to that of the child. Freud’s view informed the wish to hold on to childhood in Surrealism; as

6  Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey, London and New York 2004, 105. 7  Freud, Totem and Taboo, 105. 8  Freud, Totem and Taboo, 99–105. 9  Freud, Totem and Taboo, 105–106.

416 

 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

Max Ernst summarily confirmed when he wrote on the flyer for his first collage exhibition in Paris in 1921: “You are just kids”.10

Bjerke-Petersen between Freud and Reich The main line of thinking in Bjerke-Petersen’s book is very close to these themes in French Surrealism. Early in his book he introduces Freud,11 and in agreement with the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” states that the Surrealist should work unconsciously without any intervention from reason, and that automatism is a means of doing so.12 He wants to liberate thought and sexuality from all constraints, prescribing a total rejection of reason and consciousness in artistic creation. He also praises the playful child and regrets how it is being repressed by the morality and rationality of adults. Bjerke-Petersen refers to Freud in his initial explanation of the development of the child: when the young child is playing, countless symbols are created for what its id desires, and the play is far from reality and reasoning. Gradually the child understands more of its surroundings and builds its ego on the reasonable and moral answers provided by adults. The pleasure principle is overturned by the reality principle that becomes the governing principle of actions taken by the ego. The desire of the id is hereby repressed and modified. Society – not least school – educates children to believe that only rational actions are true and right, and Bjerke-Petersen refers to the systematic repression of all emotional life and sexuality.13 This is not just a general theoretical statement. As will be elaborated later, he addresses the actual social and political conditions and proposes concrete changes in education and upbringing. This political indignation and wish for political change seem to stem less from Freud than from Reich, whom he also mentions in a section entitled “The Repression of the Child”.14 Bjerke-Petersen’s views on childhood are thus less idealised and more directly political than was the case in French Surrealism. Reich was a sharp critic of Hitler, and fled to Copenhagen in 1933. During the 1930s, several of his books were published in Copenhagen, and Bjerke-Petersen refers to Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (The  Mass Psychology of Fascism,

10  Paldam, Surrealistiske Collager, 44. 11  Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen. Livsanskuelse. Livsudfoldelse. Kunst, Copenhagen 1934, 13. 12  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 29. 13  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 13–14. 14  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 37.



Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism  

 417

1933) in his book on Surrealism. Reich’s psychoanalysis differs from that of Freud in several ways. It is revolutionary, utopian thinking which suggests that a free and what Reich calls “natural” sexuality, which is not burdened by morals and restraints, will automatically lead to balanced happiness – and to socialism. In Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (The Sexual Struggle of Youth, 1932), Reich comes to this conclusion by referring to (unspecified) native people who, according to Reich, live in a proto-communist (“urkommunistisch”) society. They have no words for theft, and they have a satisfying, unrestricted sexual life. Sexual offences do not exist, there is no brutality between man and woman, and rape is unthinkable as there is no need for it.15 Reich has developed this theory in Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral (The Emergence of Sexual Morality, 1931), drawing primarily on the ethnographer Bronisław Malinowski’s studies of the Trobrianders in Papua New Guinea. According to Reich this tribe is a matriarchy characterised by a free and undisturbed sexual upbringing, in which adults and youngsters have no repressions or perversions. The life in the tribe can therefore be regulated by sexual satisfaction of the drives instead of by moralistic norms.16 As he writes: “A healthy person contains virtually no morals, but also no impulses, which would require moral inhibition”.17 In contrast to this, sexuality is not free in Western society. Religion invokes fear of desire and shyness about the genital,18 and people are repressed by morality and institutions such as family and marriage. The suppression of infantile sexuality is, according to Reich, the primary cause of unnatural sexual desires and perversions later in life. Like the Trobrianders, children should be raised without any restrictions. They should be allowed to follow their natural, sexual impulses – both when they are young and during adolescence.19 Reich suggests that a liberated, “natural” sexuality will free mankind of any suppressive impulses. Sadism does not exist in his ideal world,20 just as

15  Wilhelm Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend, Berlin 1932, 39. The book came in two editions with the same content: a properly-manufactured book with dust jacket published by Verlag für Sexualpolitik, 152 pages, and a cheap, red pamphlet with no publisher, 84 pages. The references here are to the latter. 16  Wilhelm Reich, Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral. Zur Geschichte der sexuellen Ökonomie, Copenhagen 1935, 4–8, 22–23 [extended edition of Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral, Berlin 1931]. 17  Wilhelm Reich, Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf. Zur sozialistischen Umstrukturierung des Menchen, Copenhagen 1936, 5 [extended edition of Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral, 1930]. 18  Wilhelm Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. Zur Sexualökonomie der politischen Reaktion und zur proletarischen Sexualpolitik, Copenhagen 1933, 22. 19  Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 207, 261–265. 20  Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 53.

418 

 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

it was not found among the Trobrianders.21 Freud, responding to Reich, claimed that culture is built on repressed sexuality; that cultural achievements are successes of sublimated sexual energy, and that human culture is always in need of the superego as human beings will always harbour violent impulses.22 Reich agrees that most people in modern culture have many infantile, cruel and asocial impulses, but argues that ethnology shows that there are highly developed cultures where such impulses are lacking.23 The need for suppression is not a given, as Freud argues, but is constructed by the organisation of society. According to Reich, instead of just adjusting to society and accepting suppression, as Freud does, psychoanalysis should be used as a liberating, political tool.24

Contemporary Theories on Upbringing and Sexual Education – Albert Moll: Nuanced Account and Moral Warning Reich was just one of many theorists writing about children in the early 20th Century. In the wake of Rousseau’s Émile, ou De l’éducation (Emile, or On Education, 1762) notions of the unspoiled, natural child and of upbringing and education were addressed by a wide range of theorists, some of the most important being the German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, who founded the first kindergarten in 1837, the Swedish feminist Ellen Key in her Barnets århundrade (The Century of the Child, 1909), and American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey, in Democracy and Education (1916) and elsewhere. After Freud had addressed children’s sexuality in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905), where he claimed that children are sexual beings and that repressing their sexuality may lead to neuroses later in life, the interest in children’s sexuality also increased. Das Sexualleben des Kindes (The Sexual Life of Children, 1908) by German psychiatrist and sexologist Albert Moll (1862–1939) was an elaborate study of children’s sexual life. Moll criticises Freud

21  Reich, Einbruch der Sexualmoral, 23 22  Sigmund Freud, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” [1930], in: Studienausgabe, vol. 9, Frankurt am Main 2000, 197–270. See also: Lea Korsgaard, Orgasmeland. Da den seksuelle revolution kom til Danmark, Copenhagen 2014, 77. 23  Reich, Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, 8–14 24  Reich, Einbruch der Sexualmoral, xii-ix.



Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism  

 419

for seeing sexuality in acts that have nothing to do with it – for instance children’s thumb-sucking or sucking on objects such as pencils,25 and in order to avoid a one-sided focus on the pathological he primarily bases his book on information drawn from healthy men and women, not from patients.26 Das Sexualleben des Kindes is on the one hand a very detailed and nuanced description of children’s diverse sexual behaviour, and on the other a moralistic warning against depravation; all presented as a mixture of scientifically-based, general material and mundane (and curious) observations – for instance that a long journey to school with many bushes along the road entails a risk of lewd acts among children, or that in order to prevent masturbation the child should not stay too long in bed in the morning, especially if it has a warm duvet.27 Moll provides a comprehensive account of sexual acts involving children, including mutual masturbation, children’s access to pornography and its damaging influence, and paedophilia in its many varieties. For a reader today it is remarkable that authentic photographs depicting children involved in sexual acts (most of them from the Romance countries) seem to have been rather well-known and widespread in 1908.28 Child pornography was definitely not introduced with the internet. Moll is aware that morals and customs are not absolute and that the given norms decide what causes shame and disgust. He therefore emphasises the importance of finding a happy medium in sexual education, which should be provided by the mother, not by the school, in order that girls will not associate sexuality with shame and disgust, making it difficult for them to enjoy sex later in life.29 Moll also rejects some of the earlier warnings against masturbation, for instance the claim that masturbation could cause cancer, and makes it clear that masturbation, if not done excessively, is not particularly harmful;30 however, he maintains that it is dangerous for both health and soul, and gives advice on how to resist it. There are thus some hints of liberation in Moll, even though religion and suitable, moral behaviour still play a strong role in his argument.

25  Albert Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, Leipzig 1908, 154. 26  Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, iv. 27  Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, 142, 280. 28  Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, 204. 29  Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, 227–228, 234. 30  Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, 163–169.

420 

 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

Hans Zulliger: Enlightening Dialogues The Swiss school teacher and psychoanalyst Hans Zulliger (1893–1965) was one of the most influential educational professionals in the psychoanalytical tradition after Freud. His study Gelöste Fesseln (1927) was translated into Swedish as Gör oss Fria (Set Us Free, 1930), which indicates the extent of interest in his work, as many people in the Nordic countries were perfectly able to read German. The book consists primarily of cases from Zulliger’s work as a school teacher, recounting his conversations with more or less troubled children. Sexuality is a recurrent theme, focusing in most cases on the child’s curiosity and fear regarding adult sexuality. By means of several examples, Zulliger shows how lack of knowledge and misinformation may lead to severe fear and anxiety, concluding that objective sexual education is required.31 As long as sexual matters are surrounded by secrecy, children draw their own conclusions and wrongly regard the sexual act as shameful, despicable or as a violent fight.32 He relates one boy’s fear of castration to shame of masturbation but neither approves of nor condemns masturbation explicitly,33 and he neutrally explains the use of condoms to a girl who has found her parents’ prophylactics in a drawer, however telling her in the end that condoms are no safe remedy for birth control. He does not make this last remark as part of the information, but rather in order to avoid that the girl later in life “might think that contraception could be a convenient means to avoid the consequences of intercourse”.34 While Zulliger believes in factual education leading to “a more natural view of sexual matters”,35 he does not advocate sexual activity among youngsters.

Nelly Wolffheim: Sexuality in Kindergarten Nelly Wolffheim (1879–1965), a German pedagogue and founder of the first psycho­analytical kindergarten, wrote the widely-recognised Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten (1930). Here, she also addresses children’s sexuality and suggests a freer approach, criticising among others the Italian physician and educator Maria

31  Hans Zulliger, Gör oss Fria. Synpunkter på uppfostrans psykologi. Lärare och föräldrar tillägnad, intr. Alfhild Tamm, trans. Birgit Anderberg, Stockholm 1930, 101. 32  Zulliger, Gör oss Fria, 50, 101. 33  Zulliger, Gör oss Fria, 94, 101. 34  Zulliger, Gör oss Fria, 54. 35  Zulliger, Gör oss Fria, 50.



Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism  

 421

Montessori – still widely known today for the educational method that bears her name – for not raising the issue of children’s sexuality.36 Regarding the question of sexual education, Wolffheim – in line with Zulliger – states that information should not be imposed on children, but that they should be provided with clear answers when they ask and show interest in sexual matters: It is all about a general openness that makes all cover-ups needless and also rejects the usual half-hearted, poetically altered ways of educating. The aim is to lead the child to a stage where it learns to perceive sexual matters naturally.37

Wolffheim addresses children’s masturbation, sucking on thumbs, doctor games, scatological interests and erotic friendships with other children. “Psychoanalysis has taught us to regard masturbation as a natural act in this age group that, when practised in the normal way, does no harm and does not require further attention”,38 she writes. Only in the case of excessive masturbation – whatever that means – should intervention be considered, and this should never be done in a way that would cause anxiety in the child, as threats in themselves can have many harmful consequences and lead to neuroses later in life.39 However, masturbation should only be allowed “as long as the child does not masturbate openly; that means in a way that is noticed by the other children”,40 and Wolffheim writes that any intervention should take place gently, as a friendly talk. Wolffheim also addresses children’s erotic friendships, which in many ways resemble erotic relationships between adults, characterised by withdrawal from other children in order to be alone with each other, demands for exclusivity, strong jealousy, and desire and attempts to touch one another.41 Wolffheim claims that this subject has not been addressed by others, explicitly pointing to Moll. However, both Zulliger and Moll do address children’s love letters and their infatuation with other children or with an adult such as a teacher, leading to the same obsessive wish to be constantly close and to kiss and touch as described by Wolffheim.42 Moll, for instance, writes about jealousy: “the boy is tortured by torment

36  Nelly Wolffheim, Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten, Vienna 1930, 27–28. 37  Wolffheim, Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten, 27. 38  Wolffheim, Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten, 29. 39  Wolffheim, Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten, 29. 40  Wolffheim, Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten, 30. 41  Wolffheim, Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten, 41. 42  Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, 60–72; Zulliger, Gör oss Fria, 148–152.

422 

 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

when he sees that his beloved friend becomes involved with someone else”.43 Zulliger quotes a couple of examples of love letters sent by school children, and calls them naïve, innocent and harmless. They should be regarded with a smile, but represent a necessary, not to say healthy, step in the liberation from the parents.44 Although kisses are mentioned in the letters, Zulliger does not address what should be done if the youngsters’ love leads to a desire for further bodily contact. As his examples regard school children, the children in question are a bit older than the preschool children Wolffheim writes about. She acknowledges doctor games as a widespread activity among this age group, but writes that they should be counteracted, both because it is impossible to tell if the passive party is hurt and because “it is in the interest of the child’s adaptation to reality”.45 Despite a widespread understanding and acknowledgement of children’s sexual activities and her wish for a natural approach to sexuality, children thus have to learn to follow the norms of society. Sexuality still belongs to a private domain and should to some extent be hidden and secret, it appears. Although Reich is listed in her bibliography, his influence is weak, if present at all, while there are plenty of references to Freud.

Wilhelm Reich: Free Sex for Youngsters Reich’s pamphlet on sex education, Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend, “written for the youth with no upper or lower age limit”, proclaimed that “everyone should have access to sexual satisfaction without being a slave to reproduction”.46 This means that sex education should include not just facts on procreation, but also on contraception. Reich discusses different means of contraception, for instance providing detailed and illustrated instructions on how to insert a diaphragm, but acknowledges that when it comes to sex what really interests young people are questions of pleasure and satisfaction,47 regretting that this is rarely included in sex education. Reich compensates for this lack by drawing curves of sexual arousal and describing the whole sexual act from initial kisses and caresses to different phases of intercourse until the – ideally – simultaneous orgasm.48

43  Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, 68. 44  Zulliger, Gör oss Fria, 153. 45  Wolffheim, Psychoanalyse und Kindergarten, 30. 46  Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf, 3, 5. 47  Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf, 15–19. 48  Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf, 26–28. In Malinowski’s studies Reich also finds proof that the Trobrianders know “real satisfaction”, here also meaning simultaneous orgasm. Reich, Einbruch der Sexualmoral, 16–17.



Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism  

 423

Reich was not the only one addressing pleasure and birth control at the time. In England, Marie Stopes had published Married Love, 1918. The book was controversial, not least because it mentions contraception – although the sequel Wise Parenthood: A Treatise on Birth Control or Contraception (1918)49 was much more explicitly instructive – as well as focusing on the mutual pleasure of man and woman, having the simultaneous orgasm as a goal. Stopes regrets that many women never have an orgasm and are left frustrated and restless after intercourse next to their sleeping husbands. As something new at the time, she reveals how women’s desire follows the menstrual cycle, peaking twice every month, and underlines the importance of foreplay to prepare the woman for enjoying intercourse.50 This book was, however, not aimed at youngsters in general, but particularly at the married couple; Stopes praises love, but for the one and only. In that sense, the book was an attempt to preserve marriage as an institution, rather than liberating sexuality as such. This approach is very different from that of Reich, who does not write about finding the one and only. On the contrary, he stresses the importance of trying different partners to find a perfect, if perhaps temporary, sexual match.51 Young people should have sex when they feel like it, and they should have access both to contraception and to a private room for their activities.52 It should not only be tolerated that youngsters have sexual relations; it should be positively facilitated. This position is rather radical compared to that of the other prominent theorists we have discussed. The biggest difference from the other theories of sexuality is Reich’s combination of sexual liberation and socialism – topics he sees as completely intertwined: on the one hand, there is no other way to sexual liberation than the revolution;53 on the other hand, sexual repression is a capitalist means of keeping the people pacified. The obedient and submissive position the parents demand of their child resembles the relation between worker and leader, and civil servant and state.54 These thoughts – which obviously invoke the political situation at the time, especially in Germany and Italy – are developed further the following year in Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. Here, Reich describes how suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child:

49  Marie Carmichael Stopes, Wise Parenthood: A Treatise on Birth Control or Contraception, London 1918. 50  Marie Carmichael Stopes, Married Love, London 1919 (sixth edition, first edition 1918). 51  Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf, 32. 52  Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 261. 53  Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf, 69. 54  Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf, 58.

424 

 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

afraid, shy, fearful of authority, obedient, “good” and “docile” in the authoritarian sense of the words. It has a crippling effect on man’s rebellious forces because every vital life-impulse is now burdened with severe fear; and since sex is a forbidden subject, thought in general and man’s critical faculty also become inhibited. In short, morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite stress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. Thus, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later.55

As an instructive example on how religion represses sexuality, but also how a sexually liberated upbringing can change society, Reich writes about a seven-yearold girl who had been raised an atheist. Usually she always masturbated before going to sleep at night, but one day she suddenly fearfully renounced her habit and began to pray compulsively instead; as Reich puts it: “Prayer had taken the place of sexual gratification”.56 However, the girl, who had complete confidence in her father, talked to him about her fear and told him about two recent incidents: one in which she was “playing at having intercourse” with a boy and was interrupted by another boy shouting “shame” at them, and another where an old, witchlike woman cursed her and her friends who sang communist songs on their way home. After that she suddenly felt afraid “that perhaps there really was a God who sees and punishes”.57 However, talking to her father helped: The compulsion to pray disappeared when she was made aware of the origin of her fear; this awareness made it possible for her to masturbate again without feelings of guilt. […] Some months later […] the little girl wrote a letter to her father from a summer camp: “Lieber Karli, there is a cornfield here and we have set up our hospital on the edge of it (only pretending of course). We always play doctor there (we are five girls). If one of us has a hurt on our ding-dong, then he goes there, where we have salves and creams and cotton. We swiped all that”. Who will deny that this is sexual cultural bolshevism?58

55  Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, New York 1970, 39; Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 50. 56  Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 205. 57  Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 205. 58  Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 207; Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 155. Most of the translation of this quotation corresponds to the English translation from 1970. The latter is, however, based on a revised manuscript from 1969 and differs slightly from the first German edition from 1933 that was printed in Copenhagen and read by Bjerke-Petersen. The first edition is therefore used here as the primary source.



Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism  

 425

Reich regards a sexually liberated upbringing as a means and necessity for creating revolution. Children’s sexual activities are not just regarded as natural and acceptable if performed discretely in private, as in Wolffheim, but are apprehended as good and healthy and nothing to hide from anyone. There are no attempts to adjust to common norms or morals, quite the contrary: free sex is a revolutionary weapon. Hereby, pleasure becomes almost as compulsory as abstinence and virtue were before. Not masturbating becomes a problem that should be analysed and solved, and the role of the father has changed from repressing sexuality to accommodating and facilitating it in a comradely fashion.59

Bjerke-Petersen and the Means for Revolution In line with Reich’s theory, Bjerke-Petersen defends children’s right to free play, as “all repression of play is repression of life”.60 It is important to try to understand the child from birth, and to give it freedom to pursue its desires. Through unhindered play the child will develop into being open-minded and take an active part in life. This also applies to teenagers, who mature sexually just to find all routes to sexuality blocked,61 as he critically writes, continuing in the style of a political manifesto: Therefore we must demand: That all kinds of play be respected as true realities of life. That from earliest childhood all compulsory education end in favour of freely chosen studies; that the teacher-pupil relation end and be replaced by comradeship; that sexual life, as soon as it matures, have free opportunity to unfold as it is respected as the highest form of life.62

59  Reich was “rediscovered” in the 1960s, copies of his books were circulated widely, and his theories had a huge impact. Dagmar Herzog writes: “No other intellectual so inspired the student movements in its early days […] and it had a great deal to do with his insistence that child sexuality in particular needed to be not just tolerated but actively celebrated, if fascism and neurosis alike were to be averted. […] But what they revered most about Reich was the way he helped them rewrite conventional wisdom about the relationship between pleasure and evil. Reich’s concepts seemed to lend additional legitimacy to that ubiquitous 1960s slogan, Make Love Not War”. Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, Princeton 2005, 159. 60  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 37. 61  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 38–39. 62  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 39.

426 

 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

Bjerke-Petersen comments explicitly on Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, writing that Reich is “undoubtedly right” when he claims that educating the working class, by explaining to them how sexual repression is a weapon of capitalism, will lead to destruction of this weapon and stimulate a proletarian revolution,63 and he sees “a close connection between communism, Surrealism and psychoanalysis in the demand that morals should be adjusted to the drives, and society adjusted to the people”.64 However, Bjerke-Petersen criticises Marxism for rejecting art as a means of revolution. He believes that Surrealism will be able to expedite the proletarian revolution, because it is capable of providing fundamental changes: [Surrealism] transforms man’s outlook on life completely. It rejects bourgeois logic and reason in favour of free expression of drives, instincts and impulses. […] It is not society that needs to change; it is above all man himself. The completion of this work is the actual task of Surrealism. Through the awakening of our drives and instincts, Surrealism will implement the psycho-materialist revolution.65

Bjerke-Petersen believes in the liberating potential of art, its ability to change norms, to change human life. With implicit reference to Freud’s argument in Totem und Tabu, he authenticates the power of art with a parallel to rituals performed by “savage” people. “Savage” people have an intuitive understanding of the unconscious, he claims, and gives two examples of Navaho Indians having instinctively used psychoanalysis to heal people suffering from depression and frigidity, with proven results. In one of the cases, the healing happened by use of sand paintings that worked through their symbolic imagery.66 Bjerke-Petersen finds it remarkable that images can have that strong an impact on the beholder: “It shows us how the very nature of shape and colour has a real content, and how their functions become living concretions in our unconscious life”.67 Reich does not seem to share this faith in art’s ability to change human life – just as Freud never embraced the Surrealist project either – and Reich’s and Bjerke-Petersen’s means to realising their erotic utopia differ in several other ways too. In Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (1936, later published in English as The Sexual Revolution), for instance, Reich writes:

63  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 66. 64  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 66. 65  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 67–69. 66  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 30–31. 67  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 31.



Erotic Utopia – Free Upbringing, Free Sex and Socialism  

 427

[A]ny type of obstruction of the child’s or adolescent’s sexual life by parents, educators or government authorities should be prohibited. In what form this prohibition should be enacted and secured cannot be said at present, but the necessity of social and legal protection of juvenile and infantile sexuality is not to be doubted.68

This is rather radical. In order to protect the natural development of the child, Reich is also willing to censor books and visual material that, according to him, might disturb the natural development. Reich opposes pornography and argues that literature such as trashy novels and children’s horror stories should be forbidden in order to build a healthy sexuality.69 Bjerke-Petersen is less militant and does not advocate any restrictions on human expression. He mentions a painting he has done, which would be deemed pornographic according to convention, and discusses whether he should create such a work. His conclusion is that “perversions do not exist! Any erotic act is beautiful and natural, as long as it is performed with true love and meets a true need”.70 Despite these differences there is no doubt that Reich’s theory had a great deal of influence on how Bjerke-Petersen conceptualised his Surrealist utopia, linking sexual liberation closely to socialist revolution. Bjerke-Petersen did not think that the vision of a sexually liberated society would be easy to fulfil – he was not that naïve. He turned to Surrealism because he saw in it an opportunity for the artist to act, to break into reality, and he optimistically wrote: “when we have achieved limitless freedom we will transform the whole world to an expression of the phantasies of the drives”.71 It was a theoretical utopia of sexual liberation, eroticism seen as the only vehicle for revolution. And it had to start with the child.

68  Reich, Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, 240. 69  Reich, Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, 240. 70  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 60. 71  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 64.

Claire Lozier

Faire jouir le système Georges Bataille et l’utopie de l’impossible « Le Désir doit être sans cesse ramené dans le Politique. C’est dire que non seulement les utopies sont justifiées, mais encore qu’elles sont nécessaires »,1 écrivait Roland Barthes dans « L’Utopie », court texte de 1974. Pour Barthes, l’utopie « a le plus grand de tous les courages, celui de la jouissance »,2 ce qui fait de Sade et Fourier les deux plus grands utopistes qu’il connaisse. Après eux, le XXe siècle aurait été incapable d’imaginer et d’écrire des utopies, car désir et jouissance ont été refoulés du champ des possibles par le grand « Sur-Moi politique ».3 Cet essai prend le contre-pied de cette affirmation en montrant que l’œuvre de Georges Bataille, dont Barthes fut commentateur admiratif,4 poursuit la pratique utopiste jouissive de Sade et Fourier. Cette pratique qui vise à ramener le désir dans le politique en y introduisant « éclairs de désir » et « possibles exaltants » afin d’empêcher que le politique ne se fige « en système totalitaire, bureaucratique, moralisateur »,5 est à la fois perpétuée et prolongée par l’œuvre de Bataille qui se donne comme tâche «  d’exiger l’impossible  », pour reprendre la formule de Georges Didi-Huberman.6 De sa première fiction érotique (Histoire de l’œil, 1928) à son dernier essai d’esthétique (Les Larmes d’Eros, 1962) en passant par son activité anarchiste (« Contre-Attaque », 1935) et l’ouvrage d’économie politique fondateur qu’est La Part maudite (1949), Bataille travailla inlassablement à transgresser les structures du système linguistique, politique, esthétique et philosophique dans lequel

1  Roland Barthes, « L’Utopie », in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, éd. Éric Marty, Paris 2002, 531–532, ici 531. 2  Barthes, « L’Utopie », 531. 3  Barthes, « L’Utopie », 531. 4  Voir notamment : Roland Barthes, « La Métaphore de l’œil », in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, éd. Éric Marty, Paris 2002, 488–495; « Les Sorties du texte », in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, 366–376. 5  Barthes, « L’Utopie », 532. 6  Georges Didi-Huberman, « L’Œil et l’expérience », in: Julia Kristeva (éd.), Vivre le sens, Paris 2008, 147–177, 148. C’est Didi-Huberman qui souligne en s’appuyant sur l’affirmation de Bataille figurant dans La Part maudite selon laquelle « L’art souverain accède à l’extrémité du possible ». Georges Bataille, La Part maudite III. La Souveraineté, in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, éd. Thadée Klossowski, Paris 1976,  243–456, ici 447. À moins qu’il ne soit précisé autrement, les italiques utilisés dans les citations sont de leur auteur.

430 

 Claire Lozier

il écrit (la France et, par extension, l’Europe des années 20 au début des années 60). Comme il l’établit dans L’Érotisme (1957), c’est en effet par la violation des limites (qu’elles soient physiques ou symboliques) que survient la jouissance libératrice. Partant de ces considérations, je me propose de montrer que les notions de transgression, d’érotisme et de dépense sans profit, qui sont au cœur de la pensée de Bataille depuis Histoire de l’œil, sont les coordonnées qui dessinent une autre modalité du vivre-ensemble qui puise ses racines dans l’anarchisme et « l’anti-­ idéalisme violent des années 20 »7 tout autant qu’elle annonce « la démocratie à venir  » que Jacques Derrida, autre commentateur enthousiaste de Bataille,8 n’eut de cesse d’appeler de ses vœux dans les dernières années de sa vie. Pour ce faire, j’analyse le jeu de ces coordonnées dans Histoire de l’œil, premier texte de fiction publié par Bataille, plus connu pour sa force transgressive et son influence sur la « French Theory » que pour sa contribution, pourtant majeure, au modernisme français.9 Ce récit à la première personne qui accumule les transgressions de tout ordre raconte les aventures de deux adolescents, le narrateur et sa complice Simone, dont les jeux érotiques de plus en plus violents mènent au suicide d’une de leurs amies, Marcelle, puis au viol et au meurtre d’un jeune prêtre dont l’œil arraché est ensuite inséré dans le sexe de Simone d’où il finit par regarder le narrateur «  en pleurant des larmes d’urine  ».10 Désir foudroyant et (im)possibles exaltants sont les moteurs de cette utopie post-sadienne d’avant-garde. Je me réfère également aux textes ultérieurs de Bataille afin d’apporter un éclairage théorique rétrospectif sur ce texte liminal qui contient en germe l’œuvre à venir. La première partie de cet essai considère le rapport d’Histoire de l’œil au genre utopique et analyse le fonctionnement du discours du désir qui s’y déploie. La deuxième partie interroge la forme de sociabilité proposée par la politique des corps découlant de la pratique de l’érotisme bataillien et fait dialoguer cette pratique avec le discours anarchiste de l’entre-deux-guerres sur la sexualité pour en dégager les points communs et les spécificités. La dernière partie envisage

7  Gilles Ernst, «  Notice d’Histoire de l’œil  », in: Georges Bataille. Romans et récits, éd. JeanFrançois Louette, Paris 2004, 1001–1025, ici 1001. 8  Voir, entre autres : Jacques Derrida, «  De l’Économie restreinte à l’économie générale. Un ­hegelianisme sans réserve », in: L’Écriture et la différence, Paris 1967, 369–406. 9  Voir : Patrick ffrench, The Cut/Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil, Oxford 1999, x–xi. 10  Georges Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, in: Georges Bataille. Romans et récits, 50–107, ici 99. Les citations d’Histoire de l’œil sont tirées de la première version de 1928, « à la fois plus drôle et plus tragique que la seconde publiée en 1947 », ainsi que la désigne Gilles Ernst (dans « Georges Bataille et la question du corps mort », in: Frontières, 23, 2010, no 1, 40–46, ici 46), mais également plus pertinente pour la période qui nous intéresse.



Faire jouir le système  

 431

les enjeux posés par l’économie de la part maudite pour le modèle utopique et analyse le dispositif alternatif proposé par Histoire de l’œil.

Utopie et discours du désir Histoire de l’œil est un texte qui se présente d’emblée sous le sceau du non lieu : l’action débute sur « la plage de X »,11 les points de départ et d’arrivée du récit sont oblitérés par la narration qui est ostensiblement initiée et achevée in medias res, tandis que les corps des personnages, qui en tout lieu se contorsionnent, se mêlent et se défont (l’œil du prêtre allant jusqu’à finir dans la vulve de Simone), sont, pour reprendre les mots que Barthes emploie dans « Les Sorties du texte » à propos des expérimentations iconographiques réalisées par Bataille dans la revue d’avant-garde Documents qu’il dirigea à partir de 1929, «  l’espace du n’importe où ».12 À l’image de ces gros plans de gros orteils qui se substituent aux visages dans la série de portraits d’un autre genre présentée dans « Le Gros orteil »,13 les corps d’Histoire de l’œil remettent en effet en question tant notre conception de la vectorisation (ils ne commencent ni ne finissent en fonction d’aucun sens de l’orientation établi) que de l’organisation spatiale (la façon dont ils sont en partie déconstruits faisant écho aux pratiques cubistes contemporaines). Il n’en est pas pour autant évident, à première vue, de considérer Histoire de l’œil comme une utopie, que l’on désigne par là, avec les dictionnaires, un « plan imaginaire de gouvernement pour une société future idéale, qui réaliserait le bonheur de chacun »,14 ou que l’on convienne, de manière plus générale, que « L’Utopie est l’expression du désir d’une meilleure manière d’être »,15 selon la définition plus ouverte qu’en donne Ruth Levitas dans The Concept of Utopia. De

11  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 51. 12  Barthes, « Les Sorties du texte », 369. Ayant posé que « Le ‘commencement’ est une idée de rhéteur : de quelle manière commencer un discours ? », Barthes explique que « Bataille pose la question du commencement là où on ne l’avait jamais posée : où commence le corps humain ? » pour établir que si le corps a un sens, ce n’est pas celui de la vectorisation. Sur ce sujet, voir également : Pierre Fédida, Par où commence le corps humain. Retour sur la régression, Paris 2000, 29–43. 13  Georges Bataille, «  Le Gros orteil  », in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 1,  éd. Denis  Hollier, Paris 1970,  200–204. Les planches photographiques de la publication originale ne sont pas reproduites dans le volume. 14  Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé : http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/affart. exe?19;s=467990790;?b=0 (visité : 01.05.2015). 15  Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, Hemel Hempstead 1990, 8. Ma traduction.

432 

 Claire Lozier

même pour l’œuvre de Sade, dira-t-on. Il n’est en effet, dans les deux cas, que peu, si ce n’est pas, question de bien-être ou de bonheur pour tous. Le narrateur d’Histoire de l’œil nous inviterait même à penser le contraire, n’hésitant pas à placer son récit sous le signe de la dystopie. Ayant qualifié ses aventures et celles de Simone de «  promenade à travers  l’impossible  »,16 il précise  :  «  Le temps depuis lequel nous avions abandonné le monde vraiment réel, celui qui est composé uniquement de personnes habillées, était déjà si loin qu’il paraissait hors de portée. Notre hallucination particulière se développait cette fois sans plus de limite que le cauchemar complet de la société humaine par exemple, avec terre, atmosphère et ciel ».17 Le monde dans lequel les personnages évoluent est ici explicitement présenté comme un idéal de société inversé, ce « cauchemar complet de la société humaine » allant jusqu’à prendre des dimensions cosmogoniques (« avec terre, atmosphère et ciel »). S’arrêter à une telle lecture reviendrait cependant à ne lire les textes de Bataille, ou de Sade, que d’un point de vue thématique. L’originalité et l’intérêt de la conception barthésienne de l’utopie consistent précisément à envisager le genre non comme la simple peinture d’une société idéale ayant atteint son état d’entéléchie, mais à le ramener à un type de discours particulier, celui du désir, que Barthes oppose à celui du besoin. C’est d’ailleurs à partir de cette opposition qu’il élabore sa définition de l’utopie : « L’Utopie, c’est le champ du désir, face au Politique, qui est le champ du besoin  »,18 lit-on en ouverture du texte qu’il consacre à la question. Outre d’ajouter que ces deux discours entretiennent des rapports paradoxaux et que si « le Besoin reproche au Désir son irresponsabilité, sa futilité ; le Désir reproche au Besoin ses censures, son pouvoir réducteur »,19 Barthes n’indique cependant pas en quoi ces discours consistent. Il précise seule­ ment que le discours du désir est celui pratiqué par les deux plus grands utopistes qui soient à ses yeux : Sade et Fourier. Dans le dernier paragraphe de « La Métaphore de l’œil », Barthes reconnaissait que « le récit de Bataille doit beaucoup à celui de Sade »20 et se lançait alors dans une analyse comparée de leurs rhétoriques érotiques individuelles entrant dans la composition de leur discours du désir respectif. Tandis que la rhétorique érotique de Sade est avant tout syntagmatique et extensive (elle épuise les combinaisons dans une visée totalisatrice qui participe du projet encyclopédique des

16  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 71. 17  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 71. 18  Barthes, « L’Utopie », 531. 19  Barthes, « L’Utopie », 531. 20  Barthes, « La Métaphore de l’œil », 494.



Faire jouir le système  

 433

Lumières), celle de Bataille est paradigmatique et intensive (elle intervertit systématiquement les mots pour en faire une autre utilisation que celle à laquelle ils sont destinés). D’un côté, le discours du désir sadien se constitue à partir de la disposition de l’unité syntaxique et produit un inventaire combinatoire exhaustif.21 De l’autre, le discours du désir bataillien est, lui, transgressif et s’élabore par le travail modulable de l’unité lexicale. Ce dernier génitif est à prendre tant au sens objectif que subjectif (le travail qui est effectué par et sur l’unité lexicale), ce qui fait écho à ce que Bataille appelle la besogne des mots. Dans le fameux article « Informe » de Documents, Bataille affirmait qu’« Un dictionnaire commencerait à partir du moment où il ne donnerait plus le sens mais les besognes des mots  ».22 En en faisant ressortir la dimension érotique, Barthes commente la formule en ces termes : « nous passons de l’usage, de l’emploi (notions fonctionnelles) au travail du mot, à la jouissance du mot : comment le mot ‘farfouille’, dans l’inter-texte, dans la connotation, agit en se travaillant lui-même ».23 Le discours du désir bataillien travaille ainsi les mots au corps pour les détourner de leur fonctionnalité et leur faire exsuder leur charge sémantique. Ainsi travaillés, les mots sont en retour dotés d’une charge libidinale – ils sont investis par le désir du texte – qui les rend saillants. C’est du fait de ce statut spécifique qu’elle donne aux mots que Barthes considère que l’écriture de Bataille participe de l’avant-garde, et ce bien qu’elle ne s’émancipe pas de la syntaxe, contrairement à ce qu’exige « tout un préjugé moderniste  ».24 Perversion ultime, le discours du désir bataillien s’immisce en effet dans une syntaxe aussi rationnelle et rigoureuse que celle utilisée par le discours du besoin. Susan Rubin Suleiman va dans le même sens quand elle explique que ce n’est pas ce qu’ils représentent qui rend les textes de Bataille pornographiques, mais «  le contraste que l’on sent entre les longues phrases grammaticale­ment ‘exquises’, avec leur alignement de verbes au passé simple et à l’imparfait du subjonctif, et les mots obscènes, explicites (‘verges raides’), qui font irruption dans la syntaxe comme le comportement transgressif de Simone fait irruption dans le calme d’un après-midi d’été ».25 Les mots du désir jouent

21  Barthes précise en effet que « Pour Sade, il s’agit de recenser une combinatoire érotique, projet qui ne comporte (techniquement) aucune transgression du sexuel ». « La Métaphore de l’œil », 494. 22  Georges Bataille, « Informe », in: Documents, 1929, no 7 (décembre), 382. 23  Barthes, « Les Sorties du texte », 376. 24  Barthes, « Les Sorties du texte », 375. 25  Susan Rubin Suleiman, «  La Pornographie de Bataille. Lecture textuelle, lecture thématique », in: Poétique, 16, 1985, no 64, 483–493, ici 490.

434 

 Claire Lozier

les troublions, ils frayent littéralement, tant au sens d’ouvrir une voie que de féconder, la syntaxe validée par le politique. Contrairement à l’exemple choisi par Suleiman, les mots qui portent le discours du désir dans Histoire de l’œil ne sont cependant pas nécessairement ceux auxquels on s’attend. Ce sont en effet essentiellement des mots – et par référence, des objets – du langage commun et quotidien (« assiette », « œil », « œuf ») qui se trouvent dotés de la charge libidinale la plus forte les détournant de leur emploi utilitaire premier. Dès sa première prise de parole, Simone dévoie ainsi d’emblée l’intégrité sémantique des signes en juxtaposant deux mots au signifiant similaire, mais au signifié différent. Décrétant que « les assiettes, c’est fait pour s’asseoir »,26 la jeune fille s’assied aussitôt fesses nues dans l’assiette de lait destinée au chat, transgressant à la fois structures logiques et normes sociales, et déclenchant, ce faisant, le premier d’une longue série d’orgasmes motivés par le rapport simultané au liquide, à la couleur blanche et à la rotondité. L’opération est plus loin reconduite avec un degré supplémentaire de complexité lorsqu’elle substitue le mot « œuf » au mot « œil » pour former les expressions zeugmatiques « crever un œuf » et « casser un œil »,27 ce qui sera suivi d’effet immédiat, tout d’abord avec des œufs puis, pour finir, avec l’œil du prêtre. Si les opérations de transgression déployées dans le texte semblent, à première vue, d’ordre essentiellement sexuel, elles sont ainsi avant tout pratiquées par et sur la langue qui les formule. Ce sont en effet les expérimentations linguistiques effectuées par Simone qui servent de déclencheur aux activités érotiques transgressives des protagonistes, non l’inverse. Son discours est, à ce titre, tant pourvoyeur d’« éclairs de désir » que de « possibles », et même, dans son cas, d’impossibles, « exaltants ». En marge de ces caractéristiques discursives, Barthes considère que le propre de l’utopie est également, sur un plan plus thématique, d’être « minutieuse, elle imagine des horaires, des lieux, des pratiques » et d’être « romanesque, comme le fantasme dont elle est la forme politique ».28 Si Histoire de l’œil excelle dans les domaines du romanesque et du fantasme, peu lui chaut cependant d’imposer de quelconques horaires, lieux ou pratiques collectives (tout du moins de manière régulière), au contraire. Il s’agirait ainsi d’une utopie particulière à vocation non pas communautaire et disciplinée (modèle auquel se rattache la pratique sadienne), mais individualiste et transgressive. Ce qui en fait, partant, une utopie de l’impossible.

26  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 51. 27  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 75. 28  Barthes, « L’Utopie », 531.



Faire jouir le système  

 435

Érotisme et communauté De même que «  Sade défend des impossibilités  »29 et que «  la scène sadienne apparaîtrait vite hors de toute réalité  » à quiconque voudrait la mettre en pratique, les activités transgressives des protagonistes d’Histoire de l’œil jalonnant leur « promenade à travers l’impossible »30 n’ont pas de prétention réaliste. C’est que la raison d’être de ces utopies atypiques n’est pas leur mise en pratique dans le monde extérieur au livre (comme c’est au demeurant le cas de la plupart des utopies génériques), mais plutôt de réaliser une double action ludique consistant à mettre en jeu le système (linguistique et politique) depuis lequel elles s’écrivent afin, à terme, de lui donner du jeu. Leur impossibilité assumée participe cependant pleinement de leur caractère utopique en ce que l’impossible est le lieu même de l’utopie, qui l’actualise. C’est également, tant pour Bataille que pour Barthes, le lieu de la littérature. « L’impossible, c’est la littérature »,31 écrivait Bataille dans son projet de préface à L’Impossible. De même, « pour Barthes, l’utopie est usuellement un synonyme de ‘littérature’, ‘écriture’, ou ‘texte’, tout comme ces mots semblent souvent interchangeables avec celui d’utopie  »,32 précise Diana Knight. Cet espace littéraire de l’impossible n’en imagine pour autant pas moins des modalités du vivre-­ ensemble à valeur programmatique. Utopie de l’impossible à dimension individualiste et transgressive, Histoire de l’œil esquisse ainsi un programme politique alternatif qui apparaît en creux dans le traitement réservé aux représentants du pouvoir et de ses institutions (c’est-à-dire, si l’on reprend les termes de Barthes, aux porte-paroles du politique). Les représentants de la famille (qui affectent de s’horrifier du comportement des protagonistes mais sont trop faibles pour les arrêter),33 de l’armée ­(à

29  Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, éd. Éric Marty, Paris 2002, 700–862, ici 820. Barthes se réfère ici à une pratique rhétorique que la scolastique imposait parfois à ses apprenants pour tester leur capacité de raisonnement logique : la défense d’impossibilia, c’est-à-dire de thèses apparemment impossibles. 30  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 71. 31  Georges Bataille, « Autour de L’Impossible », in: Georges Bataille. Romans et récits, 565–574, ici 574. 32  Diana Knight, Barthes and Utopia. Space, Travel, Writing, Oxford 1997, 4. Ma traduction. Gageons que Sade se serait reconnu dans ces conceptions. 33  Les parents émettent des « exclamations d’horreur, [d]es cris désespérés, [d]es menaces disproportionnées » et évoquent « avec des hurlements incendiaires et des imprécations spasmodiques […] la cour d’assises, le bagne, l’échafaud » (Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 60) en découvrant l’orgie à laquelle leurs enfants ont participé. La mère de Simone est, elle, tant victime occasionnelle (Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 56) que témoin passif et muet (Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 75–76) des activités transgressives de sa fille et du narrateur.

436 

 Claire Lozier

laquelle appartient le père du narrateur, « misérable, type accompli de général gâteux et catholique »),34 de l’église (où a lieu le viol et le meurtre du prêtre, ainsi que la désacralisation des objets du culte) et de l’institution psychiatrique (où est enfermée Marcelle) sont sans surprise malmenés par le texte. La parole leur est, qui plus est, littéralement retirée par le narrateur qui relègue l’essentiel de leurs propos au discours indirect ou rapporté, finissant par là de désavouer leur autorité. Il est également à noter que les protagonistes ne travaillent pas, volent, achètent le silence des domestiques avec on ne sait quel argent, et se font entre­tenir par Sir Edmond, le « richissime Anglais » qui les accompagne dans la seconde partie du récit après qu’ils sont illégalement passés de France en Espagne « pour éviter les ennuis d’une enquête policière » suite au suicide de Marcelle qu’ils avaient libérée de l’institution psychiatrique lui servant de prison.35 Le programme qui se devine ici annonce celui que Bataille défendit quelques années plus tard dans « Contre-Attaque », le groupe antifasciste qu’il fonda en 1935 avec son meilleur ennemi, André Breton, aux noms de la révolution morale et sexuelle, de l’anticléricalisme, de l’antimilitarisme, de  l’anticapitalisme, de l’antinationalisme et de l’antiparlementarisme.36 « Contre-Attaque » fut, comme le souligne Michel Surya, « l’un des derniers sursauts, parmi les plus significatifs, de l’ultra-gauche française avant la déclaration de la seconde guerre mondiale »37 et dont le but proclamé était de « sauver ce monde du ‘cauchemar’, de ‘l’impuissance et du carnage où il sombre’ »38 au moyen de « ‘la violence révolutionnaire’ »39 retrouvée. Ce projet politique entendait donc détourner la société du devenir dystopique vers lequel elle s’orientait en reconfigurant de manière radicale les modalités du vivre-ensemble contemporain. Afin d’éviter l’explosion, «  Contre-Attaque  » proposait en effet de modifier les structures sociales régulant l’organisation de l’énergie vitale. La partie de ce programme qui intéressa le plus Bataille, et ce dès Histoire de l’œil, est celle relative à la révolution morale et sexuelle, aspects fondateurs et déterminants de toute association humaine. Il est ici intéressant de rappeler que le discours sur la libre disposition du corps et de la sexualité faisait partie intégrante du discours anarchiste de l’entredeux-guerres. Dans Sex, Violence and the Avant-garde: Anarchism in Inter-war

34  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 60. 35  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 83, 82. 36  Michel Surya, Georges Bataille. La Mort à l’œuvre, Paris 1992, 641. 37  Surya, Georges Bataille, 266. 38  Surya, Georges Bataille, 266. On verra plus loin qu’Histoire de l’œil annonce davantage une forme de démocratie radicale plus que de relayer un certain antiparlementarisme anarchiste propre aux années 30. 39  Surya, Georges Bataille, 641.



Faire jouir le système  

 437

France, Richard D. Sonn a montré de manière probante que la liberté sexuelle prônée par les anarchistes des années 20, desquels Bataille peut certainement être rapproché, avait en premier lieu vocation à contester l’état militarisé, qu’il soit républicain ou fasciste.40 Le quotidien anarchiste L’En-dehors clamait par exemple, par la voix d’Émile Armand, qu’il fallait d’abord se débarrasser de la monogamie, du patriarcat, de la jalousie et de la possessivité pour faire s’écrouler les superstructures d’autorité. Reprenant une allégorie séculaire, les anarchistes faisaient ainsi du corps la métaphore la plus puissante de la société et estimaient qu’un corps ouvert au plaisir érotique poserait les fondations d’un corps social et politique qui ne serait plus hiérarchique ni orienté vers le pouvoir. Bataille va cependant plus loin en ce qu’il conçoit l’érotisme comme une pratique nécessairement violente. Dans L’Érotisme, ouvrage de 1957, il affirme dès la première phrase que l’érotisme est « l’approbation de la vie jusque dans la mort ».41 C’est que, « essentiellement, le domaine de l’érotisme est le domaine de la violence, le domaine de la violation »42 car, demande Bataille, « que signifie l’érotisme des corps sinon une violation de l’être des partenaires ? une violation qui confine à la mort ? qui confine au meurtre ? »43 Bien qu’il indique plus loin que «  si l’élément de violation, voire de violence, qui la constitue, fait défaut, l’activité érotique atteint plus difficilement sa plénitude », il concède cependant que « la destruction réelle, la mise à mort proprement dite, n’introduirait pas une forme d’érotisme plus parfaite que la bien vague équivalence dont j’ai parlé ».44 Pas besoin de tuer pour qu’il y ait érotisme donc (le meurtre du prêtre à la fin d’Histoire de l’œil a, en ce sens, valeur allégorique et non programmatique). La violation de l’être des partenaires pratiquée sans finalité reproductrice suffit. Le message à retenir est que la décharge d’énergie libératrice se mesurera à hauteur de la transgression des barrières endiguant les pulsions. À l’inverse des anarchistes, Bataille ne remet donc pas en question la nécessité des barrières ayant permis à la société de se constituer en canalisant l’énergie vitale au profit du développement de la civilisation. En contrepartie, il affirme cependant la nécessité de régulièrement transgresser ces barrières afin de consumer l’excédent d’énergie accumulé menaçant le système de destruction.

40  Richard D. Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-garde: Anarchism in Inter-war France, Uni­ versity Park 2010. Pour les éléments qui suivent, voir pages 13–25. 41  Georges Bataille, L’Érotisme, in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 10, éd. Francis Marmande, Paris 1987, 7–270, ici 17. 42  Bataille, L’Érotisme, 22. 43  Bataille, L’Érotisme, 23. 44  Bataille, L’Érotisme, 24.

438 

 Claire Lozier

Simone et le narrateur revendiquent ainsi le fait qu’ils ne manquent « nullement de pudeur, au contraire », mais reconnaissent que « quelque chose d’impérieux [les] oblig[e] à la braver ensemble aussi impudiquement que possible ».45 Cette conception de la dynamique pulsionnelle que Bataille formalisa en 1957 est très proche de celle que Freud exposa dès 1929 dans Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Malaise dans la civilisation). Elle se laisse cependant déjà deviner dans Histoire de l’œil, qui, rappelons-le, date de 1928. Transgresser sert donc tant à consumer l’énergie excédentaire afin d’éviter l’explosion du système, qu’à sa mise en jeu (à empêcher qu’il ne se fige, dirait Barthes). La pensée bataillienne a ainsi cela de particulier qu’elle conjugue discours du besoin (reconnaissance des barrières) et discours du désir (détournement des mots, des corps et des objets mettant à mal les barrières) dans la réalisation de l’opération de transgression. C’est cette combinatoire qui est exemplifiée dans Histoire de l’œil : le besoin y est systématiquement transgressé par le désir dans une visée libératrice où la poursuite de la jouissance joue à la fois le rôle de moteur et de soupape de sécurité. La modalité du vivre-ensemble qui découle de cette pratique relève par là d’une forme radicale de démocratie en perpétuelle remise en question et constant devenir. Histoire de l’œil annoncerait ainsi tant les conceptions de Derrida sur la démocratie à venir que les réflexions récentes sur le concept de démocratie radicale qui s’en inspirent.46 Audric Vitiello présente en effet comme suit l’approche radicale de la démocratie : Il ne s’agit ni de justifier ni d’élaborer un modèle idéal de la démocratie, mais de la comprendre à partir de sa conflictualité principielle, et partant de son instabilité existentielle. La démocratie désigne alors moins un ensemble de procédures qu’un processus infini de déconstruction / reconstruction de la substance, des formes et des limites de l’existence collective : une dynamique irréductible à tout état institué.47

Cette dynamique est à maints égards celle que l’on retrouve dans Histoire de l’œil qui rejette les modèles et les idéaux tout autant qu’il embrasse le conflit, l’in­ stabilité et la déconstruction des formes. Cette conception du vivre-ensemble se démarque des modèles de communauté « désœuvrée », au sens où l’entend Jean-

45  Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 53. 46  On pense par exemple à celles d’Ernesto Laclau et Chantal Mouffe exposées dans : Hégé­ monie et stratégie socialiste : vers une politique démocratique radicale, Besançon 2009. 47  Audric Vitiello, « L’Itinéraire de la démocratie radicale », in: Raisons politiques, 35, 2009, no 3, 207–220, ici 207.



Faire jouir le système  

 439

Luc Nancy, et «  inavouable  », comme la qualifie Maurice Blanchot,48 qui commentent tous deux le rapport de Bataille au communautaire en en soulignant le caractère de déréliction plutôt que l’aspect transactionnel. Les rapports humains tels qu’ils sont représentés dans Histoire de l’œil participent pourtant bien du modèle d’économie générale plébiscité par Bataille.

Utopie et part maudite Dans La Part maudite, essai d’économie générale paru en 1949 qu’il considérait comme l’ouvrage le plus important de son œuvre,49 Bataille posait en prémisse à sa réflexion : Je partirai d’un fait élémentaire : l’organisme vivant, dans la situation que déterminent les jeux de l’énergie à la surface du globe, reçoit en principe plus d’énergie qu’il n’est nécessaire au maintien de la vie : l’énergie […] excédante peut être utilisée à la croissance d’un système (par exemple d’un organisme) ; si le système ne peut plus croître, ou si l’excédent ne peut en entier être absorbé dans sa croissance, il faut nécessairement le perdre sans profit, le dépenser, volontiers ou non, glorieusement ou sinon de façon catastrophique.50

L’incapacité de la modernité à consumer cet excédent d’énergie que Bataille appelle part maudite est ce qui explique, selon lui, les deux conflits mondiaux du XXe siècle.51 Une fois généré, l’excédent d’énergie (qu’il s’agisse de forces naturel­ les, du « trop-plein de la production industrielle »,52 ou des pulsions vitales et sexuelles) est voué à exploser s’il n’est réinvesti ou détruit. Selon que cette part maudite est utilisée pour contribuer à l’expansion de la structure ou qu’elle est brûlée sans autre fin que de donner le spectacle de sa combustion, elle c­ onstitue

48  Voir : Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, Paris 2004 ; Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, Paris 1983. 49  Voir : Jean Piel, « Bataille et le monde : de ‘La Notion de dépense’ à ‘La Part maudite’ », in: Critique, 195–196, 1963, 721–733, ici 728. 50  Georges Bataille, La Part maudite, in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 7, éd. Thadée Klossowski, Paris 1976, 17–180, ici 29. 51  Cette lecture de l’histoire est formulée de manière on ne peut plus claire dans la section « La guerre envisagée comme une dépense catastrophique de l’énergie excédante », où Bataille écrit : «  On nie parfois que le trop-plein de la production industrielle soit à l’origine des guerres récentes, en particulier de la première. C’est néanmoins ce trop-plein que l’une et l’autre ex­ sudèrent ; c’est son importance qui leur donna leur extraordinaire intensité ». Bataille, La Part maudite, 32–33. 52  Bataille, La Part maudite, 32.

440 

 Claire Lozier

respectivement soit une «  dépense productive  »53 obéissant à une «  conduite utile  »,54  soit une «  dépense improductive  »55 obéissant à une «  conduite glorieuse ».56 Le premier modèle est celui de l’économie politique classique, c’est-àdire restreinte, le second celui de l’économie générale. La part maudite n’opère cependant pas dans le seul domaine économique. Dans l’«  Avant-propos  » de son essai, Bataille précise  : «  Ni la psychologie, ni généralement la philosophie ne peuvent d’ailleurs être tenues pour indépendantes de cette question première de l’économie. Même ce qui peut être dit de l’art, de la littérature, de la poésie est en rapport au premier chef avec le mouvement que j’étudie ».57 Conçue comme une dépense sans profit, la littérature a également, pour Bataille, une dimension politique en ce qu’elle soustrait les efforts de l’écrivain au travail productif. « Écrire est tout de même faire le contraire de travailler »,58 insiste-t-il en 1958 dans une interview avec Pierre Dumayet suite à la publication de La Littérature et le mal. L’écrivain bataillien est coupable et du côté du mal car il ne contribue pas à l’accroissement du système et consume son temps, son énergie et le langage à des fins poétiques et glorieuses, c’est-à-dire inutiles et non rentables. Dépourvue de fonction directement sociale, cette pratique de la littérature est donc structurellement perverse, anticapitaliste et utopiste.59 C’est ce que signifie le narrateur d’Histoire de l’œil qui vole, transgresse les interdits, ne travaille pas, mais écrit en besognant les mots et faisant entrer son discours du désir dans le champ du besoin. Son écriture participe ainsi de l’économie générale des signes. Bien que publié quelques années avant les premières réflexions de Bataille sur l’économie générale et la part maudite,60 Histoire de l’œil en annonce ainsi

53  Bataille, La Part maudite, 22. 54  Georges Bataille, « La Limite de l’utile », in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 7, 181–280, ici 200. 55  Bataille, La Part maudite, 22. 56  Bataille, « La Limite de l’utile », 200. 57  Bataille, La Part maudite, 20. 58  Voir l’émission Lectures pour tous du 21 mai 1958. Archive INA, disponible sur : http://www. ina.fr/video/I00016133 (visité : 03.05.2015). 59  Sur le lien entre littérature, dépense inconditionnelle et utopie, voir également  : Roland Barthes, « Entre le plaisir du texte et l’utopie de la pensée », in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 5, éd. Éric Marty, Paris 2002, 533–540, ici 537. 60  Présentant les premières considérations sur la question, « La Notion de Dépense » est publié en janvier 1933 dans La Critique sociale, éphémère revue marxiste codirigée par Bataille. Voir : Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, éd. Thadée Klossowski, Paris 1970, 145–158. Jean Piel date cependant le début de la réflexion de Bataille sur la part maudite de la fin des années 20, la faisant ainsi coïncider avec l’écriture d’Histoire de l’œil. Voir : Jean Piel, « Bataille et le monde », 725.



Faire jouir le système  

 441

les principes. Au-delà de ces considérations économiques et discursives, le texte souligne également le caractère fondamentalement excessif de l’énergie vitale et expose la nécessité de la consumer à perte afin d’éviter la catastrophe. Il joue, à ce titre, le rôle de muthos au sens platonicien : c’est une fable révélant de manière figurée la substance théorique où tout impossibilité a vocation à illustrer. Le narrateur ouvre le récit en faisant état de son angoisse générée par l’énergie vitale primordiale qu’est l’énergie sexuelle qu’il possède, de même que Simone, en abondance, et dont la dépense irrépressible, contrecarrée par les normes sociales, constitue le moteur de l’action.61 Dans son premier texte de fiction, Bataille esquissait ainsi de manière schématique une alternative à l’explosion – et, partant, au conflit mondial – qui pourrait se résumer par la formule emblématique de la mouvance utopiste des années 60 : « faites l’amour, pas la guerre ». Cela ne revient cependant pas à dire que la dépense gratuite et glorieuse de l’excédent fondamental saurait être exempte de toute violence, ainsi que l’indique clairement Histoire de l’œil ou que l’ont montré les mouvements protestataires, pourtant pour la plupart pacifistes, des années 60 – ainsi, en France, de Mai 68, que Barthes considère comme une «  utopie immédiate  ».62 La dépense de la part maudite étant inévitablement transgressive et ne pouvant, de fait, se dérouler sans heurt, c’est la conception même de l’utopie classique qu’il faut alors remettre en question. Depuis l’Atlantide platonicienne du Timée et du Critias, les utopies génériques se présentent comme des sociétés fermées prétendant réguler de façon optimale les rapports humains afin de garantir un état de bien-être et d’équilibre per­manent pour le plus grand nombre. Cependant, du fait de sa clôture, de son immuabilité et de son utilitarisme constitutifs, l’organisation utopique ne saurait, par définition, accommoder la part maudite. Évinçant le problème (la part maudite n’a pas cours en utopie), les utopies génériques sont ainsi nécessairement inopérantes et ne paraissent heureuses que tant qu’elles sont perçues du point de vue extérieur de l’étranger. Pour changer l’utopie en son contraire, il suffit en effet de déplacer la perspective et de se positionner du point de vue de l’individu. C’est ce que font les grands récits dystopiques du XXe siècle, et qui leur permet de renouveler le genre. La société idéale apparaît alors comme une organisation autoritaire, répressive et uniformisante, oppressant ses habitants et réglant le problème de la part maudite par la destruction de toute force d’opposition. Elle se révèle généralement comme telle une fois que l’individu a retrouvé

61  Le récit s’ouvre sur ce constat : « J’ai été élevé très seul et aussi loin que je me rappelle, j’étais angoissé par tout ce qui est sexuel ». Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, 51. 62  Barthes, « L’Utopie », 531.

442 

 Claire Lozier

lucidité et conscience de soi, la plupart du temps après avoir fait l’expérience de l’amour. Le régime textuel s’en trouve également affecté : alors que les utopies traditionnelles sont essentiellement descriptives (peu d’événements en effet à rapporter une fois le narrateur arrivé et établi dans ces sociétés immuables et parfaitement réglées), les dystopies favorisent la narration et l’action (elles relatent les épreuves de l’individu aux prises avec la société autoritaire contrecarrant ses aspirations).63 À suivre l’ensemble de ces considérations, Histoire de l’œil correspond à maints égards au modèle dystopique propre à la modernité. La première fiction de Bataille est avant tout une histoire d’amour relatant les aventures de deux individus qui se heurtent à une société répressive et clament envers et contre tout leur amour de la liberté, de la créativité, et de la vie jusque dans la mort. Il s’agit pourtant, à l’inverse des dystopies, d’un dispositif ouvert : il n’y a ni début ni fin à ce texte qui commence et finit in medias res, disqualifie les structures, enfreint les interdits à tout va, ne s’assigne aucune finalité particulière outre la dépense gratuite de l’énergie excédentaire, et use du langage de manière désirante et transgressive. Ici, pas de téléologie menant à un achèvement nécessairement funeste. C’est en effet, comme l’histoire l’a montré, l’utopie d’une société homogène, d’une structure arrêtée, d’un système à seul but productif, d’une sexualité contrôlée et d’une littérature honnête qui mène à la catastrophe dystopique. Si elle ne prétend pas être heureuse, la vision de l’impossible exposée dans Histoire de l’œil est ainsi néanmoins glorieuse au sens où l’entend Bataille  : le discours du désir qui s’y déploie consume les sens et le sens, faisant jouir par là tant les corps que le système linguistique et politique dans lequel elle s’écrit. Elle est, à ce titre, un lubrifiant salutaire à tout figement délétère. À l’encontre des surréalistes volontiers taxés d’utopistes à cause de leur idéalisme,64 Bataille peut, pour conclure, difficilement se voir adresser ce reproche. Son œuvre est en effet dédiée à la reconnaissance de l’hétérogène, c’est-à-dire de ce qu’il y a de radicalement autre et qui défie les systèmes établis, qu’il s’agisse de la pratique transgressive, de l’érotisme ou de la part maudite, comme on l’a vu ici. À en croire le narrateur d’Histoire de l’œil et les catégorisations génériques, le premier texte de fiction de Bataille contenant en germe l’œuvre et les notions à venir se rangerait même plutôt du côté des dystopies modernistes. La conception barthésienne de l’utopie comprise d’un point de vue discursif et non pas

63  Sur les spécificités génériques du genre dystopique, voir : Jean-Paul Engélibert, Apocalypses sans royaume (politique des fictions de la fin du monde), Paris 2013. 64  Voir  : Vincent Kaufman, «  La Communauté sans traces  », in: Denis Hollier (éd.), Georges Bataille après tout, Paris 1995, 61–79, ici 62.



Faire jouir le système  

 443

thématique nous a cependant permis de montrer qu’Histoire de l’œil, et à sa suite l’œuvre de Bataille, se constitue en alternative désirante exigeant l’impossible au sein même du système linguistique, politique et philosophique dans lequel il s’inscrit. À la différence de l’œuvre de Sade, des utopies génériques et des dystopies modernes, l’œuvre de Bataille est également ouverte en ce qu’elle refuse l’esprit de système, rejette la volonté de totalisation, dénie l’idée de finalité, et s’érige contre une conception du communautaire basée sur le modèle de la clôture. Si son œuvre peut être considérée comme utopique, c’est alors parce qu’elle ne cesse d’exiger l’impossible et qu’elle garantit, par là, une continuelle possibilité de renouvellement pour le vivre-ensemble. En dépit de l’action du « Sur-Moi politique » identifiée par Barthes, l’utopie n’aurait donc pas totalement disparu de la scène littéraire du XXe siècle. Elle aurait plutôt changé de nom, troquant celui d’utopie pour celui d’impossible. Dans un entretien avec Thomas Assheuer intitulé «  Non pas l’utopie, l’im-possible », Derrida exprimait en 1998 sa méfiance envers le mot d’utopie qui « se laisse trop facilement associer au rêve, à la démobilisation, à un impossible qui pousse au renoncement plutôt qu’à l’action ».65 Il déclarait alors lui préférer l’« im-possible », c’est-à-dire « ce qui ‘hante le possible’, ce qui ‘peut’ véritablement dans le possible, ce qui l’ouvre ou le possibilise ».66 Cet im-possible « n’est pas l’utopique, il donne au contraire son mouvement au désir, à l’action et à la décision, il est la figure même du réel. Il en a la dureté, la proximité, l’urgence ».67 C’est une figure de cet im-possible, désirant tout autant que garant, pour Derrida, de la démocratie à venir, que l’on rencontre ainsi au cœur de la conception bataillienne de l’utopie exposée dans Histoire de l’œil.

65  Jacques Derrida, «  Non pas l’utopie, l’im-possible  », entretien avec Thomas Assheuer, in: Papier machine. Le Ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses, Paris 2001, 349–366, ici 360. 66  François Raffoul, « Derrida et l’éthique de l’im-possible », in: Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 53, 2007, no 1, 73–88, ici 75. L’expression « hante le possible » est tirée de : Jacques Derrida, Dire l’événement, est-ce possible ?, Paris 2001, 98. 67  Derrida, « Non pas l’utopie, l’im-possible », 361.

Imre József Balázs

The Non-Oedipal Android Towards a Surrealist Utopia in Postwar Romania The origins of Surrealism, according to André Breton’s first manifesto of Surrealism, go back to the realms of childhood and of madness conceived as peripheries of the field where the “realistic attitude” prevails. The connecting principle between childhood and madness is the idea of freedom of imagination.1 This idea was promoted, among others, by previous philosophical and artistic currents such as Romanticism, but what is most important for our analysis is that Surrealism attempted to discover new techniques and strategies in order to free imagination from all kinds of constraints. Breton’s first manifesto affirms: It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer – and, in my opinion by far the most important part – has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. […] The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them – first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason.2

Surrealism is deeply rooted in some basic ideas about imagination, but at the same time (inspired by Freud’s psychoanalysis) it tries to develop a material dimension to it, situating the discourse concerning imagination within very specific and palpable contexts. What differentiates this current among many other systems of thought is that it performs a politics of liberating the human mind, conceiving the act of liberation on a social and collective level, beyond the exclusive practices of a chosen few. Surrealism is intended to produce a change in the everyday lives of people, not only in art or in the lives of initiates. This is clearly utopian thinking. The idea of changing the world is strongly interconnected with the idea of changing man: a utopia implies often what the specialists call eupsychia, that is, an ideal state of consciousness.3 Reinventing reality may have its basis on a

1  André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)”, in: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor 1969, 1–47, here 3–6. 2  Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 1. 3  Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge 1997, 4.

446 

 Imre József Balázs

social or technological level, but living in it implies a change at the psychological level. A historical overview of such constructions of eupsychia includes works by Giordano Bruno, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, and historically there are also multiple variants of the practices used to achieve the state of eupsychia. Many modern utopias tend to assert that a right state of mind could be induced virtually in any place and at any time by an adept who is ready to do regular exercises.4 However, the Surrealists’ basic assumption that liberation should be achieved at a collective level involved structural changes that targeted the human psyche, but their success could only be measured if they produced effects in the outside world, at the level of society. This attitude explains many aspects of the history of Surrealism, namely the group’s paradoxical ideas concerning revolution and political engagement throughout the history of the movement. The revolutionary, liberating element of Surrealist thought was doubled by a growing interest in direct political engagement, symbolically suggested by the title of their periodical Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution, 1930–1933), then by a gradual drawing away from direct political action, while retaining nevertheless the movement’s initial claim on having a social impact. The ideas of post-World War II Surrealism that I will explore in this article were formulated in a quite complicated historical context in which intellectuals were expected to find answers to the radical questions raised by the war. For the Surrealists, the dispersion of the group members to Northern and Southern America during World War II and the lack of direct contact between colleagues and friends resulted in an increased urge to re-establish lost connections and to search for new channels of communication. The founding of Cause as a secretariat of the international Surrealist movement in 1947 was motivated by an extraordinary flow of information from and towards Paris in the post-war cultural climate. Cause was an action bureau with a secretarial team consisting of three members: Sarane Alexandrian, Georges Henein and Henri Pastoureau. It had the job of coordinating manifestations of world-wide interest in Surrealism, it issued pamphlets, and the members elaborated a questionnaire of eight questions for those who wanted to join the Surrealist movement.5 During the war years and during his American exile, André Breton sought to reshape human mentality with his Surrealist methods, and he was hoping for a renewal, trying to mark this change also at a ritual level, considering that to understand the “latent content” of an age is just as important as dealing with its “manifest content” – a remark that he formulated initially before the war, in 1938. The international Surrealist exhibition

4  Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 792–793. 5  Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, trans. Gordon Clough, London 1970, 194.



The Non-Oedipal Android 

 447

organised in Galerie Maeght in 1947 was of great importance for Breton, marking his return to the French art scene, and also a reassertion of Surrealism that was challenged at that time quite strongly by communists and by existentialists in France. Alyce Mahon recently interpreted the goals of the exhibition as follows: They responded to the horrors of the war by bringing together an international field of artists, the art of the insane and non-western art, to insist upon the need for creative rebirth. Through display and installation, a thematic focus on myth and magic, and lengthy essays in the accompanying catalogue, the exhibition reflected Breton’s determination, explained in 1941, to turn to Eros as a means of “re-establishing that equilibrium” broken by the war. The 1947 exhibition marked surrealism’s re-entry to French culture and its belief that art and the exhibition should act as a forum within which the spectator could be initiated into a new world vision.6

In fact, one of Surrealism’s means of legitimating itself in this specific post-World War II situation was to acknowledge its increasingly international character. Consequently, ideas developed by foreign surrealists became not only interesting but also essential for the renewal of Surrealist practice and theory. Ideas such as renewing the concept of man through non-oedipal love or through the construction of the “non-oedipal android”, and experiments dealing with “objectively offered objects”, seemed challenging for Breton and for some of the young French Surrealists as well (among them Sarane Alexandrian, secretary of Cause). They developed in fact new, sometimes more radical formats for previous Surrealist ideas and practices. The focus of this article is directed towards the utopian character of these concepts and practices, trying to examine how, in the group members’ vision, a Surrealist (or non-oedipal) way of life offered an alternative for the present and its historical circumstances, trying to resist any kind of “domination of the real”.

The Eupsychia of the Bucharest Surrealist Group: The Freudo-Marxist Approach and the Concept of Non-Oedipus The group activities of the Romanian surrealists (Gherasim Luca, Dolfi Trost, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu, Gellu Naum) began in 1940, when two of its founding members, Gherasim Luca (1913–1994) and Gellu Naum (1915–2001), returned from

6  Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968, London 2005, 109.

448 

 Imre József Balázs

Paris where they had worked as journalists and pursued artistic and theoretical research, being in permanent contact with Surrealist painters Victor Brauner and Jacques Hérold. By the time of its founding, all members of the group had already published in Romanian avant-garde magazines and in revolutionary newspapers of the time. Surrealism was present in Romania from the 1920s, chiefly in the avant-garde magazine unu (One), although its authors did not claim to have the status of an official Surrealist group or to have joined Surrealism as a movement. In fact, the “second generation of Romanian Surrealists” as they are called sometimes were the initiators of genuine Surrealist research in Romania, in the sense that Breton and his comrades understood the term. Their theories, texts and visual artworks were much appreciated in post-World War II Surrealism, and were acknowledged as innovative interpretations and reinterpretations of Surrealist ideas and themes. Besides the publication of the collection Infra-Noir in Bucharest (in French)7 their most notable achievement on the international scene was probably their presence in the catalogue of the 1947 international Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Maeght, with a collective text called “Le sable nocturne” (Nocturnal Sand). For the Surrealist authors of the Bucharest group their utopia meant a social change, but for them, this implied also inventing new desires. The dynamic activity of this group shows that they were quite actively involved in theoretical debate that had political implications in Romania during the war and immediately after, but also had a more general, philosophical level. In their best known manifesto, written in 1945, “Dialectique de la dialectique”, Gherasim Luca and Trost (1916–1966) argued in favour of transcending humanity’s past and its mnemonic support in memory, in order to create the possibility of inventing new desires. To achieve this, the authors affirmed the necessity of standing in opposition to the outer limitations of nature and to the inner limitations of the Oedipus complex as well. The main conclusion formulated in “Dialectique de la dialectique” is: Surrealism should be maintained in a continually revolutionary state – by perpetuating the method of negation and negation of the negation. The authors affirm: “We reject humanity’s past in its entirety, as well as its mnemonic support in memory, recognising our desires not simply as the projection of fundamental needs but also those we must labour to invent”.8 This radical attitude resembles in many

7  See: Monique Yaari (ed.), “Infra-noir”, un et multiple: Un groupe surréaliste entre Bucarest et Paris, 1945–1947, Bern 2014. 8  Gherasim Luca and D. Trost, “Dialectics of the Dialectic”, in: Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (eds), Surrealism Against the Current, London 2001, 32–41, here 36.



The Non-Oedipal Android 

 449

ways the original claims of the avant-garde within the context of Italian Futurism. In Surrealist terms, however, eradicating the past is not about praising new technologies or leaving behind old concepts of beauty, but rather about the need to invent new mythologies to replace old and aggressive myths. This is a recurrent idea in Breton’s work in the late 1930s and the 1940s. The Bucharest Surrealists, in agreement with Breton, consider convulsive love to be a general, subversive “method” – which should have also social implications: “the unlimited eroticisation of the proletariat constitutes the most precious promise […], a real revolutionary development”.9 Inventatorul iubirii (The Inventor of Love), another work by Gherasim Luca from this period also deals with the destiny of the proletarians: here we can see that Luca adopts in fact a position that is close to radical Freudo-Marxism. The question of love and social revolution are strongly connected: Because I reject the precarious existence of man in all its aspects, I see the question of liberating man linked to the simultaneity of solutions, and nobody should tell me things like social revolution should be made before the moral revolution etc., these jumps of man into his own destiny should solve all of the claims of that very moment, because a married proletarian or one who admires his father, leaving to do his own revolution, will bring with him the microbes of family and any such revolution is doomed to fail.10

Such ideas have their own very specific context in the Romanian avant-garde, Gherasim Luca being a great admirer and disciple of the avant-garde author Geo Bogza who was famous during the thirties for his nonconformist representations of sexuality, being convicted for pornography on a couple of occasions. Another important context, however, can be identified in Wilhelm Reich’s works published in the 1930s, milestones of Freudo-Marxism in a scientific sense (Reich’s works were popularised in Romanian newspapers by a future member of the Bucharest Surrealist group, Paul Păun.)11 Nevertheless, we can identify elements of fusion between the two systems of thought also earlier on, in the works of Breton and other Surrealists. As a monograph about the history of utopian thinking points out, “[i]n many ways Freud’s was the most trenchant and devastating attack on utopian illusions […] that had ever been delivered”.12 The roots of Marxism in Saint-Simonian and

9  Luca and Trost, “Dialectics of the Dialectic”, 37. 10  Gherasim Luca, Inventatorul iubirii, Cluj Napoca 2003, 236. All translations from sources in Romanian and French are by the author of the article. 11  Iulian Toma, Gherasim Luca ou l’intransigeante passion d’être, Paris 2012, 211. 12  Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 788.

450 

 Imre József Balázs

Fourierist schools made it possible though to deconstruct the bourgeois family structure and establish a sexual utopia: Instead of a future civilization resting on heightened instinctual repression, [Reich] preached an apotheosis of the body in all its parts and a worship of the orgasm. Immediate radical sexual emancipation was for him a prerequisite to the achievement of a victorious social revolution; otherwise the potentially militant masses, enthralled by the repressive psychological forces of the Oedipal family structure, would be inhibited from active political rebellion. The two most important nineteenth-century, pre-Marxist utopian schools, the Saint-Simonian and the Fourierist, had intimately coupled free sexuality with work needs, but this bond had been neglected by the Victorian-Kaiser Wilhelm Marxists. Reich’s original Sexualpolitik, which did more violence to Freud than to Marx, was an authentic return to the older tradition.13

It is quite clear how “Dialectique de la dialectique” and Inventatorul iubirii develop the same ideas about total freedom of body, mind and of the social self: the idea of the “eroticisation of the proletariat”, and the criticism directed to the married proletarian infested with “the microbes of family”, or to the one who admires his father, shows a Freudo-Marxist position. In contrast to Reich, Gherasim Luca’s discourse is much more dynamic not least because it takes on a literary form instead of the theoretical and much more scientific approach of Reich. The oedipal dimension of life is, according to Luca and Trost something that can be reduced to general, conceptually stabilised notions. Therefore they see oedipal existence as an act of surrendering to what we usually consider to be “nature” or “the natural”. Consequently, their revolt is also a revolt against nature: “we wish to dialecticise and make concrete the utopian attempts at human resistance against nature”.14 The non-oedipal person implies transforming the human form into something that has no form of its own, into an object in a continuous, free formation. The means of transcending the given state of things is declared to be love – but not any kind of love. It is clear that this “method” is of Surrealist origin, and it contains but is not reduced to Freudo-Marxism’s ideas about sexual freedom. The unexpected forms and objects of desire are essential to the theories of the Bucharest Surrealists. We know from Luca’s book Inventatorul iubirii that this kind of love as a liberating force must be invented every day – and not discovered. Discovery would mean a much more passive attitude, while invention implies activity. In this

13  Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 793. 14  Luca and Trost, “Dialectics of the Dialectic”, 37.



The Non-Oedipal Android 

 451

theory, love and the loved one consist of fragments, and fragments become essential – there is a visual counterpart of this in Luca’s career, the procedure called cubomania, a specific type of collage invented by him. In fact, these are collages in which found images are reconfigured into grids, the result being a certain type of formal economy that makes it “one of the most theoretically-driven examples of surrealist representation”.15 As Luca defines it, “cubomania is the instantaneous ocular correspondent of our attitude towards the external world, an attitude consisting of the refusal to consider the axiomatic human condition as an objective reality, even in its apparently immutable aspects”.16 As we can see, Oedipus is a synonym for the axiomatic human condition in this theory, framing in addition to the sexual condition of human beings also their social condition, and – what is essential from a Surrealist point of view – their desires. Inventing new desires is possible only if man arrives into a non-oedipal existence, a sort of eupsychia that has social implications. The specificity of this eupsychia consists of its violent attitude, converging with the revolutionary character of Surrealist theories that consider the attacks against the rigidity of society and the axioms of nature inevitable. Cubomania is about reformulated identities and about the possibility of representing them: just like many other types of Surrealist collage, these images were designed to reveal latent unconscious configurations of the source image (that involved a human presence in most of Luca’s works), the technique of cutting and dismembering aiming at the dissolution of hierarchies and oedipal meanings. In a letter written to Victor Brauner in 1946, Luca described his works as a never-ending reconstructing and redefining process, as an attempt to open new directions for desire, rescuing it from its oedipal past, in order to reclaim “the tempting image of that love object which finally ceases to be a ready-made object […] so as to become the perpetual aphrodisiac of an object to be made, to be remade, to do anything”.17 This radical reconfiguration of identities and the acknowledgement of a wider range of legitimate desires distantiates the non-oedipal utopia of Luca and Trost from Freudo-Marxist theories of Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm or Herbert Marcuse, while retaining also the main connecting elements (“eroticisation of the proletariat”). Rupture, dismemberment, references to clinical conditions, the imagery of

15  Krzysztof Fijalkowski, “La Poésie sans langue: Gherasim Luca, Visual Poet”, in: Hyperion, 7, 2013, no. 3, 6–44, here 32. 16  Gherasim Luca, “Cubomanies”, in: Gherasim Luca and D. Trost, Présentation de graphies colorées, de cubomanies et d’objets, Bucharest 1945, n.p. 17  Quoted by: Fijalkowski, “La Poésie sans langue”, 34.

452 

 Imre József Balázs

the “robotic”, of the machine may be considered elements that relate the works of the Romanian Surrealists to later theories developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their L’Anti-Œdipe (Anti-Oedipus). An unpublished manifesto written by Luca in this period, “Androide contre androgyne”, speaks about the myth of a non-oedipal android as opposed to the “classical android”, but also to the oedipal androgyn.18 The author attempts to bring all these theoretical considerations, deeply rooted in the theories of Surrealism and psychoanalysis, to a new stage, carefully examining the possible connections between the concepts. In Inventatorul iubirii, the loved woman herself has to be invented every day, and has to be constructed from parts (as in a cubomania). The hand that touches her has to be invented again. All these paradoxical and utopian “techniques” are elements of the revolt against nature. If nature pushes mankind into an axiomatic human condition, then inventing also means escaping “nature” and “the natural”. When describing his “inventions”, Luca refers to artificiality: “From this non-oedipal position of existence […] I hear with unacoustic ears, I touch with insensitive, artificial, invented hands the thighs of the woman whose perfume I cannot smell”.19 In Androide contre androgyne Luca seems to develop the idea of artificiality, and speaks about the myths of the androgyn (which is an ancient, Oedipean myth), the classical android (that transformed an object into something resembling man), and the non-oedipal android that could serve in the construction of the new myth of love and transform the human form into something that has no form of its own, into an object in a continuous, free formation. It is continuously reinvented.20 In this sense, the concept of the android interferes in fact with concepts of the “new man”, radicalising the self-invented character of this creature, and seeing the possibility of its freedom in its continuous formation and re-formation. This way, desires retain their “productive” characteristics. This is one of the major points where Luca’s non-oedipal theories can be connected to those of Deleuze and Guattari about Anti-Oedipus: The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theatre was substituted for the unconscious as factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the uncon-

18  See: Toma, Gherasim Luca, 204–205. 19  Luca, Inventatorul iubirii, 232. 20  Toma, Gherasim Luca, 204.



The Non-Oedipal Android 

 453

scious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself – in myth, tragedy, dreams – was substituted for the productive unconscious.21

The “schizoanalysis” of Deleuze and Guattari is opposed in L’Anti-Œdipe to psychoanalysis, and seeks for the experience of breakthrough, in connection with the discovery of the “deterritorialised” flows of desire, while seeing concepts like Family, Church, Nation, Party as representing oedipalised territoriality.22 Michel Foucault’s interpretation of L’Anti-Œdipe starts with a reference to Wilhelm Reich’s Freudo-Marxism and to Surrealism,23 but shows also how Deleuze and Guattari distantiate themselves from their sources of inspiration, through “games and snares scattered throughout the book”, trying to neutralise the effects of power linked to their own discourse. For Luca, Trost and their comrades, as I have shown above, leaving behind the boundaries of social conditions, of morality, of “normal” sexuality, was essential to experience the freedom articulated by Surrealist theories, and crossing these boundaries meant also to leave behind conventional language, and also conventional connections within strings of signification that were present in the dream interpretations and in the therapy of classical psychoanalysis.

The Concreteness of Dreams In Vision dans le cristal (1945), the other major theoretician of the Bucharest Surrealist group, Dolfi Trost, criticised Freudian dream theories. In his approach, to neglect the manifest content means to reduce all interpretations of dreams to a directly utilitarian aspect, which also means that a sophisticated imagery would be reduced to support a very few general laws. From the Surrealist perspective, this manner of interpretation means that the therapy, when trying to show to the dreamers that social reality is opposed to the fulfilment of their desires, suggests in fact that they should reduce the intensity of their desires or they should abandon them. But this logic also means that the other possible option (promoted by Luca, Trost and their comrades), to change “social reality” itself, is excluded by Freudian therapy.

21  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis 2000, 24. 22  Mark Seem, “Introduction”, in: Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xv–xxiv, here xvii. 23  Michel Foucault, “Preface”, in: Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xi–ixv, here xii.

454 

 Imre József Balázs

Freud tended to treat the manifest content of a dream as a mere substitute for the latent content, this latter being much more important and interesting for him. Those who criticised Freud’s method of dream interpretation often started by deconstructing this view and emphasising the importance of the manifest content. But perhaps none of them went as far as Trost who, being interested in the concrete, material dimensions of the dream, and assuming from the start that the manifest content of dreams is erotic in itself, suggested another, poetic route to get closer to the meaning of dreams, implying the surrealist concept of objective hazard: one of the tools for his technique called “obsessional oneiromancy” was a knife: As in analysis, I resumed each symptomatic sentence, but instead of putting it in a mnesic association of ideas, I opened a handbook of erotic pathology at random, with a knife, considering the text I chanced upon to be the interpretation of the sentence read earlier. I saw in this oneiromancy a means of linking the dream to the outer world, and in its obsessively erotic aspect a palpable way to find its latent sexual content.24

The use of chance as an interpretative gesture (or to be more precise: instead of an interpretative gesture) may be seen as a return to Dadaist techniques, but in fact, within the context of the auto-analysis that the author proposed, it can be seen as a route that avoids the rationalisations and repetitions that Freud could not or did not want to avoid. With his knife, Trost radicalised in fact the direct meaning of dreams, assuming that consciousness interferes with the understanding and with the perception of dreams, further action being needed to eliminate “reactionary daytime traces” from dreams. Deleuze and Guattari summarised the importance of Trost’s vision as follows: Trost reproaches Freud with having neglected the manifest content of dreams for the benefit of a unified theory of Oedipus, with having failed to recognize the dream as a machine for communication with the outside world, with having fused dreams to memories rather than to deliriums, with having constructed a theory of the compromise that robs dreams as well as symptoms of their inherent revolutionary significance. He exposes the action of the repressors or regressors in their role as representatives of “the reactionary social elements” that insinuate themselves into dreams by the help of associations originating in the preconscious and that of screen memories originating in waking life. Now these associations do not belong to dreams any more than do the memories; that is precisely why the dream is forced to treat them symbolically. Let there be no mistake, Oedipus exists, the associations are always Oedipal, but precisely because the mechanism on which they depend is the same as for Oedipus. Hence, in order to retrace the dream thought, which shares a common lot with sleepwalking insofar as they both undergo the action of distinct repressors, it is nec-

24  D. Trost, Vision dans le cristal, Bucarest 1945, 14.



The Non-Oedipal Android 

 455

essary to break up the associations. To this end, Trost suggests a kind of à la Burroughs cut-up, which consists in bringing a dream fragment into contact with any passage from a textbook of sexual pathology, an intervention that reinjects life into the dream and intensifies it, instead of interpreting it, that provides the machinic phylum of the dream with new connections.25

While Luca tried to avoid oedipal actions and interpretations through inventing new desires and new types of love, we can see how Trost attempted to do so choosing another road already explored by Surrealists: the one inspired by dreams. In Vision dans le cristal, dreams meet objective chance in a very specific manner, opening up the discussions about the manifest content of dreams that seem to be of a much greater variety than the types of latent content analysed by Freud. Pre-established significations are avoided in Trost’s work through chance, and consequently the novelty of the dream content, a possible source of inspiration for new desires, is preserved. Dreams seem to be able to “cut up” reality and to rearrange it much like Luca’s entire production of cubomania.

The Surrealist Politics of Impersonal Creativity It is important, finally, to examine the direct political implications of the group activity of the Romanian Surrealists, in order to understand their relationship to political ideologies and utopias. The existence of the group was clandestine during World War II in Romania because of the Jewish origin of three of the five group members, but also because of the revolutionary reputation of Surrealism at that time. Individual and collective publications of the group were edited only after 1945, but the communist turn in Romanian politics after 1947 forced the group members to cease all kind of group activity and identification with Surrealism. By then, Socialist Realism became the only official cultural trend of the new regime. Let us briefly consider the political activity of the Bucharest Surrealists before the founding of the group: although Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, and even Gellu Naum had in their past episodes when they turned to communism and/or revolutionary culture26 (during the period when the French Surrealists themselves served the revolution, in the 1930s), their stay in Paris in the late 1930s led them

25  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines”, in: F. Guattari, Chaosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, Los Angeles 2009, 101–102. 26  See: Stelian Tănase (ed.), Avangarda românească în arhivele Siguranţei, Iaşi 2008.

456 

 Imre József Balázs

to adopt political positions closer to Victor Brauner, André Breton – and Lev Trotskii. This influenced their writing. In his book about the connections between early Soviet revolutionary literature and Socialist Realism, Evgeny Dobrenko presents the idea of impersonal creativity as an important stage on the road towards Socialist Realism.27 In fact, the idea of impersonal creativity was shared by several streams of avant-garde and revolutionary culture. The Dada movement in Zürich is already a decisive step on the road to impersonal creativity. During the first two decades of the 20th Century the group activities of all streams of avant-garde, the multiple authors of Surrealist texts and artworks, the abstract, impersonal concepts behind cubism or constructivism seriously undermined the subjectivist views on art. Lautréamont’s aphorism “Poetry must be made by all, not by one”, rediscovered and recontextualised by the Surrealists, was an idea that could as easily have come from the Proletkult or RAPP. When invited to take part in the 1947 Surrealist exhibition, a key suggestion of the Bucharest group was anonymity and collectivity: their text submitted to the Catalogue of the exhibition, “Le sable nocturne”, was an example of this. However, Socialist Realism, in its functionality, and partially in its content, offered a much more limited version of collectivity and anonymity, which did not suit the Surrealists, even though both movements were concerned with changing everyday life. As Evgeny Dobrenko points out: Socialist Realism is a normative aesthetic of a particular kind. It is an aesthetic norm promoted “into life” – and this is where its specific nature should be sought. This norm does not define “creativity”, as is usually done, but rather the situation of creativity itself. […] The stylistic consequence of such activity is not aesthetics, but life itself, in the sense that “life-building” does not leave a place for the creative act as traditionally understood.28

Even if avant-garde theories themselves tried to de-aestheticise art, one of their essential goals being to abolish the traditional borders between art and life, their approach produced different effects compared to Socialist Realism, most probably because they saw the global structure into which their art (and their life) should be integrated differently. As we have seen, for Luca and Trost the alternative to Socialist Realism was the concept of the non-oedipal man. The difference between the “new man” of Socialist Realism and their “non-oedipal man” is quite evident. Although the “new man” is also defined in contrast with the past, he can be described a ­ ccording

27  Evgeny Dobrenko, Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories, trans. Jesse M. Savage, Evanston 2005. 28  Dobrenko, Aesthetics of Alienation, 126.



The Non-Oedipal Android 

 457

to pre-established terms of heroic activity and political utopia. Non-Oedipus is a much more dynamic character and he does not obey to directives of a given political party. This difference was signalled quite clearly by the Romanian communist critics of the time, and consequently Surrealist activity was banned in the country after 1947.

Conclusions My article seeks to offer an inventory of the most intriguing and (within the field of international Surrealism) most successful concepts elaborated by the Bucharest Surrealist group immediately after World War II. I have argued that all these concepts (eroticisation of the proletariat, continuously reinvented love, the non-oedipal android, radicalising the manifest content of dreams) have utopian characteristics that are connected to a state of eupsychia. Romanian Surrealists hoped for the realisation of their utopia (an idea of absolute freedom), and they concentrated upon the inner revolution necessary to free all human beings, considering it inseparable from the social revolution. This Surrealist utopia had a specific context within international Surrealism, being acknowledged by André Breton and his young Surrealist comrades as an innovative and quite radical vision of the possibilities of Surrealism after World War II, but also had another, much more hostile context in postwar Romania, where Surrealist activity was seen with intensified suspicion. The postwar utopia of the Bucharest Surrealists was soon forgotten by their immediate posterity, but recent analysis shows that some of their ideas were developed later on into more complex theoretical structures, notably in L’Anti-Œdipe by Deleuze and Guattari, and also in postwar Freudo-Marxism. In a detailed analysis concerning the “influence of Surrealism on psychoanalysis”, Paolo Scopelliti argues convincingly that the dialogue between Surrealism and psychoanalysis functioned in both directions during the past Century, and the theoretical contribution of the Bucharest Surrealists to psychoanalysis and “schizoanalysis” is carefully examined.29 The growing interest of scholars in the activity of the Bucharest group seems to prove that their eupsychia is still considered to be inspiring for new generations facing new types of control of their freedom.

29  Paolo Scopelliti, L’Influence du surréalisme sur la psychanalyse, Lausanne 2002, 134–161.

Per Stounbjerg

From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City Jens August Schade’s Utopian Eroticism between Surrealism, Situationism and Popular Culture “Surrealism will carry through the psycho-materialist revolution by wakening up our drives and instincts”. With this declaration Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, a major figure in the promotion of Surrealism in Denmark, concluded his book Surrealismen [Surrealism].1 Sexual liberation was a turning point in his utopian dreams of a new mankind emerging from a close collaboration between communism, Surrealism and psychoanalysis. He saw Surrealism as a revolutionary movement building on eroticism as the purest and strongest human power.2 Erotic utopianism has often been under suspicion of leading to decadent deviations from a political confrontation with more pressing social problems – and from serious artistic work. The communist parties welcomed neither the sexual politics of Wilhelm Reich, who stayed in Scandinavia in exile and inspired Bjerke-Petersen, nor the erotic investigations of Surrealism; fundamentally they saw a focus on sexuality as a distraction from the class struggle.3 The strong accentuation of sexual liberation was controversial within the avant-gardes as well and, for example, led to the exclusion of Bjerke-Petersen from the linien group. Utopian eroticism however remained associated with Danish Surrealism. This is certainly the case with Jens August Schade (1903–1978), whom Bjerke-Petersen in his book listed as one of two or three Danish surrealist authors. Schade, who was already an established poet, was taken in by the Danish avantgarde. His poems were printed in magazines like linien, Helhesten, and Cobra, and two novels also circulated in the international avant-gardes: Kommode-Tyven (The Thief of the Chest of Drawers, 1939, partly translated in Le Surréalisme révolutionnaire),4 and Mennesker mødes og sød Musik opstaar i Hjertet (People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart, 1944). The French 1947 translation of the latter

1  Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, Copenhagen 1934, 69. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine. 2  Bjerke-Petersen, Surrealismen, 34. 3  See for example: Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité, Paris 1971, 40–41. 4  Jens August Schade, “Le voleur de commodes ou l’amour immortel”, in: Le Surréalisme révolutionnaire 1, 1948, 34–35. Reprint: Brussels 1999.

460 

 Per Stounbjerg

led to a spectacular Schadist movement – and was widely read in the circles of Lettrism. Schade’s works are the prism through which I discuss negotiations of utopian eroticism ranging from Surrealism to Schadism, Situationism and the marketing of risky Scandinavian liberalism in the 1960s.

Cosmic and Collective Eroticism In Denmark, Schade is canonised as a prolific writer of poetry, most of all dealing with erotic motifs – and describing the bohemian lifestyle which made him into a public myth. The flipside of the coin is that his experimental works, especially a group of small and strange plays and novels from the 1930s and 1940s,5 have been reduced to eccentric gestures rather than avant-garde manifestations. In all these books, Schade suspends narrative progression in favour of descriptions of networks of barrier-breaking erotic contacts ranging from incestuous love affairs to global promiscuity – and from corporeal to imaginary or even telepathic encounters. Electricity is a recurrent metaphor for a collective libido transcending time and place and transgressing official moral standards. Crimes and perversions abound, and yet the overall feeling is one of euphoric happiness. All novels rewrite a cosmic and cosmopolitan utopia of erotic love, culminating in Mennesker mødes og sød Musik opstaar i Hjertet, whose title could be their formula. Even before Henning Carlsen’s 1967 film, which led to a new wave of translations, this was Schade’s internationally most successful novel. In Denmark it had been a succès de scandale. In spite of its poetical tone, lack of bodily details and vulgar language, critics and even several newspaper editorials warned against the publication as pornographic speculation.6 The novel closest to the avant-garde movements, and aesthetically the most radical, is, however, Kommode-Tyven. Asger Jorn, the later Cobra artist and co-founder of the Situationist movement, made drafts for illustrations7 and

5  Jens August Schade, Myggestikket eller Himlens Hævn, Copenhagen 1931; Den himmelske Elskov paa Jorden, Copenhagen 1931; En mærkelig Aften i Verdens Historie, Copenhagen 1933; Én eneste stor Hemmelighed, Copenhagen 1937; Kommode-Tyven eller Udødelig Kærlighed, Copenhagen 1939; Verdenshistorier, Copenhagen 1940; Mennesker mødes og sød Musik opstaar i Hjertet, Copenhagen 1944 (English translation: People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart, trans. C. Malmberg, New York 1969); Jeg er tosset efter dig eller Mordet paa Cuxton Slot, Copenhagen 1945. 6  See: Virtus Schade, Den lyse digter Schade, Copenhagen 1963, 50–53. 7  See: Klaus Müller-Wille, “From Word-Pictures to the Wild Architecture of the Book: Asger Jorn’s Early Book Art (1933–1952)”, in: Sven Bjerkhof and Dorthe Aagesen (eds), Asger Jorn Restless Rebel, Copenhagen 2014, 94–107.



From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City 

 461

brought about the Surréalisme révolutionnaire version. Kommode-Tyven linked utopian love with the political rhetoric of the avant-gardes. A trivial event, the theft of a chest of drawers associated with Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution, leads to public upheavals and worldwide erotic mass convulsions including the thief’s simultaneous corporeal contacts with women in Denmark, France and America. The theft is described (most of all by an exaggerated fictive newspaper voice) as a revolutionary action “IN THE SERVICE OF THE NEW SOCIETY” with the thief himself as the “great spirit who creates history”. The basis of this new society is, however, sexual rather than socialist: an erotic collectivism. “You are abolishing private property. The ownership of one’s own wife”, a possessive man laments.8

Surrealist Impulses Schade’s eroticism linked him with Surrealism. He was part of the networks around linien, and contemporary reviews as well as later literary history have read him in that perspective.9 Schade actually did adopt impulses from French Surrealism. Like Breton, he cherished fantasy, dream and erotic desire as transgressions of Western rationality.10 A key concept is the unconscious: “THE THIEF OF THE DRAWERS AND ALL THE REST OF US ARE WINDS WHICH MOVE IN A STATE OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS ACROSS THE EARTH, since we only know a little part of our consciousness”.11 Here, the collective unconscious is most of all

8  Schade, Kommode-Tyven, 69, 78, 47. 9  See for example the review of a 1944 collection of poems: “Schade is in the power of his surrealist inspiration and seems to write in a sort of trance. […] He is without artistic taste, waking, grown-up and organised reason, it seems”. Frederik Schyberg, “Inspireret Lyriker og lallende Barn”, in: Politiken, 15 May 1944, 7. Another reviewer spoke of “Dadaist pornography” (Marinus Børup, “Litteraturhistorisk Pionérarbejde”, in: Jyllands-Posten, 25 February 1946, 4). He did so with reference to Frederiksen who characterised Schade as the only Danish writer continuing the Dadaism and Surrealism of the 1920s, but alas in a hideous form and maniacally obsessed with sex (Emil Frederiksen, Ung dansk Litteratur 1930–1945, Copenhagen 1945, 75, 84). I do not take for granted that Schade was or saw himself as a Surrealist, but he was positioned as such by the often critical reviews, by literary historiography trying to construct Surrealism in Denmark – and he was appropriated by the Danish Surrealist movement. 10  Sometimes he even borrowed Surrealist terminology; in Mennesker mødes he thus uses Breton’s notion of écriture automatique to describe a sort of telepathic effect: “to let her write to me, as if she were using my hand as a sort of radio-controlled teletype printer or by automatic writing as it is called”. Schade, People Meet, 167. 11  Schade, Kommode-Tyven, 55.

462 

 Per Stounbjerg

a libidinal force creating telepathic eroticised correspondences and synchronicities across the globe.12 The central instrument to achieve this effect is a sort of hasard objectif: accidental real or imagined encounters. The aimless wanderings and unexpected chance encounters connect Schade with a fundamental form of experience in prose works by male Surrealist authors such as André Breton’s Nadja and Louis Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris. Here the strange correspondences are also quite often of an erotic kind creating a geography of desire with the streets as fields of experiment. During the late 1920s and the early 1930s sexuality played an increasingly important role in Surrealism.13 It was from the beginning included in the focus on the unconscious and the dream, on revolution, poetry and love, but now it was studied specifically, notably in Les Recherches sur la sexualité (1928–1932).14 Desire was seen as the basis of experience, and as a subversive force transgressing bourgeois normality. As Gauthier puts it with a re-writing of Breton’s aphorism: “revolution will be sexual, or it will not be”.15 As a transgressive force, sexuality had affinities to crime as well as madness. Overt references to sex still had pornographic shock effects, which were quite often reinforced by an accent on perversions, fetishism and violence – references to de Sade were frequent – and on the forbidden, the abject and repulsive. Within the Surrealist movement, this darker, destructive and destabilising side of sexuality was emphasised by, inter alia, Dalí, Bellmer, and the dissident circle around Georges Bataille and the Documents magazine,16 while André Breton remained closer to monogamous heterosexual normativity, but also to a utopian view of sexuality as a primordial force to be set free. Schade is indeed closest to a happy utopianism, and yet transgressions are prevalent. The novels are about desire that transcends cultural limits. In a drama,

12  The underground connections are sometimes taken literally as in the reference to a tunnel under the river Mersey: “yesterday I drove beneath the water through the tunnel, and I mentioned that sometimes things lie deep beneath our consciousness”. Schade, Jeg er tosset efter dig, 128. 13  See: Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité; Jennifer Mundy and Dawn Ades (eds), Surrealism: Desire Unbound, London 2001; Natalya Lusty, “Surrealist Masculinities: Sexuality and the Economies of Experience”, in: Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet (eds), Modernism and Masculinity, New York 2014, 103–121. 14  English translation in: José Pierre (ed.), Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928–1932, London and New York 1992. 15  Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité, 36. 16  For a description of the controversies within the Surrealist movement, see for example Maurice Nadeau’s description of “The Crisis of 1929” in: The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard, London 1968, 154–165.



From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City 

 463

which Schade due to moral concerns was forced to withdraw from the market right after its publication, a daughter commits a strongly sexualised suicide with her father’s dagger (which is described as sinking his sable into her “delicious body parts”).17 Even apart from such blatantly Freudian imagery, desire is closely connected to crime, violence and death, sadomasochism is frequent, and so are references to baseness, dirt and defilement. Among the main characters of the novels are several gangsters, and crimes abound reaching from the theft of the drawers (because a prostitute wants it for her silky pants) to murder committed in a state of hypnotised trance. As contemporary reviews show, this transgressive side of Schade’s eroticism prevented him from being integrated into Danish mainstream culture. On the other hand, even criminal transgressions are described in a light and poetic, dreamlike tone far from Bataille’s nightmarish excesses. They are still part of a euphoric vision of all-encompassing cosmic love. This remarkable positivity led one critic to characterise Schade as a “happy Baudelaire”.18 For some decades, a key question in the scholarly reception of Surrealism’s erotic visions has been the place of women. The dominant perspective in the early years of Surrealism was male. Women were placed in an almost utopian position: “The Surrealists conceived of woman as man’s mediator with nature and the unconscious, femme-enfant, muse, source and object of man’s desire, embodiment of amour fou, and emblem of revolution”.19 The backside of this idealisation was a reduction of women to passive screens for male projections20 and a marginalisation of women as artistic subjects. Women were represented “as sites of desire more than as subjects of desire”.21 This was quite often reinforced by a het-

17  Schade, Myggestikket, 28. 18  Poul Borum, Danish Literature: A Short Critical Survey, Copenhagen 1979, 77. 19  Gwen Raaberg, “The Problematics of Women and Surrealism”, in: Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (eds), Surrealism and Women, Cambridge and London 1991, 1–10, here 2. 20  The passive role included women as (especially pictorial) objects of mutilating violence (see for example: Mary Ann Caws, “Seeing the Surrealist Woman: We are a Problem”, in: Caws et al. (eds), Surrealism and Women, 11–16; Rudolf Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny”, in: Caws et al. (eds), Surrealism and Women, 17–26). Even without restoring humanist ideals of the whole and closed human body or norms of realist representation one must pay attention to the predominance of disfigured female bodies. In a fine essay, Elisabeth Oxfeldt (“Headless Women: Vilhelm Krag’s and Jens August Schade’s Neoromanticist and Surrealist Representations of Female Bodies”, in: edda, 106, 2006, no. 2, 131–149) reads Kommode-Tyven in a similar perspective, but without proving that Schade actually makes women into dismembered victims of violent representations. My point would rather be that desire in his works moves from individualist humanism to a state of polymorphous perversity accentuating partial objects in men as well as women. 21  Hal Foster, “Violation and Veiling in Surrealist Photography: Woman as Fetish, as Shattered

464 

 Per Stounbjerg

eronormative celebration of the happy monogamous couple, notably by Breton. It is, however, worth stressing, as Ades for example points out,22 that Surrealism was no unity, and that Breton was not the only spokesman. In the enquiries into sexuality, for example, Aragon’s views were broader than those of Breton, and the movement included masculine anxieties, same sex desire and eventually quite a few female artists.

“One big multifarious haystack happiness”: Schade’s Polymorphous and Playful Erotic Visions What are then the characteristics of Schade’s utopian eroticism? The most striking feature is perhaps its positivity. In spite of crimes and perversions the general attitude favours the idyllic. Schade revitalises romantic ideas of love as a cosmic force which re-enchants everyday life. He gives those ideas a twist, makes them more explicitly sexual, and counter-balances spirituality by including the lower material bodily strata: “You can find poetry even in a piss-pot”.23 But women still represent sexuality which as a primordial force in a sort of female mysticism places them “in an intimate relation with the universe”.24 Stereotypes relating to sex and gender are abundant and include conventional images of femmes fatales. From a gender perspective, a considerable number of Schade’s poems are embarrassingly traditional expressions of a male subject with woman as the object of dreams and desires. Schade’s activation of stereotypes and discursive commonplaces was, however, not, or at least not always, naïve. The clichés are deliberately exaggerated and over-affirmed. Big cities like New York or Rio are characterised by their most well-known features, and so are nationalities. The gangsters seem to have stepped out of cheap pulp fiction and into some virtual quotation marks. Schade’s frequent use of italics is a way of signalling the element of pastiche. In a similar fashion, the settings and plots borrowed from genre fiction such as detective novels, the romantic commonplaces, and even the avant-garde utopian proclamations are on display as quoted discourses. The inherent irony is certainly benevolent, yet it creates a distance, which makes it possible for Schade to hover

Object, as Phallus”, in: Mundy and Ades (eds), Surrealism, 203–222, here 203. 22  Dawn Ades, “Surrealism, Male-female”, in: Mundy and Ades (eds), Surrealism, 171–196. 23  Schade, People Meet, 84. 24  Schade, Jeg er tosset efter dig, 136.



From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City 

 465

between cosmic visions and the comical attribution of world historical significance to a French commode. Neither the revolutionary rhetoric nor the male and female stereotypes should be taken at face value. By puncturing and rendering banal the pretentions of Surrealism as well as romanticism, Schade maintains a reflexive solidarity with their intentions. His ludic and humorous works are not deep modernist compositions, but playful experiments. Schade put stereotypes on display. But he also formulated radical visions of sexuality as a transgressive force challenging middle class normality. It is certainly not neat and decent. First and foremost the traditional monogamous couple, not to mention the family, is of no importance and most of all a temporary construction; romantic love may connect people across the oceans, but even the happiest marital relations seem to include a series of lovers. Promiscuity is universal. Crime and spirituality, the holy and the hideous, are closely related. Traditional oppositions between high and low, violence and tenderness, life and death, body and mind are suspended. “My heart is a sexual organ”, a police inspector suddenly sings.25 The agents behind these transgressions are most often women. In Schade’s plays and novels, women are not just passive objects. Most frequently they are the subjects of desire. They are active, sexually demanding and in control; the thief of the chest of drawers for example is a mechanical agent acting on the orders of his girlfriend rather than an unbound Prometheus, fighting to liberate mankind. Sometimes their positions have phallic qualities reversing the typical gender roles. Susi, the main character in Jeg er tosset efter dig is the one penetrating the policeman representing male order: “She then stuck out her tongue, and obediently he brought his mouth close to her tongue, and she thrust it into it and calmly placed it there”.26 More important is, however, that both sexes are most of all puppets operated by collective desire. The motor of the novels is desire itself, which in an invisible choreography distributes accidental encounters within libidinal networks. This choreography of desire lies behind the surrealist suspension of rational time and space. It creates an alternative global geography with the big iconic cities (Rio, New York, Marseille, Liverpool, Istanbul) along with Danish countryside as libidinous zones. At the same time it reduces persons to agents of desire. Sexuality thus suspends individuality; the protagonists are most of all interchangeable parts of a collective. Their weird and whimsical names (Dada, Fandango, Lucia Lucifer, Homunculus, Slim Slogan, Brooklyn Bruce) signal that they are ­stereotypes

25  Schade, Jeg er tosset efter dig, 165. 26  Schade, Jeg er tosset efter dig, 116–117. With a dubious sort of female empowerment this 1945 novel is on the back cover described as “[t]he book with the atom-bomb girls”.

466 

 Per Stounbjerg

rather than individuals. The subject itself is placed in quotation marks. The novels have no single experiencing centre, neither male nor female. Quite the contrary, Schade experiments with multiplying and reversing the perspectives by switching between persons, places, trifling material everyday objects, and a cosmic bird’s eye view of the bodies and minds of individual human subjects: “My hands were constantly moving around their ‘I’ or their ‘bodies’ as they call it here on earth”.27 In this multifocal collective eroticism, love and sexuality suspend the mental as well as bodily coherence of the human subject. Quite a few times, Schade orchestrates many-sided recombinations of men, women and even animals. Sexuality is in a Freudian sense polymorphous and perverse, focussing on partial objects rather than genitality: The quintessence of human happiness, the legs and arms and stomachs and waists and hips and breast and breasts and hands and heads and hairs of the thief of the chest of drawers and Fandango were tangled up in each other like the hay and straws of the stacks so that the different “straws” of the human “haystack” did no longer possess individual existence but made up one big multifarious haystack happiness […].28

In some of the novels, the sense of a decentred trans-individual unity is created by a fairground roundabout: And down at the ground the humans become one mass – breasts and fingers, legs and women waists melt together with men’s square-built shoulders and rectangular trousers. – It all becomes a wonderful whole […] there is connection between people – their tails are no more their own – they are attached to other people’s tails […] rapidly they send a bucket of joy, piety, hunger for pleasure, human wisdom, kisses, dirty memories, fantastic caresses, roaring madness, longing, ecstasy, greatness – over each other.29

The haystack and merry-go-round experiences are close to the quintessence of Schade’s erotic utopias. Sexuality itself is ubiquitous, polymorphous and decentred. Sexual intercourse is counter-balanced by a general eroticising of normally non-sexual parts of human life. Schade practises a pan-eroticism30 transcending heterosexual normativity (even though male homosexuality is one of the sexual

27  Schade, Én eneste stor Hemmelighed, 38. 28  Schade, Kommode-Tyven, 69–70. 29  Schade, Én eneste stor Hemmelighed, 11–12. 30  See: Frank Kjørup, “Mellem mand og kvinde. Det omvendte, panerotikken og Schade”, in: Kritik, 40, 2007, no. 185, 72–87.



From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City 

 467

variations which is never mentioned explicitly).31 Distinctions are blurred, even outside the human world: In unguarded moments, the stallions climb the back of the cows, because there are no other possibilities – but the farmers had not anticipated that, when they put up barriers between the animals […]. There is invisible attraction – a common band, a mutual feeling among the creatures – farmers pat their horses and look into their eyes before they part.32

Sometimes the transgressions require a careful reading. You can easily normalise Schade and overlook the equivocal implications of his writings, especially because he is himself so fond of stereotypes. The 1932 poem “Spring Morning” contains the following passage (loosely rendered): “musical women/ animals and men find each other under the roofs// in deathlike paleness – until they silent, feeble/ fall apart, humans and cats”.33 In an inattentive reading, this may be seen as men joining women, and cats joining cats, but read literally Schade includes same sex as well as inter-species erotic activities. His idylls are not always as simple as they seem. The self-relativising irony in combination with the decentred, multifocal point of view makes it possible for Schade to create visions extending from ridiculous pieces of bedroom furniture to images of a new, eroticised society. Some of his French followers actually tried to transform these ideas into a sort of practice. Their appropriation of Schade did, however, also imply a conventionalising of his visions.

Schadism and the Implementation of Utopia as Nudism One commentator on the French reception of Danish artists in 1951 stated that Jens August Schade had “a little band of noisy anarchists and nudists as his faithful admirers”.34 The well-received 1947 French translation of Mennesker mødes actually led to the formation of a new French movement, le Schadisme with clubs

31  For queer readings of Schade, see however: Kjørup, “Mellem mand og kvinde”; Frank Kjørup, “Jens August Schade og kunsten at skrive per vers”, in: Ole Karlsen (ed.), Krysninger. Om moderne nordisk lyrikk, Oslo 2008, 249–277. 32  Schade, Én eneste stor Hemmelighed, 15. 33  Jens August Schade, Jordens Ansigt, Copenhagen 1932, 49–50. 34  “Fransk Uvidenhed om Danmark”, in: Aarhuus Stifts-Tidende, 5 January 1951.

468 

 Per Stounbjerg

and public happenings.35 Due to its links to nudism, including the introduction of a naked Miss Schade in Franche Dimanche,36 part of the publicity around Schadism took place in the popular press, including men’s magazines. Here the group claimed to have thousands of members. Jens August Schade was not one of them; the group had no direct contact with him. On the other hand it behaved like one of the post-war avant-garde groups. It was a collective enterprise with artists as leading members; it was received as one of the new “isms”, but it also articulated a desire to develop alternative ways of life which would transcend the aesthetic field. In La Fille perpendiculaire, which bears the subtitle Initiation au Schadisme, Jean-Albert Foëx refers to the “archives” of the Schadist group and reprints newspaper cuttings which bear witness to the use of an avant-garde discourse including assault troops, action plans and rebellious intentions.37 Foëx’s own text is the closest I have come to a manifesto of Schadism. Most of all it celebrates individual freedom from all conventions (including collective political groups). Close to Schade (and to Surrealism) is the emphasis on the privileged moments when accidental meetings might occur. Openness to contact, friendship and eroticism are essential values. The culture of desire rather than sexual accomplishment is the ideal. Foëx goes along with a denunciation of Surrealism’s cult of the amoral and abnormal,38 and instead cherishes physical and mental health. Nakedness is sane and natural. When the protagonists Ellen and Walter are finally joined as a Schadist couple, they experience “an extraordinary feeling of purity”.39 This goes well with nudism – and with the idea of a quasi-religious initiation in Schadism. “Mr Schade does not agree”, Foëx admits.40 He is probably right. In most respects, his ideas normalised impulses deriving from Schade. Schade’s decentred and polymorphous pan-eroticism was transformed into a more fashionable easy living with a touch of libertinage. While by Schade beauty was most of all an erotic and spiritual quality, girls had to be well-formed to be part of Schad-

35  See for example: Virtus Schade, Den lyse digter Schade, 48–49; Virtus Schade, Schade i spejlet, Copenhagen 1978; Ib Permin, “En dansk digter og en ny litterær isme i Paris”, in: Vinduet, 1949, 344–347; Philippe Boggio, Boris Vian, Paris 1993, 243. The Danish 1967 edition of Mennesker mødes describes Schadism as still existent. 36  Sarane Alexandrian, Histoire de la littérature érotique, Paris 1989, 368. 37  Jean-Albert Foëx, La Fille perpendiculaire: Initiation au Schadisme, Paris 1949, 38–41. 38  Foëx, La Fille perpendiculaire, 216. 39  Foëx, La Fille perpendiculaire, 197, see also 211. 40  Foëx, La Fille perpendiculaire, 213.



From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City 

 469

ist groups. Perversions seem absent in Foëx’s cult of the sane. Schade’s visions reached from the cosmic to the low, aberrant and indecent; both sides are cut off by Foëx, and what is left is a rather conventional middle space. Self-relativising humour is replaced by didactic fiction. Schade’s function in Foëx’s text is most of all instrumental. Foëx appropriates Schade to position himself within a French cultural field – especially to legitimate his recurrent philosophical attacks on existentialism. The Schadist movement cannot, however, be reduced to Foëx’s ideas, many of which seem to be a result of his own ideological speculations. Its activities were not only artistic and discursive. Quite the contrary, the Schadists replaced Schade’s linguistic and rhetorical playfulness with action. They physically fought the existentialists, and they tried to carry out their utopia in reality by establishing nudist colonies (Schade would have found such an approach too heavy-handed). In 1948 the Magazine thus announced the establishment of a “love lab” at L’Ile du Levant (which was the final destination of the boat trip in La Fille perpendiculaire). The headline went “Laboratory of Love. Schadism Will Colonise L’Ile du Levant”.41 Schadism was described as a movement that aimed to revolutionise everyday life. Most interesting for the readers of a men’s magazine, Schadists were described as naturists who believed in the therapeutic qualities of the sun; the article was illustrated by a bikini-clad girl and a text asserting that to be a Schadist you have to be young and physically perfect. With “Schade” as a catalyst, surrealist impulses were reduced to wishful male fantasies. L’Ile du Levant was no desert island. It was – and is – the home of the nudist city Heliopolis, created by the doctors Gaston and André Durville in the early 1930s. Naturism was itself a utopian movement. It built upon medical ideas, but quite often it also had progressive and egalitarian utopian accents.42 Some of its gestures are reminiscent of the avant-garde movements. It is worth stressing that nudist utopias most often authorise themselves by being emphatically asexual. This is also the case when Foëx praises Walter’s natural way of seeing Ellen naked. Eventually Foëx, who had quite a colourful life spanning dubious activities during World War II to submarine archaeology in search of the lost Atlan-

41  V, 1948, no. 197 (11 July). 42  “In both its nostalgic and rationalist forms, nudism was a utopian movement. It was seen by many European writers in the late 1920s and the 1930s as a sign of the inevitable, healthy, scientific, liberal, democratic future to come”. Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy, Oxford and New York 2004, 167). See also: Ruth Barcan, “‘Regaining what Mankind has Lost through Civilisation’: Early Nudism and Ambivalent Moderns”, in: Fashion Theory, 8, 2004, no. 1, 63–82.

470 

 Per Stounbjerg

tis, became a spokesman of the nudist colony at L’Ile du Levant. In a historical overview from the annual naturist guide to the island, he compares nudism and Surrealism: You can draw a parallel between the influence of the surrealists and of the nudists. Now orthodox Surrealism is of no great importance, but it has profoundly put its stamp upon literature […]. The nudists have also played an important role in the liquidation of taboos, of aberrant conventions and morality […]. Today people practise Surrealism and naturism without knowing it.

The reason that nudism has dropped its ideological content is physical and sexual liberation and increased time for recreation.43 What were once avantgarde utopian investigations have become mainstream culture.

Situationism and the Utopia of Straying in the (Naked) City The integration of the avant-gardes, not least Surrealism, into mainstream culture was what the Situationists would soon call “recuperation”: a process where the system of media, advertisements and other representations let even radical art become just another of the spectacles keeping up modern capitalism. To avoid recuperation Situationists had to tear down the representations, not by art, but by subversive interventions. “Constructed situations” could open utopian glimpses of how social life could be organised around creative and playful collective participation. This presupposed human encounters: that people met. Urbanism was a keyword, as the main scene for the Situationist practices was modern city space. It should, however, be transformed and de-familiarised, for example by a systematic drifting, a dérive. The participants in the dérive drop their own instrumental plans and actions and let themselves be seduced by the encounters offered by the city. Guy Debord stressed the tactical use of drifting in an explicit opposition to the mystical chance encounters and correspondences of Surrealism.44

43  Jean-Albert Foëx, “Gide avec nous”, in: Le Guide naturiste 1961 de l’Ile du Levant, http:// www.iledulevanthodie.fr/search/fo%C3%ABx/ (accessed 25 April 2015). 44  See: Guy Debord, “Théorie de la dérive”, in: Internationale Situationniste, 1958, no. 2 (December); “Theory of the Dérive”, trans. Ken Knabb, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory. html (accessed 25 April 2015). The text was originally published in: Les Lèvres nues, 1956, no. 9 (November).



From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City 

 471

The practice of drifting was not far from Schade’s choreography and geography of desire. Actually, the non-hierarchical linkages between normally separated Parisian districts on Debord’s alternative map The Naked City (1957) could be a diagrammatic formalisation of Schade’s method in Mennesker mødes, with its abundance of contact zones offering chances to be led astray. It is certainly closer to Schade’s intentions than the normalising nudism in the popular promotions of Schadism. The Naked City has much in common with Schade’s decentred visions, and similarly Schade’s collective eroticism is quite close to Situationist ideas of a ludic and participatory community. The affinities are not just accidental. Due to the French translation (and to Asger Jorn’s efforts), Schade and especially Mennesker mødes were well-known in the circles around the Lettrists and the Situationists.45 In Internationale Situationniste Ivan Chtcheglov commented on the importance of Schade’s book: Since we are involved in a sumptuous potlatch, here is a title: “Des êtres se recontrent” by J.A. Schade, by far the greatest novel of the twentieth century […]. It ends with the little song “that we sang when we were children”: The rich, they go to market by carriage, The poor, they go by foot. Us, we amuse ourselves.46

Chtcheglov was the one who in the manifesto “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau” (Formula for a New Urbanism, 1953/1958) dreamt of a “continuous dérive”.47 Schade’s book may be one of the inspirations behind the concept of the dérive. De Vree quite radically suggests that Debord’s idea of the dérive is just a humourless version of Schade’s novel.48 One of the differences is actually Schade’s self-reflexive sense of fun in contrast to Debord’s serious political rigour. Maybe it is no coincidence that it is Chtcheglov and not Debord who from his asylum reminds the Situationists of Schade. Schade might be part of what

45  See: Libeo Andreotti, “Architecture and Play”, in: Tom McDonough (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, Cambridge, MA 2002, 213–240, here 239; Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde: Eine Geschichte der Situationistischen Internationale und der modernen Kunst, Hamburg 1990, 106. 46  Ivan Chtcheglov, “Lettres de loin”,  in: Internationale Situationniste, 1964, no. 9 (August). French original and English translation by Ken Knabb and Reuben Keehan at: http://debordiana. chez.com (accessed 25 April 2015). 47  Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov], “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau”, in: Internationale Situationniste, 1958, no. 1 (June). French original and English translation by Ken Knabb at: http:// debordiana.chez.com (accessed 25 April 2015). 48  Freddy de Vree et al., Wyckaert, Antwerp 1986, 68–69.

472 

 Per Stounbjerg

Donné sees as the obscured influence from Surrealism.49 Later French re-editions of Mennesker mødes by Debord’s publisher Le Champ Libre had Chtcheglov’s canonising remark printed on the inner cover.50

Coda: Non-Stop Sex: The Appropriation of Schade in Popular Culture. In the American 1969 edition it was Henry Miller who magnified Schade into “Scandinavia’s most significant writer”. Now the focus was no longer on Surrealism, Situationism or other avant-garde links. It was on sex. “Here is a novel neither for the prudish nor for the prurient. Here is a glorious celebration of human liberation and the infinite delights of the flesh”, the prelims announced.51 The reader’s attention was drawn to no other qualities of the book than “the unblushingly erotic games” people play. To emphasise this point the cover displayed stills from the Danish/Swedish 1967 film version with lots of naked skin. “The Danes have done it again. – See the electrifying movie”. The references to the movie place Schade’s book within a discourse of risky and daring Scandinavian liberalism: “The controversial novel – now a sensational movie from the producers of I am curious (yellow)”. This front cover allusion is to Vilgot

49  Donné’s point is that Chtcheglov for Debord came to represent the return of the repressed: Surrealism. It was Chtcheglov who introduced the idea of creating an imaginary urban geography for Lettrism, and this idea was inspired, inter alia, by Aragon’s Paysan de Paris. Key elements of the new urbanism were already present in Surrealism (as they are in Schade’s erotic practices, which themselves involve a sort of “psychogeography”, I would add). At first, Debord who opposed Surrealism did not discover these links. When he later on became aware of the Surrealist sources of Chtcheglov’s ideas, in Donné’s view, he deliberately obscured their Surrealist provenance by giving the Situationist practices new names: “dérive”, “psychogeography”, “constructed situations”, opposing them to the lyricism and mysticism of Surrealism. The marginalised Chtcheglov was not himself an active member of Situationism. See: Boris Donné, “Debord & Chtcheglov, Bois & Charbons: la dérive et ses sources surréalistes occultées”, in: Olivier Penot-Lacassagne and Emmanuel Rubio (eds), Le surréalisme en héritage: les avant-gardes après 1945: colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 2–12 août 2006, Paris 2008, 109–124 (Mélusine: Cahiers du Centre de Recherche sur le Surréalisme, no. 28).  50  Jens August Schade, Des êtres se rencontrent et une douce musique s’élève dans leurs cœurs, Paris 1978. The Italian publisher Neri Pozza also quotes Chtcheglov and promotes Degli esseri si incontrano… by its links to Lettrism, Surrealism and Situationism (see http://www.neripozza.it/ collane_dett.php?id_coll=1&id_lib=226 – visited 20 July 2015). 51  Schade, People Meet, 1.



From Collective Love to Nudism and the Naked City 

 473

Sjöman’s 1967 film, one of the first mainstream films with explicit sex scenes, trialled for obscenity, and a big success in the United States in 1969 when Mennesker mødes was published. Carlsen’s and Sjöman’s works were both of them serious art movies. To achieve lyrical concentration in the Schade film, Poul Borum had written what is probably one of the few versified film manuscripts consisting of 150 poems;52 Krzysztof Komeda composed the music. The international promotion on the other hand placed it within a wave of Scandinavian sexual liberation. “A victory for pure porn poetry”, the German poster for Sie treffen sich, sie lieben sich stated, while the French one for Sophie de 6 à 9 promised “a film of nonstop sex”. The American poster design alluded to contemporary liberated youth culture, labelled it “a hallelujah to amorality” and asked “Love is for women, sex is for men – or is it the other way around…?”. According to Schade it is the other way round, but even the reversal of gender roles now serves as just another means of excitement. Then again, the sensitivity of the hippies and other contemporary counter-cultures was probably closer to Schade than Schadism and Situationism. If Foëx was right, this appropriation of Schade could be seen as a cultural implementation of what were once the dreams of the avant-gardes. In that perspective mainstream culture has made utopian thought obsolete. On the other hand this implies a reduction and normalising of Schade’s vision to a modernisation of sexual morals cutting off its cosmic as well as collective and polymorphous qualities. In a perspective closer to Debord’s, this is not the realisation of avant-garde impulses but their liquidation. In a gesture of recuperation, even the poetics of the polymorphous and transgressive has become commercialised, with sex as just another commodity in the society of spectacles.

52  Th. Borup Jensen, “Mennesker mødes og sød musik opstår i hjertet (Henning Carlsen)”, in: Roman og drama bli’r til film, Copenhagen 1975, 64–92, here 88.

Riku Toivola

The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot The Russian poet and actor, singer and songwriter Aleksandr Vertinskii (1889– 1957) made his breakthrough during the years of World War I. He appeared on the stages of Moscow’s miniature theatres, dressed up as the clown Pierrot, to perform his “doleful ditties” (“pechal’nye pesenki”).1 These tragicomic songs expressed the torment of broken love affairs, sombre funeral scenes, exotic images, ineffable longing for faraway lands – or nostalgia for something lost. It is almost as if Vertinskii knew what was destined for him: emigration, a life as an itinerant artist and vagabond, until in 1943 he was finally permitted to return to the Soviet Union. The character of the artist always lies at the heart of any performance. In Vertinskii’s case, this character can be seen as being divided into three components. Firstly, the lyrics of the songs express the lyrical “I”. Secondly, what the spectator sees on the stage is the artist’s actual appearance and presence, and, thirdly, there is the character, created by the artist, which the viewer might easily identify with the artist’s biographical person. The spectator might even form an illusion that these three are, in fact, indistinguishable from each other. Russian culture of the early 20th Century witnessed several cases of such interaction, where a work of art turned into a “manuscript”, or a “text” for life, according to which the artist would consciously create a myth or a presentation of the self: the strong correlation of life and production, both organised according to the same rules.2 Taking his cue from the vanguard artists of the “Silver Age”, Vertinskii crafted his own image consciously and schematically in his writings and performances, as well as in the presentation of his personal life beyond the stage. Contemporary memoirs often emphasise Vertinskii’s dramatic intonation, his speech defect which was reminiscent of French pronunciation, and his peculiar body language. For a modern researcher, only Vertinskii’s voice has been saved in the form of recordings, and we have lost the opportunity to observe his performance, his “singing hands”, and his ability to enact a whole range of ­emotions

1  All translations are by the author of the article. 2  See, for example: Elena Khvorost’yanova, Usloviya ritma: Istoriko-tipologicheskie ocherki russkogo stikha, Saint Petersburg 2008, 326; Zara Mints, Poetika russkogo simvolizma, Saint Petersburg 2004, 97–102.

476 

 Riku Toivola

with a single gesture.3 In this situation the researcher is compelled to work on the other existing material: song texts, memoires, photographs and other documents. In this article I analyse the poetics of Vertinskii’s doleful ditties in connection with their realisation – the mise-en-scène, and, more broadly, the image of the artist and its evolution as an aesthetic manipulation of life. My theoretical focus here is on the relationship between the word and the gesture. How, in Vertinskii’s case, did art transform into the creation of reality, a utopia; a “presentation of self”, in a word, into a life?

White Pierrot A cornerstone of Vertinskii’s performance in its entirety was the scenic figure he embodied – a mask representing a modification of an emploi (archetypal character) which had become outstandingly popular in early 20th-Century Russia.4 As in many Russian texts of this time, different variations of the plots of commedia dell’arte’s love triangles have been seen to work as an important mythopoeic leitmotif for Vertinskii’s ditties.5 To be more precise, the roles and actions of the different lyrical characters in Vertinskii’s songs are derived from those of these stock characters. Moreover, the mask of Pierrot was not merely a costume: it entered both Vertinskii’s poems and his biography. One of his most popular ditties is called “Today I laugh at myself”: Today I laugh at myself… I really want happiness and affection, I really want a foolish fairy tale, Children’s fairy tale, naïve, silly. I am tired of white face paint and blusher And of the eternal tragic mask, I want at least a little affection, To forget this wild deception.6

3  This reference to Vertinskii’s “singing hands” was used, for instance, by one of the leading actors of the troupe of the Moscow Art Theatre – Vasilii Kachalov. See: Boris Savchenko, Estrada retro, Moscow 1996, 123. 4  See, for example: Vladimir Babenko, Arlekin i P’ero, Ekaterinburg 2011, 210; Aleksandr Rumnev, O pantomime, Moscow 1964, 128–156; J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd, Montreal 1993, 75–102. 5  Olga Gorelova, Aleksandr Vertinskii i ironicheskaya poeziya serebryanogo veka (avtoreferat), Moscow 2005, 15. 6  Aleksandr Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoyu… Stikhi i pesni. Rasskazy, zarisovki, rasmyshleniya.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 477

Pierrot’s mask captures several paradoxes, which are embedded in it already on the level of a combination of exaggerated and contradictory forms and opposite colours. Through the mask things that are tragic appear to the world as laughable. The setting of the poem is a thematic equivalent of Ruggerio Leoncavallo’s verismo opera I Pagliacci, which was particularly popular in pre-revolutionary Russia. Everybody knew the famous arias: “Vesti la giubba” – “Put on the clown costume and the makeup… Turn your tears and anguish into laughter, and your face into a grimace and sorrows. Laugh at your broken love, and the grief that poisons your heart!” In addition, the performer of the poem finds his life-situation reflecting the emotional state which he depicts on the stage. A mask allows a limited scope for the emotions of the lyrical hero, but behind the mask there is another – real – person, who has his own, broader and deeper range of feelings: “No! Pagliaccio non sono!” – “No! I’m not a clown. If my face is pale, it’s from shame”.7 In his memoirs, Vertinskii tries to explain away his costume: “From the fear of the public, from the fear of my own face, I made a heavy makeup… To hide my embarrassment and shyness, I sang in a mysterious ‘lunar’ twilight” (95–96). Whereas Vertinskii, often and seemingly consciously, emphasises his socially timid character, the wording “embarrassment and shyness”, can be interpreted as an acknowledgement of qualities that bind his true identity together with the conventions of his stage image: a shy, ill-starred lover, a dreamy and tragic clown. According to Vertinskii’s memoirs, during World War I, he joined the service troops of the imperial army as a volunteer on a medical train, travelling between the front and the rear – using the pseudonym “brother Pierrot” (82). Subsequently, one of his contemporaries, the Russian poet and Imaginist Vadim Shershenevich, described the young Pierrot’s efforts in Minsk, taunting him with accusations of cowardice: He was a tall young man with a speech defect and a pale, thin face […] He wrote and sang pitiful decadent verses […] That young man was a sufferer […] One day, when a “Taube”,8 which everyone was terribly afraid of, showed up, the young man started running down the street. We grabbed his arms but he was able to tear himself free. A blush of fear penetrated his powdered face.9

Pis’ma, Moscow 1990, 277. Quotations of Vertinskii’s texts from this publication follow in the main body of the text with a page number given in parenthesis. 7  Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Ruggerio Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, trans. Burton D. Fisher, Opera Journeys Libretto Series, Coral Gables, Florida 2002, 20. 8  A German military aeroplane. 9  Vadim Shershenevich, “Velikolepnyi ochevidets”, in: Sergei Shumihin (ed.), Moi vek, moi druz’ya i podrugi: vospominaniya Mariengofa, Shershenevicha, Gruzinova, Moscow 1990, 417–646, here 478–479.

478 

 Riku Toivola

Although Shershenevich’s reminiscences must be considered an anecdote, typically of him drawing a strongly exaggerated picture, the depiction of Vertinskii’s posture, and his inability to function calmly in stressful circumstances, seem to illuminate his character – and can be construed as artful manipulation or mystification of the artist’s image. To return to Vertinskii’s memoirs, the description of the “lunar twilight” contains traces of implied instructions for the staging of Pierrot’s musical piece: most probably the artist sang in a pale spotlight. Meanwhile, the scenic arrangements appear to function as a meta-narrative to his performance. They lead us to reconsider ironically some of the well-known and stereotypical themes and motifs beloved by the Russian Symbolists. This adaption is based on reductions of their conceptions of the world, one of the essential aspects of which was so-called “diabolic aesthetics”. Central to the cosmology of the diabolic poetic world, according to Aage A. Hansen-Löve, is the moon, the “lunar” imaginary world, which is opposed to the “solar” system and characterised, for instance, by lifelessness or vacuity, (in opposition to life and vitality) and insanity or delusion (in opposition to sanity and wisdom).10 In the mythopoetic space of the early 20th Century, the character of the pale Pierrot was clearly associated with lunar images.11 Incidentally, in Vertinskii’s ditties, the work and creation of the artist – his singing – is connected to the night-time. This is the case, for example, in several songs where the lyrical “I” seeks consolation after his failed love affairs: “Nothing ever happens like you dream under the sounds of moon…” (“Smoke without Fire”, 282); “I shall sing a psalm in the night…” (“All that Remained”, 287–288); and “I’ll continue to sing, as always, my lunar nonsense…” (“The King of Clubs”, 288). Fortunately, one of the famous gestures of the artist was immortalised as he posed for the Monument of Dostoevskii by one of the greatest Russian and Soviet sculptors, Sergei Merkurov, in 1913–1914 (see fig. 38).12 But why did Merkurov decide to give his Dostoevskii the gesture of the Russian Pierrot? In his correspondence, Merkurov reveals that working on the Dostoevskii monument and, subsequently, his cooperation with young Vertinskii, was a revo-

10  Aage A. Hansen-Löve, Russkii simvolizm: Sistema poeticheskikh motivov. Rannii simvolizm, Saint Petersburg 1999, 45–46. 11  For example, the poems of Albert Giraud “Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques” (1884), were well-known in Russia due to the songs of Arnold Schoenberg and the translations of the Symbolist poet Lev Kobylinskii (Ellis). 12  Merkurov’s famous monument of Dostoevskii ornamented the Tsvetnoy Boulevard in the centre of Moscow from 1918 to 1936, and was later replaced by the Marinskii hospital, where the writer was born.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 479

lutionary point in his career: “I feel that I have reached the laws which the actual works of art follow. They are the same laws according to which the universe (or, rather, the circulation of cosmos), and the growth of the organic world are organised”.13 It is remarkable, how the character posed by Vertinskii intertwines with cosmological meta-narrative. According to the sculptor, Vertinskii was an excellent sitter: “He acquired my aspiration, took just the right pose. And how he held his astonishingly plastic hands!”14 The sculpture portrays Dostoevskii in a convict’s robe, referring to his mock execution and exile. The emphasis is put on the hands: it seems as if the figure of Dostoevskii had chained himself by crossing his arms, as if he was currently having an inner struggle over his existence, his facial expression dumbfounded. The heavy lines of the granite sculpture emphasise the painful and broken tension of the gesture. Another Russian poet, Sergei Gorodetskii, who had an opportunity to see the sculpture while it was still in progress, wrote about its simplified but expressive shapes and sharp contrasts: “These lines give an impression of a search, perpetual restlessness and painful anxiety […]. The head reaches somewhere to the side, as if the great seer looks into the last abyss of the human spirit”.15 The image that Merkurov chooses for Dostoevskii is ambivalent (or even wider – polyphonic and diverse). The inner contradiction of the image is created by dichotomies: the tail of the robe clearly divides the monument into two opposing put combined parts, left and right, old and young Dostoevskii. The sculpted figure’s gaze, as of an old man’s, is frozen, directed to the right side, the left knee of the character is bent, the left shoulder is slumped, and, in contrast to the right side, bare, which introduces classical ideas of beauty – youth, strength, elegance and attractiveness. At the same time, the character, on the verge of madness, seems remarkably self-confident. The robe might also refer to the costume of an ascetic monk and the Orthodox tradition of foolishness for Christ – shocking and unconventional behaviour to challenge the accepted norms. Thus, Merkurov seems to be combining the characters of Dostoevskii’s “blessed fool” and Vertinskii’s Pierrot, which reveals, perhaps, certain similarities between these two figures. In the song “Today I laugh at myself”, we see that the lyrical hero, the clown, is foolishly seeking an exit from the play (“wild deception”) into the real world; an exit from the stage of artificial emotions into real feelings (“happiness and

13  Sergei Merkurov, Vospominaniya. Pis’ma. Stat’i. Zametki. Suzhdeniya sovremennikov, Moscow 2012, 243. 14  Merkurov, Vospominaniya, 465. 15  Merkurov, Vospominaniya, 432–433.

480 

 Riku Toivola

affection”) found only in fairy tales. Consequently, the “lunacy” of Vertinskii’s Pierrot is connected to infantilism, which we might connect to a biblical thought about the nature of heaven: “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it”.16 The world without a mask is the beginning of Vertinskii’s utopia: that world arises from the point of view of someone very small and honest. It is a childish fantasy – a dream of a sincere and altruistic joy – yet it is a delusion, a doomed pursuit of happiness. In addition, Vertinskii’s character is made up from several kinds of juxtapositions: contrast is one of the predominant principles in the structure of Vertinskii’s performance. Moreover, the opposition of “big” and “small” is, perhaps, one of the most substantial oppositions in the doleful ditties.

Fig. 38: Sergei Merkurov: Monument of Dostoevskii, Moscow (photograph by Erkka Mikkonen).

16  Mark 10:15.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 481

Miniature World It is commonly accepted that the cultivation of infantilism and the special attention given to children can be considered a typical feature of culture in Revolutionary Russia.17 An imprint of puerility, a miniature scale or significant kinship with toys, are attributes that link the lyrical characters in Vertinskii’s songs.18 Many of Vertinskii’s songs noticeably relate to children: several texts are addressed to “little girls” (“devochka”). For example, the song “One-Legged Girl” depicts a “little sweetie” who is a paralysed fool of Christ. Even when the addressee of a song is clearly an “adult” figure, his or her childish features are referred to: in the song “Jámais” the lyrical heroine is a babe (“malyutka”), and in the song “Little Moment” (“Minutochka”) the heroine Lulu plays like a child and cuddles like a kitten. The teeth of the “Girl with Grey Eyes” are described as “childish and coralliferous”, “Little Creole Girl” is capricious as children, the Polish belle “Panna Irena” has childish shoulders and a weepy mouth, and in the song “On the Blue and Faraway Ocean” the heroine is “silent as a child”. On the stylistic level of Vertinskii’s poetic language, this kind of a “reduction”, the principle of emphasising the infantile, is reflected in a wide variety of diminutives – words indicating small size, affection or underestimation, which in the Russian language are formed by using certain types of suffixes. Many of the lyrical characters are called by specific sobriquets. Diminutives also apply to their outfit and details of their clothing (little head, little beard, little foot, little toe). Often the reduction applies as well to the milieux which the characters inhabit, which are also described by diminuitives (little theatre, little puppy theatre, little town, little road, little ship, little grave). Another typical feature of Vertinskii’s poetic language is the use of evaluative epithets. In the context of all the ditties, they create schematically repeated motifs and can be clearly divided into contrasting thematic groups: small, pretty, tender, silent, simple and childish are in constant antithesis to big, old, indifferent, savage and bitter. The latter group of motifs often describes the enormous space that surrounds the intimate circle of life of the lyrical characters – the world and eternity, which is frequently personified in the songs. The environment lives its own life, in which a general atmosphere of apathy prevails. This feeling arises from an impression that everything in this world – dreams as well as suffering – has already been seen and experienced by someone and that there will never be

17  Nikolay Guskov, Ot karnavala k kanonu: Russkaya sovetskaya komediya 1920-kh godov, Saint Petersburg 2003, 33–34. 18  Gorelova, Aleksandr Vertinskii, 12–13.

482 

 Riku Toivola

anything new. Vertinskii’s lyrical characters, however, still believe in their silly, naïve and funny dreams that regrettably often appear to be useless and insane. Thus, the doleful ditties represent a universal plot depicting a neo-romantic conflict between illusion (dream, play, theatre) and actual reality; this opposition recurs in every ditty. It has an obvious archetype in the metaphor of “life as a theatre stage” or “life as a children’s play”, which, once again, was one of the key aspects of the diabolic aesthetics of the Russian Symbolists.19 Frequently, the conflict is followed by the motif of spring. This topos retains the traditional connotations of childhood and youth, the great hope of a new life and new happiness.

Black Pierrot In Vertinskii’s ditties, “spring” can be interpreted as an allegory of naïve and inaccessible illusions: it engenders in people a blind desire to live which leads them to futile suffering. For example, in the song “What I Have to Say”, the desire for the “unobtainable spring” leads into an “endless abyss”, and the evidence of this is a needless sacrifice of young cadets: I do not know why and who needs it, Who sent them to death with an unshaking hand Just so mercilessly, so evilly and pointlessly Dumbed them in eternal rest! They threw branches of spruce at them, pelted them with mud And went home – under the guise of debate That it’s already time to put an end to ugly riots, That, as if, we soon begin to starve anyway. (283)

Reminiscent of the funeral Mass (“Eternal rest grant them, O Lord…”) it is in contrast to the cold indifference of the crowd, which silently justifies the sacrifice of the young men. The contrast is emphasised by the fact that the funeral procession takes on the features of a fête: the “cautious audience silently wrapped in their fur coats” prepares to leave after the funeral, as they might after a spectacle. The sequence of actions (threw, pelted and went) introduces a logical continuation – the young victims have been forgotten without saying a word. Only the lyrical “I” remembers them: nobody else thought to simply “get down on his knees / And

19  Hansen-Löve, Rannii simvolizm, 331.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 483

tell these boys that in a worthless country / Even bright feats of valour are only stair steps / To endless abysses of inaccessible Spring!” (283). After the October Revolution, Vertinskii left the Russian capitals behind and continued to give concerts – spreading the message that he had to announce – in the more peaceful southern parts of the country. In the empire, mutilated by continuous riots of war, his listeners interpreted Vertinskii’s pacifistic resistance as an endorsement of the White Guard, and “What I Have to Say” gained remarkable popularity amongst the Whites. At this point, Vertinskii’s stage image began to transform. During the years of the Russian Civil War, the original white costume of Pierrot turned to a grievous black. Another Russian writer, Yurii Olesha, recalls in his memoirs a concert in Odessa: I was shocked by his performance in the form of Pierrot, not in the usual white, but in a black robe, in a lilac spotlight, directed at him from below. First from between the folds of a dark curtain appeared a hand, only then did Pierrot himself step out on the stage.20

The lighting refers to another typical layer of epithets in Vertinskii’s songs, which are presented in a spectrum of cold colours, ranging from light (“goluboi”) and dark blue, to lilac and violet. These colours are frequently used in the description of lyric characters: they wear a blue veil (“Girl with Grey Eyes”), ride in a blue car (“Hispano-Suiza”, “Parisienne”); their blood is noble and blue (“Pani Irena”), they make blue mistakes (“Angry Perfumes”), walk in blue pyjamas and dream blue dreams (“Madame, the Leaves Fall Already”). If the light blue colour expresses hope, the latter transformations suggest disappointed dreams, broken illusions that reveal the true reality. For example, a famous ditty, “Lilac Negro”, describes a mystical femme fatale, surrounded by exotic admirers: Chinese, Malay, and Portuguese. The song opens with three direct questions: “Where are you now? Who kisses your fingers? / Where did your little Chinese Li go?” (279). However, there is no answer: the heroine repeatedly fades away, seeking consolation and security from luxurious objects, as indicated in the original Russian rhyme of two foreign, indeclinable words, “avto” (car) and “manto” (fur): For the last time I saw you so close, A car accelerated you to the flight of streets I saw a dream – in dives of San Francisco A lilac negro offers you a coat. (280)

20  Yurii Olesha, Kniga proschaniya, Moscow 1999, 331.

484 

 Riku Toivola

In the last verse, the heroine is getting ready to leave again, this time escorted by a pale violet companion. It is not a clear reference – is it the dusky illumination of the dive or the complexion acquired through drug abuse21 – either way, the illusion is broken. It is hardly a coincidence that Hansen-Löve, investigating the motif of the “whimsical fickleness” of a diabolic femme fatale in the poetry of Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Belyi, has found its connection with the motif of the “chaotic (snow)storm”,22 to which associatively cling the “whirl”, “incessant motion” and “warm outerwear”, depicted in Vertinskii’s song. The motif of “coldness” is connected to the heroine in other texts as well: for instance, the “blue glaciers keep guard” over her “turned into a dark blue granite” heart to prevent it from the penetration of true love (“To an Actress”, 318).

Dystopia At the end of the 1920s, Vertinskii emigrated from the former Russian Empire. The quarter Century he spent abroad seems like a long journey home, as he travelled through Turkey, Romania, Poland, Germany, France, Palestine, the United States and China, and in some ways it is reminiscent of the peculiar world of Vertinskii’s songs. The artist built himself a reputation as a diseur (storyteller) of the Russian emigration.23 In exile Vertinskii’s performances clearly took the form of restaurant entertainment: the foreign audience as well as the emigrant community demanded that he included in his repertoire elegant variants of well-known Russian hits and gipsy songs, for instance, his interpretation of “Those Were the Days” (originally Russian song “Dorogoi dlinnoyu”), to comfort their toska, a vague longing for a lost era. The feeling of alienation shaped Vertinskii’s doleful ditties. Gradually they began to represent illusions through the quality of distance: distant lightning, a ray of light or stars somewhere out of reach, over the ocean, in Damascus; there, where the almonds are flowering. Since these kinds of dreams seemed so

21  This theme in his songs was shocking and, at the same time, remarkably interesting for the audience in pre-revolutionary Russia. In his memoirs Vertinskii admits that he used to be addicted to cocaine (78–79). His repertoire included another famous song called “Little Cocaine Girl”. 22  Aage A. Hansen-Löve, Russkii simvolizm: Sistema poeticheskikh motivov. Mifopoeticheskii simvolizm. Kosmicheskaya simvolika, Saint Petersburg 2003, 484–485. 23  A famous Russian singer Fëdor Shalyapin has referred to Vertinskii using this honorary title. See: Savchenko, Estrada retro, 86.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 485

­ nattainable, eventually they obtained a status of eternal deception, leading to u endless longing and sorrow, making the lyrical characters ill, pale, disconsolate, strange and tired. On the other hand, the core of the conflict in Vertinskii’s songs seems to have obtained a more universal character than just the pain of emigration. For example, the song called “Insane Organ Grinder” depicts a tragedy that concerns everyone: The furious ball is soaring and flying to infinity, And ridiculous bugs got stuck around it, Wriggling, squirming, droning and counting on eternity, They disappear like smoke, without realising anything. (300)

The rotating ball is a metaphor of the planet Earth spinning endlessly, in order to shake off the little insects – people, with their needless bustle. It is our inescapable fate: sooner or later we will be “put out”. Equally, the song presents a complex realisation of the metaphor of the machinery of a barrel organ, where the pins or staples (bugs) are encoded into the cylinder to produce certain voices (songs) when activated by the grinder. The pins operate valves within the wind chest, and in the song we find metaphors of winds hounding people: “Time, the old cheater / Is blowing the years away from them, like dust from the seeds”, and “We are autumn leaves, we are all torn by the storm”. (300) Accordingly, the song seems to discuss how difficult it is to maintain one’s individuality, dreams, free will, as every life seems to be already predestined by fate.

Man in a White Tie In exile the artist abandons his Pierrot costume, although his new image implicitly repeats some of its essential attributes. Performing as a decadent dandy in a white tie, the artist seems to maintain stylish black-and-white colour solutions and, in fact, produces a new, reduced version of the clown’s prototype. In addition, the “tailcoat” (“franchnik”) had been a very popular emploi of male couplet singers who presented their humorous and mischievous songs on burning themes in pre-revolutionary Russian miniature theatres24 – simultaneously, irony, inherited from them, began to play a greater role in the plot of Vertinskii’s doleful ditties. It has been shown, for instance by Rhonda K. Garelick, how the socially detached hero turned his attention from the spectacle of the self to the spectacle

24  Elizaveta Uvarova, Istoki rossiiskoi estrady, Moscow 2013, 244–248.

486 

 Riku Toivola

of the other, to a woman on stage, during the decadent dandyism of the fin-desiècle.25 Analogously, in the doleful ditties Vertinskii often creates a portrait of lyrical heroines. In his descriptions detailed, excessively precise images of the body parts and facial expressions function as discreet metonymic “hints” of psychological characteristics. Often they reveal a hidden and well-chosen gesture, and, what is most exciting, associate the heroines with a mystical religious experience. For example, in the song “Girl with Grey Eyes” (“I love your vintage fingers, / Of strict Catholic Madonnas… I love your tired hands / As though just taken down from the cross”, 277) or “Gioconda” (“In you I feel the severity of icons, / From the wide-opened eyes”, 290). From the point of view of the universal conflict, these gestures reveal another, specific antithesis: gestures or emotions which are insincere and feigned are opposed to those which are honest and deeply felt. Thus, in the songs the lyrical “I” at the same time diligently worships and points his finger ironically at the heroines, who, unfortunately, have indulged themselves in their own shallow, “external” illusion of beauty, fashion and superficiality, and who fade away from him “cold and distant”, swathing their “heart in silk and chinchilla” (“Won’t You Soothe Me”, 300). As we can see, Vertinskii uses the principle of matching and comparing the heroines with archetypes of “eternal womanhood”, one of the main myths that underlie the complex conceptual world of Russian Symbolism. In addition, numerous references to women’s divine nature are once again connected to the central conflict between illusion and reality which clings to the diabolic discourse of the Russian Symbolists and, in fact, leads us to the imagery of the “woman temptress, seductress” from the Fall of Man in Genesis. The delusions of coquettes are frequently manifested in motifs of a “dream”, “compelling music”, “dance” or “swing”, and sometimes reach a level of apocalyptic dystopia, as “an altar of jazz” in the song “Shanghai”: Virginal dames, conceived by the devil, Press their withered breasts towards men, Twisting, shaking, swimming and waving, Pouring out the bliss of their last minutes. (325)

The diabolic world of night, a scene in a restaurant, replaces an entire reality as well in the song “Yellow Angel”. It is the story of how the lyrical “I” celebrates

25  Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle, New Jersey 1998, 3–4.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 487

Christmas performing at the restaurant, constructed as the confession of an artist, infinitely tired of the hypocrisy of his continuous performance: “All the night I am wringing my arms / For fury and pain / And singing something pitiably to people” (316). The milieu is characterised by an oxymoron – it is a “cheap electrical paradise”, so natural, vital light is here converted into artificial light. Everything around seems like a prop, the set of a spectacle. The lyrical “I” looks at himself from outside and discovers his tragic mask: “I am a tired, old clown, / I wave my cardboard sword, / And the light of day dies in the points of my crown” (316). This revelation also uncovers a pretended joy in his surroundings – everything around undergoes a metamorphosis. Spectators lose their human face; they seem like a group of beasts, their laughter turns into a savage grimace – a traditional satanic apparition: Jazz bands tinkle and clang, And angry monkeys Bare their infirm mouths at me, And I, twisted and drunken, Call them into oceans And sprinkle flowers in their champagne. (316)

At this point of the hallucinations an angel, a Christmas decoration, comes to life, is terrified and laments the scenery, but, eventually, melts – indicating infernal heat. Evidently, the song alludes to the biblical praise of love: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”.26 The words that the artist is singing, his call for a colourful and joyful existence – his whole life appears to be no more than a meaningless delusion he is indulging himself in. Along with the crowd in the intoxication of a restaurant he finds himself lonely and miserable. In addition, many ditties embody the motif of Christmas. In the late period of the artist’s emigration it gains another expression: Christmas, we can say, reveals the resolution of the universal conflict of the ditties – a utopia, where illusion and reality merge. For example, in the song “Christmas in My Home Country, Blue Holiday with Distant Stars”: Children’s holiday, and once mine. Someone close, warm and familiar Softly stroking me with a gentle hand. (310)

26  1. Cor. 13:1.

488 

 Riku Toivola

Rodina A little before Vertinskii’s return to the Soviet Union, his ditties began to change. Rodina, motherland of the dreams, embodies the highest standard of harmony and happiness in the doleful ditties. Motherland is, typically in Vertinskii’s art, personified: “And she is there smiling and greeting / Bringing peace to people and ages, / All shines intolerable light, / Still invisible to you” (343). She seems so perfect – a symbol of Eternal Womanhood – that even belligerent neighbouring nations, in the song “Kitezh”, addressed to comrade emigrants, greet her with devoted, laudatory gestures: And already a million human hearts Are awaiting Her on distant shores. And their banners are already fluttering To meet her with raised hands. (343)

Lifted hands stand for a sweet and long-desired capitulation: the emigrants have miscalculated and now understand that Kitezh, the mythical city of harmony, has already come true in the form of the Soviet Union. As in the song “Our Sorrow”, they present a generation of “prodigal fathers” – a modification of the wellknown parable27 – “knocking back to the home country” (340). On 7 March 1943 Vertinskii addressed a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, with a request to return to the fold of his homeland (409–410). In the autumn of 1943 Vertinskii arrived in Moscow with his three-monthold firstborn Marianna, his newly-wedded wife Lidiya Tsirgvava, and his motherin-law Lidiya Pavlovna, who, according to the memoirs of her daughter, when packing the bags expressed some insecurity before the journey, to which the artist replied: “[W]hat are you afraid of? We are heading to a country where people live like innocent and naïve children”.28 It is noteworthy how, in spite of the repertoire commission’s attempts to reform the contents of his concerts,29 Vertinskii’s songs curiously retained many of their former poetical features. One of them was the incessant and tender attention to children. For instance, the song “Little Town for Children” pictures war orphans building a new town “out of light blue marine stones”, but the “purple sunset is fading behind them” (348). An allegory of illusions, destroyed by World

27  Luke 15:11–32. 28  Lidiya Vertinskaya, Sinyaya ptitsa lyubvi, Moscow 2004, 122. 29  Vertinskaya, Sinyaya ptitsa lyubvi, 126–127.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 489

War II, is set with the old-established colour motifs. The song continues with the dialogue of three boys: the first is willing to defend their town from all other people and beasts; the second suggests praying to God to get angels to take them to heaven. The third boy is suspicious and interprets angels as a metaphor: “I’m not happy with those angels. Here they already ripped off my leg – dropped a bomb from heaven on our lads” (348). In other words, this is how Vertinskii creates his own style of Socialist Realism. In Moscow, he was, in a proper Soviet way, allowed an employment record book and was given the post of an artist-singer of the All-Union Tour and Concert Association. Soon he began to give concerts all over the country with indisputable success, although, as he later on regretted, his work was by unspoken agreement ignored by the Soviet media (see the letter to the vice minister of culture: 410–412). However, he combined the image of a Stakhanovite entertainer with an individual spark of exotica. People throughout the country rushed to Vertinskii’s concerts to marvel at a pre-revolutionary aristocrat or an overseas bourgeois: in the context of a totalitarian society, where even the leaders dressed in uniform, he seemed like a gift from the past, a model of exemplary style that – almost – everyone was longing for. According to the memoirs of Vertinskii’s widow, a border guard shook his head with an old-fashioned look when he saw the three costumes that the artist was travelling with: one was on him, the tailcoat was for the concerts, and apart from that there was a dinner jacket.30 In addition, Nataliya Il’ina recalls her visits to the Vertinskiis’ home in the 1950s, where “the owner of the house in a beautiful silk robe with quilted lapels is grimly sitting in the corner of the semi-dark room, illuminated by one lamp. On the table there are two glasses, and an open bottle of champagne (Vertinskii preferred it to wine)”.31 It was a daring and, therefore, a very conscious act of the time to keep up the posture of a gentleman, which was an absolute counterpoint to his surroundings. Nevertheless, these features of his image Vertinskii managed to successfully exploit in the Soviet film industry: the Catholic prelate, the Doge of Venice, a Polish pan or an old philandering earl, as in the cinematographic version of Anton Chekhov’s “Anna on the Neck”. For his role as a fiery cardinal in “The Doomed Conspiracy” Vertinskii was awarded the Stalin Prize second degree in 1951.32

30  Vertinskaya, Sinyaya ptitsa lyubvi, 122–123. 31  Nataliya Il’ina, Dorogi i sud’by, Moscow 1988, 224. 32  See the filmography of Vertinskii: Vitalii Vihornov, Aleksandr Vertinskii na èkrane i ne tol’ko, Novosibirsk 2013, 265–266.

490 

 Riku Toivola

Vertinskii seemingly continues to narrate his biography through paradoxes. According to his accompanist Mikhail Brokhes, Vertinskii, when talking about emigration, frequently used a quotation from the writer Ivan Turgenev: “Russia can manage without any one of us, but none of us is able to manage without her”.33 A similar kind of contradictory idea, “those, who did not part with the homeland, cannot understand how deeply one can love his homeland” – was made by Vertinskii in a failed and flippant toast while visiting Boris Pasternak. It was made in the presence of several writers, including Vertinskii’s own favourite, the poet Anna Akhmatova. One of the witnesses,34 Mariya Belkina, describes the meeting in her memoirs: He put a bottle of cognac on the table and asked for permission to kiss Akhmatova’s hand. And Akhmatova with a theatrical gesture gave him her hand, and he leaned over her artistically. It was like a play where I, sitting apart from the rest, at the other end of the table, was in the audience. The guests, evidently, did not like Vertinskii.35

It seems that Vertinskii’s exquisite “cognac” was too showily offered: one of the reasons for the artist’s rejection was that his self-created performance of aristocratic sprezzatura was exposed in this particular circle of genuine intelligentsia. For them, Vertinskii represented a pretentious product of mass culture. On the contrary, Akhmatova’s manners and intonation, according, for instance, to the literary critic Lidiya Ginzburg, were always orderly and purposeful: the gestures that in others seemed affected and theatrical, were with her in harmony.36 Alienation remained one of the constant traits of Vertinskii’s artistic image. Throughout his career, Vertinskii’s self-performance seemed to signal insecurity – it arose from the desire and need to belong to some kind of culture, a community, and to someone. Therefore, gradually the artist’s own loving family, his wife and daughters became the central topic of his songs. All this is reflected in one of his later hits, called “Little Daughters”: Plenty of Russian sun and light Shall be in my daughters’ life. And, above all, it is important That they shall have a Home country! (345)

33  Savchenko, Estrada retro, 82. 34  For different versions of the occasion, see: Sil’viya Gitovich, “Ob Anne Anreyevne”, in: Mikhail Kralin (ed.), Ob Anne Akhmatovoy, Leningrad 1990, 330–356, here 331–332; Vertinskaya, Sinyaya ptitsa lyubvi, 140–143. 35  Mariya Belkina, Skreschenie sudeb, Moscow 1992, 263. 36  Lidiya Ginzburg, Zapisnye knizhki. Vospominaniya. Esse, Saint Petersburg 2011, 467.



The Undercut Utopian Worlds of the Russian Pierrot 

 491

At first sight, the song seems like a joyful lullaby. The father is putting his children to bed – entirely in accordance with the ideals of “happy childhood”37 promoted by Socialist Realism. But Vertinskii, however, allows himself a gesture which can be interpreted as the cultural removal of the self from the social body of a totalitarian citizen – an aging individual38 examining himself: “It is true, I am getting older, / Even though I try to be a young like them from my soul! / I ask the good Lord / To continue my sinful days” (345). Aging and the inevitable passing of time are amongst the main themes of the doleful ditties. At the ending of the poem the roles are reversed: “And my little daughters / Will close my eyes, / The same nightingales / Will sing to me in the graveyard” (345). In one of his last photographic portraits Vertinskii is sitting in a changing room, smoking, and an old dandy is reflected from a right-angled mirror. The contradictory mask of Pierrot was a constant image throughout his artistic life.

37  The picture created reminds one of the posters which used images of children to promote Stalin’s cult of personality: “Thank You Dear Comrade Stalin for a Happy Childhood!” 38  After World War II Vertinskii also wrote a controversial, unpublished ditty addressed to Stalin. The song called “He” pictures an old and grizzled, but upright generalissimo viewing a military parade (one of the stanzas is published in: Babenko, Arlekin i P’ero, 298), which is a clear allusion to many of Stalin’s portraits, as well as being an interesting parallel between the lyrical “I” and the dictator.

Jun Tanaka

Dystopian Visions and Ideas of Death as a Transformation in Gilbert Clavel’s An Institute for Suicide Gilbert Clavel was born in May 1883 in Basel, Switzerland. The second son of a wealthy family which was involved in silk dyeing, he suffered serious health problems, including a childhood bout of spinal tuberculosis that left him hunchbacked. Clavel developed a requirement for warmer weather as a result of his health condition, which prompted him to visit and remain in Capri, Naples and Positano in Italy for long periods from 1907 until his death in 1927. In 1913 and 1914, he visited Egypt, which made a significant impression on him, as determined from his letters and diary entries. In 1916, he wrote Ein Institut für Selbstmord or An Institute for Suicide, which was translated into Italian by Italo Tavolato and published as Un istituto per suicidi in 1918. In 1917, Clavel became acquainted with the Italian Futurist painter Fortunato Depero. They subsequently collaborated on illustrations for the Italian version of An Institute for Suicide and the puppet theatre production of Balli plastici (Plastic Ballet), which was performed in Rome in 1918. Furthermore, Clavel contributed several articles to the Italian art magazine Valori plastici, and in 1920 he published Espressioni d’Egitto (Express­ ions­of Egypt), an essay on ancient Egypt. In 1909, Clavel purchased the ruins of a 16th-Century watchtower (Torre di Fornillo) that was once used to alert Positano’s citizens of approaching Muslim pirates. Commencing work in 1919, Clavel extensively rebuilt the tower with the help of local builders, and took up residence when the interior was near completion in 1922. He eventually met Meister Lietz, a German master builder, and together they decided to build three additional rooms (including one for Clavel’s younger brother, René) by drilling into the rocks adjacent to the tower. Clavel referred to his underground complex of rooms and corridors as “architecture of the chthonic” (“eine Architektur des Chthonischen”). The term chthonic, from the ancient Greek chthonios, means “in, under, or beneath the earth”. The chthonic labyrinth and underground rooms of the tower were linked by a series of porticos and corridors that formed an architectural complex Clavel referred to as Castel Clavel (Clavel’s Castle). After Clavel’s death in 1927, René Clavel completed construction of the remaining part of the castle. In 1955, he sold the structure to an Italian aristocrat, Santa Borghese Hercolani. It still exists today as a private villa. My presentation focuses on the dystopian visions of An Institute for Suicide, especially the institute’s bureaucratic killing system. I see the story as an inter-

494 

 Jun Tanaka

weaving of symbolism about life and death, as drawn from ancient Egyptian religious thought, renditions of the dance of death, mediaeval art and modern technological functionalism. The paper is divided into three parts. First, I have summarised the plot of An Institute for Suicide. Second, I have presented my interpretation of Clavel’s dystopian visions in the story and its narrative mode. Third, I have discussed the interrelations of Clavel’s literary imagination in An Institute for Suicide, his architectural imagination of his castle and his physical self-image.

Summary of An Institute for Suicide There are three versions of An Institute for Suicide in two languages – German and Italian. The first is an unpublished German manuscript dated March 1916, which is held in the private archive of the Santa Borghese Hercolani Foundation (Fondazione Santa Borghese Hercolani) in Rome.1 The second is an unpublished and undated German manuscript which is, most likely, the final German version, written in December 1916 and housed in the State Archive of the Canton BaselCity (Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt).2 The third is an Italian translation by Italo Tavolato, with Depero’s illustrations, published in Rome by Bernard Lux in 1918.3 The Italian translation appears to be based on the final German version, with some minor changes. These changes and issues of translation are not discussed in this paper. I have summarised the plot from both the final German version and the Italian translation. Harald Szeemann indicated that An Institute for Suicide “belongs to the typical mixture of the late period of decadence and the early period of Surrealism, which consists of sarcasm, irony and the unlimited acceptance of death”.4 Mauro Ponzi suggested that the Italian version, in particular, revealed the tension between the Futurist and the metaphysical directions of the Italian avant-garde.5

1  The author deeply appreciates the permission of the Hercolani family to research archival materials and the help provided by the ex-archivist, Ms. Matilde Ferrari. 2  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2. 3  Gilbert Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, trans. Italo Tavolato, Rome 1918 (illustrations by Fortunato Depero) – reprint: Gilbert Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, trans. Italo Tavolato, Venice 1979; Gilbert Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, trans. Italo Tavolato, Mori 2004 (with a cartoon by Marco Albertazzi); Gilbert Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi / Espressioni d’Egitto, Rome 2006. 4  Harald Szeemann, “Gilbert Clavel. Basel 1883–1927 Kleinhüningen”, in: Harald Szeemann (ed.), Visionäre Schweiz, Aarau 1991, 97–100, here 97. 5  Mauro Ponzi, “Übergangsräume. Gilbert Clavel und die Verortung der Visualität”, in: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca / Zeitschrift für deutsche Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, 9, 2009,



Dystopian Visions and Ideas of Death 

 495

Clavel cultivated his literary imagination in the milieu of symbolism and decadence, especially under the influence of Oscar Wilde. In Capri, he became a close friend of Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, a French aristocrat decadent, with whom Clavel used opium in the opium room of Fersen’s villa. In the Italian version of An Institute for Suicide, the background of the novel is symbolist and decadent, although he tried to overcome this with sarcastic irony. The story begins with a description of the institute’s building, which resembles a bank and stands in the centre of the market square. The protagonist stops before its main entrance, which is illuminated by many colourful lamps, despite the daylight setting. A man in black livery speaks to him, saying: “Everything here is solid and guaranteed by the state”.6 According to the man in livery, the duty of the institute is to bring forth life in its final form. The man leads the protagonist to a flashing hall, where the protagonist reads the following: Institute for Suicide Approved and accredited by the state Way of death to be arranged Capital stock 80,000,0007

The protagonist says he has been seeking this type of institute for twenty years. A group of servants, who are always chattering, “you will be served, you will be served”, leads him through a glass door to an information room. A man who looks like a bank clerk speaks to him saying: “We have a great deal to do, because the whole world wants to die”.8 The clerk explains to the protagonist that the principle of the institute is to alter the experience of death, which all regard throughout life as something terrible, into a comfortable moment. Therefore, the modes of death are limited to three: drunkenness, lust and pantopon (opium). But the protagonist wants a fourth mode of death, one that unites the other three, to fashion a singular death for himself. The clerk accompanies the protagonist to the administration hall, where counters with alphabetical signs stand side by side. Credentials are to be issued here to grant the wishes of clients after their death. The protagonist completes a form with his name, status, age, residence, inheritance and legacy at counter A. At counter B, he is required to write his own life course, and a clerk at counter C

15–32, here 26–27. 6  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 1; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 7. 7  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 2; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 9. 8  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 3; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 10.

496 

 Jun Tanaka

asks whether he wants a pagan or Christian burial. The protagonist asks the clerk at counter D for a requiem mass. Furthermore, a young foreign clerk at counter E arranges a funeral procession around the city centre for the protagonist. At the final counter, F, a clerk explains that each coffin has two corresponding keys. Finally, the protagonist completes and signs a certificate. The servants lead the protagonist to an elevator-like room, which suddenly descends at such a high speed that he cannot catch his breath. When the room stops and the door opens, the protagonist finds, in the dark, a tall, fat man wearing a hat with a red feather. The man is a Todsäufer (death drunkard).9 Following him, the protagonist goes through so many rooms, corridors and halls that he becomes disoriented and lost. When the protagonist awakes, he and thirteen death-drunkards are seated at a round table and begin to drink from a mug that never becomes empty. They drink and drink until, one after the other, the death-drunkards collapse into piles of dust. The protagonist then hears two voices. One says: “Death is a shift of the centre”. The second asks: “And life?” The first replies: “A dream in the circle of time”.10 The protagonist loses consciousness. When he revives, women from all lands and times appear before him, dancing in the air. The protagonist falls into the mass of women, who entangle themselves around his body and press their breasts against his chest. In his abyss of pleasure and pain, the mouth of one woman attaches to his lips and sucks like a vampire. Again he hears the refrain “Death is a shift of the centre, and life will be a dream in the circle of time”.11 In the third room, a male nurse dressed in white inserts a syringe into a glass ampoule of pantopon. He swiftly inserts the needle into the thigh of the protagonist. The clerk, hereafter known as “Folding-skull” in the text, who the protagonist previously met in the information room, comes to perform surgery on him. Folding-skull opens a metal box, which he had hidden under his white coat, and extracts a strange instrument. Its head is a small shiny wheel. He tells the protagonist that he was also decentralised, as indicated by his name. Folding-skull cuts the protagonist’s skull from his forehead, then behind an ear and around the back of the head, and the skull opens. The protagonist can see himself from outside without emotion or pain, as if he were a third person. He hears the voices of three people: Somebody, Nobody and “the invisible centre”,12 which is the soul of the protagonist and sings like a cuckoo. The protagonist now feels that he is

9  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 11. 10  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 15; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 27. 11  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 18; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 32. 12  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 20–21; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 36.



Dystopian Visions and Ideas of Death 

 497

perceiving things as if he were dead. He no longer thinks, wishes or suffers. He views a page of a book appearing before him. The text on the page reads: “As nature demonstrates to us that several dead things retain yet an occult relation to life […]”.13 Although Clavel did not mention a source in the final German and Italian versions, he cited these lines from Michel de Montaigne’s Essays.14 The protagonist sees visions of a cathedral tower, a green church roof, a river and a small grey bird perched on a tree. These visions change rapidly. The protagonist sees the text again, which now reads: “[…] several dead things retain yet […]”.15 Somebody responds: “Yes, also disjoined legs of a spider flutter for a while. A cripple feels pain in limbs that he no longer has. In order that death will outlast life, a corpse is wrapped to mummify in Egypt”.16 The protagonist’s monologue closes the story: “I woke once a few years ago near a spring in a forest. The water murmured. The woods rustled. A bird sang: cuckoo”.17

Clavel’s Dystopian Visions and the Story’s Narrative I offer two perspectives on this story from two viewpoints: the first is related to the story as a dystopian vision; the second draws attention to the shifts in the story’s narrative. First, an “institute for suicide” ironically represents the vision of wartime death. Death at one’s own will is not prohibited; however, suicide is approved and accredited at the institute as a state-sanctioned process. Under its regulations, the institute makes a client’s death as comfortable as possible, providing three different types of death. The institute does not merely produce death but also sells it to those who want to kill themselves. The protagonist refers to it as a “substitute for death, which is even bought by money”.18

13  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 22; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 39. 14  Clavel gave a reference to this quotation in the unpublished German manuscript dated March 1916 in the private archive of the Santa Borghese Hercolani Foundation: Michel de Montaigne, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Otto Flake and Wilhelm Weigand, vol. 1: Essays, Munich and Leipzig 1908, 28. 15  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 23; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 41 16  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 23; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 41. 17  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 23; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 42. 18  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 1; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 8.

498 

 Jun Tanaka

The remark by the clerk Folding-skull – “We have a great deal to do, because the whole world wants to die”19 – satirically implies the on-going massacre of World War I. Clavel describes the death of one person by his own will, which contrasts sharply with anonymous deaths on the battlefield. In the novel, Ruedi Ankli found an “attack” on the “double standards” of society and the “death machine of World War I”.20 In this regard, the aesthetics and metaphysics of death and life are the main focus of the story. Clavel himself was never familiar with the battlefield. On the contrary, he lived in perfect solitude as a foreigner on an island. A world in which one can design his own comfortable death might be considered a utopia of aestheticised death. He infers that a heroic death is not one that is achieved on the battlefield; rather, it is one which can be chosen for oneself. For Clavel, who was forced to battle disease throughout his life, to choose the way to die would be the aesthetic of life. However, it could be said that the appearance of utopian self-determination is a mere façade for the institutional system of a death-dealing institute under conditions set by the state. In this system, people must register themselves and specify in detail how they wish to die. Religious authority no longer has power over one’s death; a secular institute arranges it systematically. Note that among the story’s characters, several are dropouts from the Christian church: the former Jesuit clerk at counter D, the former Swiss guard among the death-drunkards and a male nurse, who belonged to a Christian brotherhood but was expelled for manslaughter. Clavel was not an aggressive anti-clericalist, such as the Italian Futurists, but he seemed to keep his distance from the church and Christianity throughout his life, in contrast to his deep interest in Egyptology. The bureaucratic system at the institute is accompanied by modern technological equipment, such as a high-speed elevator and a cranial cutter. The scene wherein the surgery is described is extremely vivid, probably because Clavel had personally experienced this type of situation, in hospital as a result of his long illness. Besides having a modern and avant-garde aspect in its symbolism, Futurist technological imagery and the experimental narrative of its last section, An Institute for Suicide succeeds in the tradition of mediaeval danse macabre. Clavel’s hometown of Basel was famous for its painting of the dance of death, on the interior wall of the cemetery of the Dominican convent. As a young author, Clavel wrote a short story about a girl’s dance with death, titled “Der Totentanz” (Dance

19  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 3; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 10. 20  Ruedi Ankli, “Gilbert Clavel im Kreis der italienischen Futuristen”, in: Basler Magazin, 1983, no. 21 (28 May), 7.



Dystopian Visions and Ideas of Death 

 499

of Death).21 Folding-skull could therefore be viewed as a personification of death in the modern age. In this regard, Basel personifies the dystopian town where the institute is located. Clavel rarely returned to Basel; he hated its petit bourgeois culture in which he felt like an outsider.22 As for the narrative mode, the protagonist is the narrator, who describes events and dialogues with other characters in the past tense and in temporal order. At the story’s beginning, the narrative style is realistic. During the process of the tripartite suicide, the tempo of the narrative accelerates and the style changes from realism to a sequence of dreamlike visions. At the end of both the first death from drunkenness and the second death from lust, the protagonist hears the same message: “Death is a shift of the centre”.23 This could be determined as the story’s primary metaphysical assertion about life and death. The shift of the centre occurs in the protagonist’s third death, from opium. After the injection, the protagonist undergoes the surgical procedure of cutting the skull; however, we cannot clearly discern if the event is real or an opiate illusion. At the end of this section, not only the protagonist but also Somebody, Nobody and the Centre begin to speak, and the narrative mode also becomes decentralised. After finishing the German manuscript on 12 February 1917, Clavel wrote the following to his brother René: “The beginning is probably stronger and more uniform in its external effect but does not have the intuition of the last pages. I just wanted to demonstrate the loss of centre, the dissolution, not the destruction by death”.24 The description of delirium might originate in Clavel’s personal experience with opium, but the most important point for him is to express the dissolution of death through the dissolution of the narrative form into a sequence of symbolic visions.

Interrelation of Clavel’s Literary Imagination, His Architectural Imagination of his Castle and his Physical Self-Image I will now move on to the interrelationship between Clavel’s literary imagination in An Institute for Suicide, his architectural conception of his castle and his physical self-image. I surmise the following three points:

21  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D1. 22  See: Letter to René, 11 October 1915, Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 1030 C4 1. 23  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 15, 18, Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 27, 32. 24  Letter to René, 12 February 1917, Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 1030 C4 1.

500 

 Jun Tanaka

1. Clavel’s thoughts about suicide and his own body-image. 2. Influences from ancient Egyptian texts. 3. Clavel’s castle as a site for symbolic suicide.

Because of his serious physical problems, Clavel distanced himself from his body; he confessed in a 1902 diary entry that he wanted to strip off his “defective case”.25 He was tempted toward suicide many times, because, for him, death was liberation from his body. Writing to René in 1927, Clavel talked about the “double view” in which one’s body was “a curious car”26 that carried its soul, like the “decentralised”27 protagonist in An Institute for Suicide. Clavel’s interest in Depero’s puppet theatre (with its colourful machine-like puppets) was probably based on his wish to exchange his own defective body for a new one. In this regard, his collaboration with Depero for the illustrations of the Italian translation of An Institute for Suicide held the same meaning for Clavel. Clavel found a metaphysical basis for his thoughts about life and death in ancient Egyptian religion, with which he gained acquaintance during his long journeys in Egypt. One source might be the ancient Egyptian text, Dispute between a Man and His Ba, in which a suicidal man conversed with his own soul, his Ba.28 The Egyptians believed one’s Ba lived after one’s body died, and it was represented as a human-headed bird. Clavel described the human soul as a bird in An Institute for Suicide. The interest in these Egyptian topics was related to Clavel’s literary roots in French symbolism, especially to his interest in the esoteric works of symbolists, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose Là-bas (Down There, 1891) influenced Clavel’s friend, the poet Jacques Fersen, in designing his villa. I located Clavel’s notebook of his second journey to Egypt in the private archive of the Santa Borghese Hercolani Foundation in March 2010. It contains analyses of expressions of repetition (Wiederholung) in ancient Egyptian art and literature. Therein, Clavel refers to an Egyptian folktale, Tale of Two Brothers, in which the younger, Bata, repeats death and rebirth through transmigration from

25  Clavel’s diary, 15 November 1902, Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 B2 1. 26  Letter to René, 21 February 1927, Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 1030 C4 1. 27  Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 D2, 20; Clavel, Un istituto per suicidi, 1918, 36. 28  See: Ruedi Ankli, “Un futurista basilese: Gilbert Clavel”, in: L’Almanacco 1987. Cronache di vita ticinese, Bellinzona 1986, 139–145; Karin Sabine Peters, Gilbert Clavel e il “futurismo caprese”. La figura di un intellettuale svizzero e il suo ruolo all’interno delle avanguardie italiane durante e dopo la Prima Guerra Mondiale [Doctoral Dissertation, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”], Rome 1992/1993; Karin Sabine Peters, “Gilbert Clavel: L’esule svizzero di Capri”, in: Avanguardia. Rivista di letteratura contemporanea, 2, 1997, no. 4, 80–117.



Dystopian Visions and Ideas of Death 

 501

a human to a bull, then to a Persea tree and finally to the pharaoh’s son.29 The motif of repeated death and rebirth and the repetitive narrative of this tale appear to have influenced the style of An Institute for Suicide. By the end of August 1927, shortly before his death, Clavel referred to his underground complex of rooms and corridors as “architecture of the chthonic” in his letter to an old friend, Carl Albrecht Bernoulli. In this complex, he confesses that it was extremely important for him to learn about the works of Johann Jakob Bachofen. Clavel writes: I have created in recent years, as a solitary act of inner need, an architecture of the chthonic in Positano that is a background and an opposing force to a pentagonal tower connected with underground rock corridors that lead into the depth of a mountain and its caves. The egg form, which is often mentioned in Bachofen, has become, for me, an experience like the dome of the church in oriental style, and I have incorporated this form into my building in order to construct a large space (inside the mountain).30

The term chthonic, literally meaning subterranean, bears the connotation “of the dead”. In Greek mythology, Hades and Persephone are the chthonic god and goddess who reign over the dead. The architecture of the chthonic belongs to the underworld of the dead. The unfinished but crucial part of Clavel’s chthonic architecture was the natural cave, which would have had an egg-shaped or testicular form if not for its collapse.31 In Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right) and Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten (An Essay on Ancient Mortuary Symbolism), he refers to the egg symbol and reveals how in Dionysian and Orphic mystery cults, the egg is a symbol of the material source of all things or the ­beginning of creation.32 The structure of Clavel’s complex building, with its pentagonal tower and the architecture of the chthonic, served as a mediating space for him, between life and death, which was deeply rooted in the Dionysian and Orphic mystic cults in southern Italy. In creating his castle and living there, Clavel died symbolically in order to be reborn. In this sense, Clavel’s castle can be regarded as a site for his symbolic suicide.

29  See: Susan T. Hollis, The Ancient Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers: The Oldest Fairy Tale in the World, Oklahoma 1996. 30  Letter to Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, 27 August 1927; Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, “Gilbert Clavel”, in: Annalen, 12, 1927, no. 1, 1927, 952–955, here 953. 31  See: Letter to René, 22 July and 31 December 1925, Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 1030 C4 1. 32  See: Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht. Johann Jakob Bachofens Gesammelte Werke, vol 2–3, ed. Karl Meuli, Basel 1948, 233; Johann Jakob Bachofen, “Die drei Mysterieneier. Ein Grabbild”, in: Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten. Johann Jakob Bachofens Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Karl Meuli, Basel 1954, 11–351.

502 

 Jun Tanaka

What would his new body be after Clavel stripped off his “defective case”33 in the symbolic death? In a 1917 letter to Depero, Clavel wrote that he would become a giant if he were healthy.34 In this regard, Clavel’s castle, which was transformed from ancient ruins into a gigantic architectural body, symbolically represents him as a giant. Clavel’s obsession with suicide and death changed from an ironical dystopian vision of state-controlled death in An Institute for Suicide to the mystical idea of suicide as a transformational rite of passage, and finally as a conception of his own rebirth in the construction of his castle. The themes of death and rebirth were already intimated in the image of the bird in the last section of An Institute for Suicide. However, to clearly understand its development from An Institute for Suicide to Clavel’s castle, we must analyse the relationship between Clavel’s literary text, its visualisation by Depero and their collaboration for the puppet theatre. However, such an investigation must await future studies.

33  Clavel’s diary, 15 November 1902, Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, PA 969 B2 1. 34  Letter to Depero, 14 July 1918, Fortunato Depero Archive, MART [=Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy], Dep.3.1.1.16.

List of Contributors Elza Adamowicz – Queen Mary University of London Sarah Archino – Furman University Kate Armond – University of East Anglia David Ayers – University of Kent Erik Bachman – University of California at Santa Cruz Imre József Balázs – Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca Natalia Baschmakoff – University of Eastern Finland / University of Helsinki Fae Brauer – University of East London / University of New Sout Wales Marjet Brolsma – University of Amsterdam Sam Cooper – University of Sussex Marysa Demoor – Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and Ghent University Cedric Van Dijck – Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and Ghent University Joshua Dittrich – University of Toronto Markus Ender – Universität Innsbruck, Forschungsinstitut Brenner-Archiv Konstantina Drakopoulou – National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Éva Forgács – Art Center College of Design, Pasadena Ingrid Fürhapter – Universität Innsbruck, Forschungsinstitut Brenner-Archiv Sylvia Hakopian – Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University Benedikt Hjartarson – University of Iceland Tomi Huttunen – University of Helsinki Cathy L. Jrade – Vanderbilt University Kate Kangaslahti – KU Leuven Tessa Lobbes – Utrecht University Claire Lozier – Université de Leeds Irina Marchesini – University of Bologna Bruno Marques – IHA, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam – Aarhus University Elena Petrushanskaya-Averbakh – Moscow State Institute for Arts Studies Annebella Pollen – University of Brighton Sarah Posman – Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and Ghent University Max Saunders – King’s College London Sami Sjöberg – University of Helsinki Per Stounbjerg – Aarhus University Jun Tanaka – The University of Tokyo Riku Toivola – University of Helsinki Dmitrii Tokarev – Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Saint-Petersburg Harri Veivo – Université de Caen Barrett Watten – Wayne State University

Index Abrams, Richard 367 Adamowicz, Elza 8, 73–88 Ades, Dawn 464 Adler, Alfred 394 Adler, Paul 190 Adorno, Theodor W. 6–7, 17, 29, 101, 312 Ady, Endre 317 Agamben, Giorgio 41, 113 Akhmatova, Anna 490 Akinsemoyin, Ronke 407 Albert-Birot, Pierre 407 Ale, Salvador 162 Alexandre, Arsène 140 Alexandrian, Sarane 446, 447 Althusser, Louis 370 Alvarez Bravo, Manuel 83 Anders, Günther 180 Anderson, Perry 46 André, Hans 180 Anemolius 281 Anemone, Anthony 275, 279, 283 Ang, Brian 99, 113–114, 115–117 Ankli, Ruedi 498 Antonov, Aleksandr 201, 202 Apollinaire, Guillaume 61 Aragon, Louis 77, 86, 295, 462, 464, 472 Archino, Sarah 12, 355–368 Arcos, René 56 Aristotle 89 Armand, Émile 437 Armantrout, Rae 108, 109 Armond, Kate 11, 259–273 Armstrong, Tim 342, 354 Arnold, Matthew 317 Arp, Hans 407 Artaud, Antonin 75, 77, 82, 87, 88, 317, 407 Asie, Marc 303 Assheuer, Thomas 443 Attila 77 Aublet, Félix 289, 291, 297, 303 Auden, W.H. 349 Audiberti, Jacques 407 Audoul, Alfred 289, 296 Auria, Matthew D’ 51 Avraamov, Arsenii 223, 224

Avrich, Paul 357 Ayers, David 3–13 Baader, Johannes 246 Bachman, Erik 7, 89–97 Bachmann, Gábor 309, 316, 318 Bachofen, Johann Jakob 501 Bacon, Francis 343 Baden-Powell, Robert 340 Badiou, Alain 113 Bakhtin, Mikhail 158 Bakunin, Mikhail 135 Balázs, Imre József 13, 445–457 Ball, Hugo 407 Balzac, Honoré de 115 Bann, Stephen 310 Baraduc, Hippolyte 123, 133 Baranov-Rossine, Vladimir 219 Barbusse, Henri 50, 55 Barnard, Jeremy 215 Baronov, Vadim 105 Barrès, Maurice 68 Barthes, Roland 317, 431–435, 438, 441, 443 Baschmakoff, Natalia 10, 199–214 Bataille, Georges 13, 429–443, 462, 463 Baudelaire, Charles 76, 83, 463 Baudrillard, Jean 222 Beaudin, André 296 Beauduin, Nicolas 407 Beethoven, Ludwig van 64 Béhar, Henri 85 Belkina, Mariya 490 Bellamy, Edward 39, 40 Bellmer, Hans 462 Bellows, George 357 Belyi, Andrei 203, 206–207, 211, 484 Benda, Julien 51, 57 Benjamin, Walter 6, 11, 186, 283 Bennett, E.N. 395 Benson, Steve 109 Berdyaev, Nikolai 206 Berg, Hubert van den 59 Bergson, Henri 36, 38–39, 53, 124, 125–126, 147, 202–203, 359–360, 364–365 Berlage, Petrus Hendrik 52

506 

 Index

Berman, Marshall 384 Bernal, J.D. 383, 388, 389–390 Bernes, Jasper 113, 118 Bernheim, Hippolyte 129, 131, 146 Bernoulli, Carl Albrecht 501 Besant, Annie 149 Besnard, Albert 144 Binet, Alfred 132, 133 Biro, Matthew 254 Bishop, Claire 335 Bismarck, Otto von 64 Bissière, Roger 289 Bjerke-Petersen, Vilhelm 13, 413–427, 459 Bjerre, Poul 61, 67, 68, 70 Blake, William 22 Blanchot, Maurice 79–80, 86, 439 Blavatsky, Helena P. 124, 126–127, 140, 147, 150 Bleeps 332, 333 Bloch, Ernst 6–7, 11, 33–34, 46, 75, 78, 90, 92, 95–96, 101, 186, 241, 242–243, 259–273, 287, 312, 325 Blok, Aleksandr 484 Blum, Léon 296 Bock, Eugeen de 56 Bogza, Geo 449 Bois, Jules 124, 133, 140–143, 145–146, 150 Boissonnas, Fred 143, 144 Bois, Yve-Alain 252 Bölsche, Wilhelm 272 Bolshakov, Konstantin 407 Borel, Henri 61, 63 Borges, Jorge Luis 284 Borngräber, Otto 68 Bortnyik, Sándor 314 Borum, Poul 473 Boullée, Étienne-Louis 237 Bourriaud, Nicolas 335 Bowlt, John 210, 211–212 Boyesen, Bayard 357 Boym, Svetlana 282 Bozhnev, Boris 397 Bragdon, Claude 127, 128 Braid, James 131, 146 Braque, Georges 252 Brauer, Fae 10, 123–151 Brauner, Victor 448, 451, 456 Brenkman, John 99, 101–102, 108, 118

Brenner, Michael 365 Breton, André 21–23, 25, 29, 31, 74–88, 317, 413–415, 436, 445–449, 456, 457, 461–464 Brien, Geoffrey G. O’ 29 Brill, A.A. 358 Brinks, Michael 176 Brittain, Vera 396 Brod, Max 177 Brodskii, Iosif 221 Brokhes, Mikhail 490 Brolsma, Marjet 8, 49–57, 59 Brown, Brandon 113 Brown, Michael 119 Brunclair, Victor J. 56 Bruno, Giordano 446 Bruno, Guido 356 Bru, Sascha 47, 185 Bryen, Camille 407 Buchanan, Robert 388 Buelens, Geert 59 Bunyard, Tom 26 Bürger, Peter 26 Burgess, Gelett 358 Burke, Kenneth 18, 393 Burkhardt, Richard 130 Burlyuk, David 5 Burq, Victor 131 Burroughs, William S. 455 Busoni, Ferruccio 220 Butler, Samuel 386–387 Buuck, David 113 Cabrita Reis, Pedro 10, 229–240 Caffin, Charles 363, 364 Calliaux, Rodolphe 296 Campanella, Tommaso 275, 279–280, 283, 285, 343 Camps, Ramón J. 154 Canjuers, Pierre 27 Canudo, Ricciotto 18 Čapek, Karel 347 Cárdenas, Lázaro 81 Carlsen, Henning 460, 473 Carnap, Rudolf 394 Carpenter, Edward 342 Carrington, Leonora 75, 77, 87 Carter, Nicolas. See John Coryell Casas, Bartolomé de las 76

Index  Cassou, Jean 293 Cattiaux, Louis 296 Certeau, Michel de 163 Chaffee, Lyman G. 325 Chaplin, Charlie 341, 366 Charchoune, Serge 397, 404, 405 Charcot, Jean-Martin 128, 131, 132, 146 Chashnik, Il’ya 308 Chekhov, Anton 489 Chekrygin, Vasilii 207, 210, 211–212 Cheronnet, Louis 297, 299, 303 Chevreul, Michel Eugène 292 Cheyssial, Georges 296 Chiosso, Giorgio 372 Chomsky, Noam 102–103, 105 Chopin, Frédéric 144 Chtcheglov, Ivan 471–472 Claeys, Gregory 285 Claretie, Jules 142 Clavel, Gilbert 13, 493–502 Clavel, René 493, 499, 500 Clover, Joshua 23, 113 Coady, Robert 355, 356, 365–367 Cogniat, Raymond 406 Cohen, Joseph 364 Colin, Paul 55, 57 Colucci, Géo 296 Columbus, Christopher 80, 88 Conan Doyle, Arthur 125 Constant (Nieuwenhuys) 8–9 Conway, Jack 81 Cooper, Sam 9, 17–32 Cortés, Hérnan 77, 80, 82 Coryell, John 366 Coster, Dirk 51, 53–57 Cox, Kenyon 361 Crookes, William 125 Crookshank, F.G. 385 Crotti, Jean 296 Curtius, Ernst Robert 51 Dagen, Philippe 150 Dainotto, Roberto 380 Dalai Lama 77 Dalí, Salvador 462 Dallago, Carl 169–176 Danilevskii, Nikolai 277 Darget, Louis 133 Dariex, Xavier 142

 507

Darwin, Charles 200, 262 Davanzati, Roberto Forges 379 Davidsohn, Hans. See Jakob van Hoddis Davidson, Michael 103, 104 Dawkins, Richard 389 Debord, Guy 8, 24–26, 27, 29–30, 470–472, 473 Delaunay, Robert 11, 289–305 Delaunay, Sonia 11, 289–305 Delauzières, André 296 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 452–453, 454, 457 Deleuze, J.P.F. 129–130 Demoor, Marysa 8, 33–47 Depero, Fortunato 493, 494, 500, 502 Derain, André 252 Dermée, Paul 407 Derrida, Jacques 13, 284, 311, 321, 430, 438, 443 Desnos, Robert 405 Dewey, John 418 Didi-Huberman, Georges 429 Dijck, Cedric Van 8, 33–47 Dilthey, Wilhelm 53 Dittrich, Joshua 11, 241–255 Dobrée, Bonamy 391 Dobrenko, Evgeny 456 Doesburg, Theo van 52 Donzel, Maurice 405 Dorival, Bernard 298 Dostoevskii, Fëdor 54, 478–479, 480 Dovzhenko, Aleksandr 107 Drakopoulou, Konstantina 11, 323–336 Druskin, Mikhail 221 Druskin, Yakov 213 Duchenne de Bologne, Guillaume 145 Dumayet, Pierre 440 Durant, Will 357 Durville, André 469 Durville, Gaston 469 Durville, Hector 129, 130, 133 Dyl, Yan-Bernard 296 Ebners, Ferdinand 173, 174 Eburne, Jonathan 28, 30 Eco, Umberto 287, 369–370 Edinger, George 392 Eeden, Frederik van 59–71 Ehrenstein, Albert 175, 190, 192 Eichholz-Schönfeld, Lisl 180

508 

 Index

Einstein, Albert 395 Einstein, Carl 252, 253 Eisenman, Peter 311 Eizenshtein, Sergei 81, 228 Eksteins, Modris 52 Eliot, T.S. 34, 36, 51, 307 Ellis. See Lev Kobylinskii Ellis, Havelock 341 Elsworth, John 203 Empson, William 394 Encausse, Gérard 132 Ender, Markus 10, 169–183 Engelhard, Georgia 358, 364 Engels, Friedrich 4–5, 17, 19, 26, 89, 93, 135, 182 Epstein, Jacob 348 Ernst, Max 74–75, 75, 416 Estève, Maurice 296 Evangulov, Georgii 397 Evans, Idrisyn Oliver 343, 345, 346 Evreinov, Nikolai 205 Fabian, Johannes 352, 354 Fabry, Geneviève 155 Favorskii, Vladimir 211, 212 Fechner, Gustav 200, 204, 209 Feinberg, Samuil 216 Felski, Rita 28, 30 Fénéon, Félix 199 Férat, Serge 296 Féré, Charles 132–133 Ferkel, Lina de. See Lina (de Ferkel) Ferrer, Francisco 357 Ferry, Gabriel 81 Fersen, Jacques 495, 500 Fest, Joachim 177 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 193 Ficker, Ludwig von 169–170, 172–180, 183 Filonov, Pavel 208–209, 212 Finsterlin, Hermann 259, 260, 263–266, 267, 269, 271 Flake, Otto 177 Flammarion, Camille 123–124, 125, 142 Florenskii, Pavel 199, 210–211 Fodor, Nancy 125 Foëx, Jean-Albert 468, 469, 473 Ford, Ford Madox 35 Ford, Henry 70 Forgács, Éva 11, 307–321

Foster, Hal 249 Foucault, Michel 36–37, 236, 453 Fourier, Charles 93, 296–297, 429, 432, 450 Franco, Francisco 305 Franklin, Benjamin 129 Frank, Waldo 359 Freud, Sigmund 12–13, 21, 38, 200, 235, 358, 413, 414–420, 422, 426, 438, 445, 447–455, 457, 463, 466 Fried, Alfred 67, 68 Friedlaender, Salomo 192 Friedman, Alan Warren 37 Fröbel, Friedrich 418 Fromm, Erich 451 Frueh, Alfred 358 Fürhapter, Ingrid 10, 169–183 Fussell, Paul 34 Fyfe, Hamilton 390 Gabo, Naum 314 Gamboni, Dario 325 Garelick, Rhonda K. 485 Gastev, Aleksei 220, 221 Gauguin, Paul 249 Gauthier, Xavière 462 Gayraud, Régis 398, 406 Geddes, Patrick 341 Gehry, Frank 311 Gelder, Hendrik Enno van 53 Gelman, Juan 10, 153–167 Gentile, Giovanni 12, 369–371, 377–381 George, Lloyd 70–71 George, Stefan 61 Germain, André 405–406 Gérodias, Jack 289 Gershwin, George 226 Gibelli, Antonio 380 Gide, André 54, 56 Gijssen, Marnix 56 Gilman, Sandor 248 Gimes, Miklós 307 Ginger, Aleksandr 397, 399 Ginzburg, Lidiya 490 Giraud, Albert 478 Glebova, Tatyana 212 Gleizes, Albert 289, 296 G., Magdeleine 124, 143–144, 146 Godwin, George 391 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 52, 64, 89

Index  Goldberg, Oskar 191–193 Goldman, Emma 356, 367 Goldring, Douglas 55 Golovanov, Nikolai 227 Golyshev, Efim 216 Goncharova, Natalia 20 González Tuñón, Raúl 154 Gorkii, Maksim 56 Gorodetskii, Sergei 479 Goujon, Jean 301 Gould, Stephen Jay 350 Grant, Oscar 112 Grave, Jean 134 Graves, Robert 383, 391 Gray, Camilla 310 Greco, El 85 Greenough, Sarah 358 Gregory, Rosalyn 33–34, 41 Greig, J.Y.T. 391 Grelling, Richard 69 Grivokostopoulos, Harris 334 Gropius, Walter 271 Grosz, George 248 Guadalupe Posada, Jose 84 Guarnieri, Romano 55 Guattari, Félix 13, 452–453, 454, 457 Guénon, René 87 Guevara, Che 153 Guipet, Emma. See Magdeleine G. Gulyás, Gyula 315 Gutkind, Erich 61, 62, 67 Hablik, Wenzel 259, 261, 263–266, 269 Hadid, Zaha M. 311 Haeckel, Ernst 11, 259, 261–266, 272–273, 340, 350 Haecker, Theodor 172–175 Hakopian, Sylvia 12, 369–381 Haldane, J.B.S. 383–390, 393 Haldane, John Scott 387 Haldane, Naomi 387 Hall, G. Stanley 350 Halpern, Rob 113 Hamill, Sam 111 Hansen-Löve, Aage A. 478, 484 Hapgood, Hutchins 361 Hargrave, John 339–341, 343, 346–353 Harryman, Carla 109 Hart, Basil Liddell 383

 509

Hartley, Marsden 359–360, 361, 365, 366 Hartmann, Sadakichi 362 Hartmann, Thomas von 360–361 Hartwig, René 289, 302 Hasenclever, Walter 189 Hatfield, H. Stafford 391 Hausmann, Raoul 244, 246, 407 Havelaar, Just 56 Havel, Hippolyte 356 Havel, Václav 319 Haviland, Paul 360, 362 Heard, Gerald 385 Heartfield, John 248 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 5, 23, 36, 89, 95, 113–114, 193, 312, 371 Heinrich, Karl Borromäus 172 Hejinian, Lyn 99, 104, 109, 112 Heller, Ágnes 91–92 Henderson, P.W. 366–367 Henein, Georges 446 Henri, Robert 357 Hercolani, Santa Borghese 493, 494, 497, 500 Herder, Johann Gottfried 193 Hérold, Jacques 448 Herzog, Dagmar 425 Herzog, Fritz 185, 189 Hesse, Hermann 54, 177 Hewitson, Mark 51 Heym, Georg 192, 195 Hickey, Martha Weitzel 276 Hiller, Kurt 185, 186–187, 191, 192 Himmelb(l)au, Coop 311 Hitchens, Christopher 389 Hitler, Adolf 74, 416 Hjartarson, Benedikt 3–13 Höch, Hannah 11, 241–255 Hoddis, Jakob van 187, 188, 191–199 Hoffmann, Camill 189, 194 Hollier, Denis 77 Holtby, Winnifred 390 Horace 144 Horowitz, Gregg 164 Houston, Edwin 149 Huebner, Friedrich Markus 55–57 Huelsenbeck, Richard 245–246 Hughes, Gordon 292 Huidobro, Vicente 407

510 

 Index

Huistra, Pieter 59 Hulme, T.E. 35, 394 Huxley, Aldous 384, 386, 387 Huxley, Julian 341 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 500 Il’ina, Nataliya 489 Il’yazd. See Il’ya Zdanevich Imposti, Gabriella 215 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 248–249 Ionesco, Eugène 403 Ivain, Gilles. See Ivan Chtcheglov Ivanov, Vyacheslav 105, 216, 279 Izenberg, Oren 99, 102, 103, 104–105, 108, 117, 118 Izvekov, Georgii 227 Jackson, Julian 296 Jackson, Paul 35 Jaeger, M. 394 Jameson, Fredric 40–41, 92–94, 327, 371 Janecek, Gerald 406, 407 Janet, Pierre 141, 143 Jeffries, Richard 342 Jessup, Lynda 342 Joad, C.E.M. 396 John, Augustus 349 Johnson, Philip 311, 312 Jolas, Eugene 407 Jones, David 35 Jorn, Asger 460, 471 Joyce, James 386, 392–393 Jrade, Cathy L. 10, 153–167 Jung, Carl Gustav 394 Jussieu, Laurent de 129 Kádár, János 309 Kahlo, Frida 8, 81, 84 Kállai, Ernő 314 Kamenskii, Vasilii 407 Kandinskii, Vasilii 200, 204, 208, 271, 355, 359–360, 364 Kangaslahti, Kate 11, 289–305 Kant, Immanuel 92, 207 Kassák, Lajos 314, 315 Kauffer, E. McKnight 348 Keeffe, Georgia O’ 365 Kelly, Catriona 281 Kemény, Alfréd 313 Kempner, Alfred. See Alfred Kerr Kepes, György 317

Kern, Stephen 354 Kerr, Alfred 144 Key, Ellen 418 Kharms, Daniil 212–213 Khlebnikov, Velimir 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 217, 219, 401, 404, 407 Kierkegaard, Søren 172 Kilcher, Andreas 193 King, Katie 125 Király, Tamás 318 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 249–250, 529 Kitchener, Lord 37 Kliger, Dave 114–116 Kloos, Willem 53 Knight, Diana 435 Knut, Dovid 397 Kobro, Katarzyna 312 Kobylinskii, Lev 478 Kohlmann, Benjamin 33–34, 41 Kokoschka, Oskar 271 Kolb, Annette 177 Komeda, Krzysztof 473 Konody, P.G. 43 Koolhaas, Rem 311 Koselleck, Reinhart 3 Kotányi, Attila 28, 29 Kots, Arkadii 223 Kounellis, Jannis 332 Kovtun, Evgenii 214 Kraus, Karl 171 Krell, Max 177 Kropotkin, Pëtr 124, 134–135, 139, 147 Kruchenykh, Aleksei 207, 397, 401, 404, 407, 408 Kul’bin, Nikolai 200, 204, 228 Kupka, František 10, 123–151 Laclau, Ernesto 324, 336, 438 Lakoff, George 103, 105 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 124, 129–130, 134–140 Lamba, Jacqueline 80–81 Landauer, Gustav 61, 68 Lane, Barbara Miller 270 Laotse 173 Larabee, Mark 35 Larsen, Sara 113, 118 Lasker-Schüler, Else 175, 191, 195 Latinina, Yulia 105

Index  Lau, David 113, 114, 115 Laurent-Eynac, André 296 Lautréamont, Comte de 456 Lavater, Johann Caspar 145 Lavin, Maud 244 Lawrence, D.H. 341, 349 Lawrence, Emmeline Pethick 341 Leadbeater, Charles W. 127–128, 149 Lears, T.J. Jackson 341 Le Brun, Charles 145 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 237, 267 Lee, Vernon 383, 396 Lefebvre, Henri 23, 29, 75 Léger, Fernand 292, 295 Lehmann, Otto 261 Lenin, Vladimir I. 89, 93, 113–114, 224–225, 228, 315 Leoncavallo 477 León, Moses de 163 Lermontov, Mikhail 404 Levinas, Emmanuel 158 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 398 Levitas, Ruth 90, 431 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 22 Lewis, Wyndham 35, 43, 45, 47, 348 Lianos, Panagiotis 334 Libeskind, Daniel 311 Lichtenstein, Alfred 188, 190, 191, 195 Liébeault, Auguste 123, 131 Lietz, Meister 493 Lifton, Robert Jay 326 Lina (de Ferkel) 124, 142–146 Lipps, Theodor 205 Lisitskii, El’ 190, 308, 312 Livshits, Benedikt 217 Lobbes, Tessa 8, 59–71 Locquin, Jean 296 Lombardo-Radice, Giuseppe 369–379 Losonczy, Géza 307 Lot, Fernand 303 Lotov, Anton 407 Loudon, John 70 Lourié, Arthur 217, 219, 223 Lovett, Chris 276, 277, 278 Low, A.M. 385 Lozier, Claire 13, 429–443 Luca, Gherasim 13, 447–457 Luce, Maximilien 134

 511

Luckhardt, Hans 259, 260, 269–271 Luckhardt, Wassili 259, 260, 269–271 Luhan, Mabel Dodge 358 Lukács, Georg 7–8, 89–97, 267, 315 Lunacharskii, Anatolii 223 Luria, Isaac 162–164 Luys, Jules Bernard 129, 132, 141 Lyall, Archibald 391 Lyotard, Jean-François 329 MacDiarmid, Hugh 383 MacDonald-Wright, Stanton 366 Machor, James L. 280 Macke, August 252 Maeterlinck, Maurice 206 Magnin, Émile 123, 130, 140, 143–144 Mahler, Gustav 216 Mahon, Alyce 447 Maléter, Pál 307 Malevich, Kazimir 200, 209, 210, 213 Malinowski, Bronisław 394, 417 Mandel’shtam 279 Mandel, Tom 109 Manet, Édouard 248 Mannheim, Karl 7, 33, 38–39, 394, 400 Mannherz, Julia 200 Mann, Paul 20 Mann, Thomas 51, 56–57 Marc, Franz 49, 57 Marchesini, Irina 11, 275–287 Marcuse, Herbert 90, 101, 451 Maréchal, Jean 297 Marembert, Jean 296 Marie Antoinette 461 Mariengof, Anatolii 223 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 18–21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 42–43, 221 Marin, John 365 Marques, Bruno 10, 229–240 Marrero, Vincente 328 Marx, Karl 5, 13, 17, 19, 26, 30, 38–39, 50, 74, 82, 89, 90, 93, 102, 111, 135, 153, 162, 175, 186, 267–268, 273, 314, 319, 384, 388, 426, 440, 447–453, 450, 457 Matisse, Henri 249, 250, 252 Matyushin, Mikhail 202–203, 209, 213 Maurois, André 396 Max, Gabriel von 272 Mayakovskii, Vladimir 107, 167, 217, 283

512 

 Index

Mazow, Leo 366 Mazzini, Giuseppe 375 McBean, Angus 349 McBride, Henry 363, 365 McDougall, William 395 McKinley, William 356 Medunetskii, Konstantin 312 Megasthenes 280 Melchiori, Alessandro 378 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii 277 Merkurov, Sergei 478, 479, 480 Mesmer, Franz Anton 128, 129 Meyer, Hannes 313 Michaud, Eric 302 Michnik, Adam 319 Miller, Glen 226 Miller, Henry 472 Miller, Tyrus 6 Millet, Jean-François 169 Mints, Zara 202 Moctezuma 77–78 Moens, Wies 56 Moholy-Nagy, László 314 Molitor, Franz 193 Moll, Albert 414, 418–419, 421–422 Molotov, Vyacheslav 488 Molo, Walter von 68 Monnerot, Jules 79 Montaigne, Michel de 497 Montessori, Maria 420–421 Moore, G.E. 394 Morard, Annick 404 More, Thomas 4–5, 40–41, 93, 94, 275, 280, 285, 343 Morris, William 343, 347 Mouffe, Chantal 324, 334, 336, 438 Mowrer, Edgar Ansel 390 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 114, 115 Mühsam, Erich 190 Müller, Elise-Cathérine. See Hélène Smith Müller, Robert 175 Münter, Gabriele 355 Murray, John Middleton 54 Musorgskii, Modest 219 Mussche, Achilles 56 Mussolini, Benito 369, 373, 379 Myaskovskii, Nikolai 217 Myers, Jerome 361

Myers, Virginia 361 Nadar, Paul 142 Nagy, Imre 307 Nash, Paul 47 Naum, Gellu 447–448, 455 Navarro Sanchez, Adalberto 85 Neal, Mary 341 Nebel, Carl 76 Neep, E.J.C. 392 Neruda, Pablo 160 Nevinson, Christopher R.W. 42–47 Newton, Isaac 129, 147 Nicholls, Peter 22, 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35, 36, 53, 169, 171, 202, 277, 317, 388 Nordau, Max 125 Nourry, Joséphine 140 Obukhov, Nikolai 223 Ogden, C.K. 12, 383–396 Olcott, Colonel 126 Olesha, Yurii 483 Oppenheimer, Robert 180 Ory, Pascal 296 Ovid 144 Owen, Robert 4, 5 Owen, Wilfred 37 Oxfeldt, Elisabeth 463 Paalen, Wolfgang 75, 87 Padellaro, Nazareno 379 Paget, Richard 393 Paldam, Camilla Skovbjerg 12, 413–427 Palladino, Eusapia 142 Pankhurst, Sylvia 383, 391 Papaioannou, Tassis 334 Papus. See Gérard Encausse Parnakh, Valentin 397, 404–405 Pascolato, Maria Pezzé 372–374 Pasternak, Boris 490 Pastoureau, Henri 446 Patten, C.J. 395 Pauer, Gyula 315 Paul 330 Păun, Paul 447–448, 449, 455 Pavlovna, Lidiya 488 Paz, Octavio 74 Pearce, M. Channing 390 Pearson, Karl 394 Pearson, Ted 109

Index  Perelman, Bob 109 Péret, Benjamin 75, 87 Perloff, Marjorie 18, 20 Peter the Great 280 Petnikov, Georgii 217 Petrushanskaya-Averbakh, Elena 10, 215–228 Pfemfert, Franz 195 Phidias 144 Piaget, Jean 394 Picasso, Pablo 206, 252, 305, 327, 328, 408 Piel, Jean 440 Pink, M. Alderton 390 Pinthus, Kurt 56, 187 Pippin, Robert 35 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 237–238, 240 Pitois, Étienne 296 Plato 207, 281, 343 Pollen, Annebella 12, 339–354, 351 Ponzi, Mauro 494 Poplavskii, Boris 12, 397–410 Posman, Sarah 8, 33–47 Pound, Ezra 34–35, 36 Pratt, Mary Louise 245, 247 Praxiteles 144 Prezzolini, Giuseppe 375–376 Prokof’ev, Sergei 217 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 4 Ptolemy, Claudius 80, 280 Puchner, Martin 18, 19 Puckhaber, Eda L. 364 Puyfontaine, Marquis de 132 Puységur, Marquis de 128 Quincey, Thomas De 22 Rafael Videla, Jorge 153 Rajk, László 11, 307–321 Rambosson, Yvanhoé 303 Rancière, Jacques 29 Rang, Florens 61, 62, 67 Rank, Otto 394 Ravaglioli, Fabrizio 379 Raynal, Maurice 329 Read, Herbert 22 Reclus, Élisée 124, 134–139, 147 Reich, Wilhelm 12–13, 413–427, 449–450, 451–452, 459 Reinitzer, Friedrich 261 Reynolds, Craig W. 334 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges 406–407

 513

Richards, I.A. 385, 390, 394 Richet, Charles 128, 131, 142 Ricoeur, Paul 7, 38–39, 41, 46 Riegl, Alois 241 Riggs, Garrett 406 Rimbaud, Arthur 74, 76, 79, 85, 194–195, 299 Rimskii-Korsakov 215–216 Rivera, Diego 76, 81–84, 86 Rivers, W.H.R. 394 Robinson, Kit 109, 115 Rochas, Albert de 123, 130, 133, 140–143, 145–147 Rock, David 154 Rocks, Cacao 327–330 Rodin, Auguste 144 Rodker, John 396 Rolland, Romain 50–51, 56, 61, 64, 67, 68 Room, Abram 224 Rosen, Friedrich 70–71 Rosenzweig, Franz 186 Roslavets, Nikolai 216 Ross, Robbie 45 Rousseau Jean-Jacques 418, 446 Rousseau (Le Douanier), Henri 75, 81, 134, 140, 367 Rowell, Margaret 127 Roxburgh, J.F. 390 Rozanova, Olga 207, 407 Rubins, Maria 400 Ruskin, John 347 Russell, Bertrand 383–385, 390 Russell, Dora 383, 390 Russell, Frank D. 329 Rutte, Miroslav 55 Ryback, Isaac Ben 190 Sade, Marquis de 86, 417, 429, 432–433, 435, 443, 462 Saint-Maur 294 Saint-Simon, Henri de 4, 450 Sardou, Victorien 142 Saunders, Max 12, 383–396 Sby, Roger 296 Schade, Jens August 13, 459–473 Scheerbart, Paul 259, 260–261, 267, 272–273 Schelling, Friedrich 193 Schickele, René 177

514 

 Index

Schiller, Friedrich 4, 93 Schillinger, Iosif 225–226 Schlegel, Friedrich 193 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 193 Schlemmer, Oskar 349 Schlier, Paula 176–183 Schmitt, Carl 41 Schœdelin, Réginald 294 Schoenberg, Arnold 478 Scholem, Gershom 192 Schubert, Franz 144 Schuré, Édouard 127 Schwimmer, Rosika 70, 71 Schwitters, Kurt 253, 408 Scopelliti, Paolo 457 Seal, Graham 38 Segantini, Giovanni 169 Selincourt, Basil de 391 Sergius of Radonezh 210 Seton, Ernest Thompson 341 Seuphor, Michel 408 Shakespeare, William 144 Shalyapin, Fëdor 484 Shaw, Bernard 64 Sherry, Vincent 35, 38 Shershenevich, Vadim 477–478 Sholpo, Evgenii 224 Shostakovich, Dmitrii 226 Signac, Paul 134, 199 Silliman, Ron 104–108, 115 Simmel, Georg 135 Sinclair, Upton 61 Šiška, Josef 123 Sitwell, Osbert 43 Sjöberg, Sami 10, 185–198 Sjöman, Vilgot 473 Skryabin, Aleksandr 216, 219 Slonimskii, Mikhail 307 Smith, Hélène 125, 140–141 Snow, C.P. 317 Sokhor, A. 215 Solov’ёv, Vladimir 202, 285 Sonn, Richard D. 437 Sontag, Susan 317 Souriau, Paul 146 Spahr, Juliana 113, 118 Spengler, Oswald 277 Spitteler, Carl 68

Stahl, Jess 366 Stahr, Henrick 251 Stalin, Iosif 82, 105, 213, 308–309, 310, 315, 319, 384, 489, 491 Stanislavskii, Konstantin 219 Stavridis, Stavros 334 Steiner, Rudolf 175 Stepanova, Varvara 109 Sterligov, Vladimir 210, 212–214 Stewart, Oliver 384 Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne 379 Stieglitz, Alfred 12, 355–365, 367 Stiles, Kristine 326–327, 329 Stopes, Marie 423 Stounbjerg, Per 13, 459–473 Stravinskii, Igor’ 405 Studnička, Alois 123 Sukhovo-Kobylin, Aleksandr 9 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 433–434 Survage, Léopold 296 Surya, Michel 436 Swietlicki, Catherine 163 Swift, Blue. See I.O. Evans Szalai, Tibor 318 Szeemann, Harald 494 Szilágyi, József 307 Szirtes, George 316 Szobel, Geza 296 Tafuri, Manfredo 237 Tagore, Rabindranath 56, 61, 64 Talov, Marc 397, 404, 405 Tamayo, Rufino 86, 87 Tamburlaine 77 Tanaka, June 13, 493–535 Tanguy, Yves 78–80, 84 Tapie, Michel 296 Tarkovskii, Andrei 105 Tatlin, Vladimir 313 Taut, Bruno 259–261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 269–272 Taylor, George 39 Teodorescu, Virgil 447 Terent’ev, Igor’ 408 Termen, Lev 224–225, 227 Theremin. See Lev Termen Thoreau, Henry David 61, 342 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 335 Tissot, James 125

Index  Toivola, Riku 13, 475–491 Tokarev, Dmitrii 12, 397–410 Toller, Ernst 185–187, 190, 195, 197 Tolstoi, Lev 347 Trakl, Georg 172, 176 Trevino, Wendy 113 Trost, Dolfi 447–448, 450, 451, 453–455, 456 Trotskii, Lev 5–6, 81, 82–83, 85–86, 310, 347, 456 Tschumi, Bernard 311, 320 Tsekhanovskii, Mikhail 224 Tsirgvava, Lidiya 488 Tuckfield, Winifred 349 Tufanov, Aleksandr 401–404, 406 Turgenev, Ivan 490 Tythacott, Louise 81 Tyutchev, Fëdor 404 Tzara, Tristan 196, 405, 408 Uspenskii, Pёtr 208 Vachtová, Ludmila 123, 126 Vaginov, Konstantin K. 11, 275–287 Valéry, Paul 50 Vallejo, César 167 Varshavskii, Vladimir 400 Venturi, Robert 312 Verlaine, Paul 144 Vertinskii, Aleksandr 13, 475–502 Viard, Paul 289, 291 Vida, Judit 318 Vidari, Giovanni 379 Vieira, Fátima 285 Villon, Jacques 296 Virilio, Paul 333 Vitiello, Audric 438 Vlaminck, Maurice de 252 Volkov, Solomon 280 Vree, Freddy de 471 Vvedenskii, Aleksandr 212 Vyshnegraskii, Ivan 223 Waddell, Nathan 33 Wadsworth, Edward 204 Wagner, Richard 144, 145, 216

Walkowitz, Abraham 358, 365 Warren, Alli 113 Washton Long, Rose-Carol 359 Wassermann, Jakob 68 Watten, Barrett 9, 99–119, 109 Weindler, Wilhelm 177, 178 Wells, H.G. 61, 339, 341, 343–346, 351, 353–354, 385, 392 Werfel, Franz 190 Westphal, Bertrand 75–76 Whitman, Walt 167, 169, 365 Whyte, Iain Boyd 259 Wigley, Mark 311 Wijk, Hjalmar 67, 70 Wilde, Oscar 495 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 135 Williams, Bert 366 Winter, Jay 34, 36 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 317, 385 Wolff, Adolf 363 Wolffheim, Nelly 414, 420–422, 425 Wölfflin, Heinrich 241 Woodruff, Douglas 390 Woolf, Virginia 35 Wordsworth, William 22 Worringer, Wilhelm 241 Wünsche, Isabel 212 Yakulov, Georgii 217 Yusfin, Abram 105 Zamyatin, Evgenii 222–223, 384 Zangerle, Ignaz 176, 181–182 Zangwill, Israël 68 Zapata, Emiliano 82 Zayas, Marius de 358, 361–362 Zdanevich, Il’ya 12, 397–410 Zevi, Sabbatai 189 Zima, Carlo 376 Žižek, Slavoj 113, 323 Zuckerman, Solly 394 Zulliger, Hans 414, 420–422 Zweig, Stefan 51, 54, 177

 515

Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 1 (left): František Kupka, L’Origine de la vie (or Les Nénuphars), 1900–1903, coloured copper engraving, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris: Gift of Mme Eugénia Kupka 1963. Public Domain. Col. fig. 2 (right): František Kupka, “L’Argent”: “La Science triomphe sous l’argent”, in: L’Assiette au Beurre, 1902, no 41 (11 January). Photograph by the author.

Col. fig. 3 (left): Albert de Rochas, fig. 1: “Pôle N. rouge”; figs 2 and 3: “Pôle North bleu”; fig. 4: “Rétraction des couches lumineuses de la main gauche à travers un prisme en plâtre”, 1895, coloured lithograph, in: L’Extériorisation de la sensibilité: Étude experimentale et historique, Paris 1895. Photograph by the author. Col. fig. 4 (right): František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs, 1912, oil on canvas, 210 x 200 cm, Narodni Galerie, Prague. Public Domain.

518 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 5: Vasilii Chekrygin, Transformation of Physical into Spiritual (1913, also known as Painfulness). Oil on canvas, private collection, Moscow.



Colour Illustrations 

 519

Col. fig. 6: Vladimir Sterligov, “The spirit breaths wherever it pleases”: Square, Chalice and Cupola. A sketch for the catalogue of the 1995 exhibition at the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

520 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 7: Pedro Cabrita Reis, Large Glass, White and Red (Stockholm),12–15 January 1998. Site specific (each glass 430 x 300 x 15 cm), oil on laminated glass, iron beams. Ferdinand Boberg Power Station, Stockholm. Assistants: Arkipelag technicians. Photo: Mathias Givell. Collection: National Public Art Council Sweden (PCRSTUDIO). By permission of the artist.



Colour Illustrations 

 521

Col. fig. 8: Pedro Cabrita Reis, Dans les villes # 2, 15–19 May 1998, 180 x 414,5 x 80 cm, aluminium, plywood, wrapping tape, enamel on masonite, colored plexiglass. PCRSTUDIO/ Elevador da Bica, Lisboa, Serralharia Nova Abóbada, Trajouce, Galerie Arlogos, Paris. Assistants: PCRSTUDIO / Hugo Diniz Marques. Photo: Marc Domage. Collection: Carlos de Sousa (PCRSTUDIO). By permission of the artist.

522 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 9 (above): Pedro Cabrita Reis, True Gardens # 1 (Crestet), 26–28 April 2000. Nine elements (694 x 570 x 30 cm), wood structure and enamel on mirrors. Crestet Centre d’Art, Le Crestet, Vaison la Romaine. Assistants: PCRSTUDIO / Hugo Diniz Marques / Crestet technicians. Photo: Hervé Abbadie. Collection: Coll. the Artist (project) (PCRSTUDIO). By permission of the artist. Col. fig. 10 (below): Pedro Cabrita Reis, D’après Piranesi, 2–9 April 2001, variable dimensions (site specific), brick walls and fluorescent lights. Volume, Rome (in situ). Assistant: Gianluca Nucci. Photo: Claudio Abate. Collection: Coll. the Artist (project) (PCRSTUDIO). By permission of the artist.



Colour Illustrations 

 523

Col. fig. 11 (above): Pedro Cabrita Reis, Absent Names [view from inside], 1 March–13 June 2003, 400 x 1000 x 600 cm, painted aluminium, asphalt roofing flet, standard air conditioners, fluorescent lights. Serralharia Nova Abóboda, Trajouce / Giardini, Venice. Assistants: Daniel Malhão and Rosário Sousa. Photo: Daniel Malhão / Rosário Sousa. Collection: Coll. the Artist (project) (PCRSTUDIO). By permission of the artist. Col. fig. 12 (below): Pedro Cabrita Reis, Compound #7, 11 May 2006, 225 x 125 x 75 cm, steel pipes. Zámorzc. Assistant: Zbigniew Kloda. Photo: Krsystof Zielinski / European Art Projects. Collection: Coll. the Artist (PCRSTUDIO). By permission of the artist.

524 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 13 (top): Hannah Höch, Fremde Schönheit (Strange Beauty, 1929). © Estate of Hannah Höch / SODRAC (2015). Col. fig. 14 (middle): Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, L’Odalisque à l’esclave (Odalisque with Slave, 1839). Col. fig. 15 (bottom): Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863).



Colour Illustrations 

 525

Col. fig. 16: Édouard Manet, Nana (1877).

Col. fig. 17: Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (L’esprit des morts veille) (Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892).

Col. fig. 18: Henri Matisse, Nu Bleu: Souvenir de Biskra (Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra, 1907).

526 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 19: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mädchen unter Japanschirm (Girl under a Japanese Umbrella, 1909).

Col. fig. 20 (left): Hannah Höch, Mischling (Halfbreed, 1924). © Estate of Hannah Höch / SODRAC (2015). Col. fig. 21 (right): Source photograph for Halfbreed as collected in Höch’s “scrapbook”. © Estate of Hannah Höch / SODRAC (2015).



Colour Illustrations 

 527

Col. fig. 22 (above): Robert Delaunay, Air fer eau (Air Iron Water), 1937. Oil on canvas, 97.4 x 151.4 cm. The Sam and Ayala Zacks Collection in The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, on permanent loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photograph © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem Col. fig. 23 (below): László Rajk, Letatlajk, 2000. Photo courtesy László Rajk.

528 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 24: László Rajk, Haraszti, Na-Ne Gallery 1986–1989. Photo courtesy László Rajk.



Colour Illustrations 

 529

Col. fig. 25 (above): László Rajk, Farmer’s Market, 2002, Budapest, detail. Photo courtesy László Rajk. Col. fig. 26 (left): László Rajk, Farmer’s Market, 2002, Budapest, detail. Photo courtesy László Rajk.

530 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 27 (above): Sidron, Revolution Now and Ever, aerosol paint on wall, Athens 2010. Photo by Sidron. Col. fig. 28 (below): Cacao Rocks, Guernica, aerosol paint on shop window, Athens 2012. Photo by Cacao Rocks.



Colour Illustrations 

 531

Col. fig. 29 (above): Bleeps, Worship, mixed media on wall, Athens, 9 July 2014. Photo by Bleeps. Col. fig. 30 (below): Posters and flyers pertaining to events for the funding of the Container Project, Athens 2013–2015. Photo by Harris Grivokostopoulos (CANarc).

532 

 Colour Illustrations

Col. fig. 31: John Hargrave design for a Gleeman’s surcoat in red, green, yellow and black, 1929. Image courtesy of Jon Tacey.