The Dark Side Of The Moon-Was Nietzsche An Anarchist?
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Chara BrainTransplant...
THE ANARCHIST NIETZSCHE IN THE 20TH CENTURY AVANT-GARDES
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'Why so hard?’ the charcoal once said to the diamond; ‘for are we not close relations?’
Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: for are you not – m
‘Wy brothers?
Why so soft, unresisting and yielding? Why is there so much denial and abnegation in your hearts? So little fate in your glances?
And if you will not be fates, if you will not be inexorable: how can you – conquer me?
And if your hardness will not flash and cut and cut to pieces: how can you one day – create with me?
For all creators are hard. and it must seem bliss to you to press your hand upon millennia as upon wax, bliss to write upon the will of millennia as upon metal – harder than metal, nobler than metal. Only the noblest is perfectly hard.
this new law-table do I put over you, o my brothers:
Become hard!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Hammer Speaks’, Twilight of the Idols
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON – WAS NIETZSCHE AN ANARCHIST?
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One is paying Nietzsche injustice, just by posing the question above, for he had delegated us with his most precious property, wishing only to be listened to, “Listen to me! For I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!” [i] It is the same to be asking if he was a Communist or anything else for that matter. It is insolence to be deducing his writings to a paranoid reading, but such acts of insolence are unavoidable. Friedrich Nietzsche’s rich and complex textual strategies have not known any set of hermeneutic limits and his theories have been received by a range of ideological appropriations of the extreme spectrums of political and social thought. Anarchists have never shied away their possible threading with Nietzsche’s Ariadne strings, and so John Moore’s deconstructive analysis in Attentat Art: Anarchism and Nietzsche’s Aesthetics (2004) undertakes the appropriation of this possibility by exploring a significant point of congruence, namely aesthetics.
Julian Young comments that “there is, in Nietzsche, no single view of art (or of very much else). Rather his career divides up into different periods distinguished from each other by sharply contrasting attitudes to and about art.”[ii] Even if one disagrees with Young’s theses on, and periodisation of, Nietzsche’s aesthetics, marks Moore, this point remains indisputable. On what in particular relates to this subject, Nietzsche remained loyal to one essential premise of his aesthetical philosophy, i.e. the Dionysian archetype in art. It was ever present in all his attempts to solute the problem of universal suffering and existential absurdity. But the considerable shifts that occurred in the axis of significance in the aesthetics-society relation, in his writings between the years of writing The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Ecce Homo (1888), signify extreme switching “from asserting the quintessential importance of art to denouncing art as redundant”[iii] overall.
Prima volta to his renunciation of the Wagnerian-aesthetics as the affirmative epitome of the European bourgeoisie, they essentially represented “the supreme form of art” with a vital task: to rescue the eye of the beholder “from gazing into the horrors of night and releasing the subject, with the healing balm of illusion, from the convulsive stirrings of the will.”[iv] Art was, in a Schopenhauerian mode, the medium “through which life is made both possible and worth living”[v] for “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”[vi] Still under the Gesamtkunstwerke spell and affirming the Kantian notion of amoral aesthetic contemplation, Nietzsche denounced action because, Moore notes, regeneration for Nietzsche could occur through the medium of art alone, providing necessary illusions that made life endurable whilst facilitating men in higher levels of consciousness: “Man is not longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the prima Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication”[vii] – but at the cost of inaction.
The subterranean changes that take place in Nietzsche’s philosophy and aesthetics occur around 1876, the year of his breaking with Wagner. In all subsequent publications on the renowned Dionysian condition in his aesthetics, Nietzsche envisages radical psychosocial transformations effectuated through “necessary wars”, “higher breeding of humanity” and “remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements” that “will again make possible on earth that superfluity of life…”[viii] His anti-Schopenhauerian aesthetics recite in the middle of his revolutionary mist. Julian Young summarises Nietzsche’s radical change of stance at this transitional stage from the liberatory perspective: Nietzsche’s ongoing preoccupation with the “release” of humans from “the struggle against misfortune” sums up to the renunciation of all power (coercion and control) and the improvement of those parts of the world which have been recognised as alterable.[ix] Unlike his previous reluctance towards social-activism and unsurprising confinement into an idealist reformation through art, Nietzsche renegotiates the verges previously at asymphonic distance, between art and activism, in Human All Too Human.
In his revised theory, there are two ways to go about when misfortune strikes: either its effect on our feelings has to be changed or the cause of misfortune has to be removed. Religion, art and metaphysical philosophy effectuate the first; they affect people’s feelings, partly by varying the way human beings judge experiences and partly by erecting pleasure from positive and negative emotions. A few years back, Nietzsche would have retreated to, and insisted on, the consolation of metaphysical work and the passive acceptance it dictates over the human subject, like the ancient Greek’s destitution towards his own destiny. In a volte face fashion he now affirms the opposite. “The more a person tends to reinterpret and justify, the less will he confront the causes of the misfortune and eliminate them; a momentary palliation and narcotisation… The more the rule of religions and all narcotic arts decreases, the more squarely do men confront the real elimination of misfortune…”[x]
His profound devaluation of art can only be justified in the light of his apparent repulse toward his contemporary art practises which he characterised as narcotic and considered them to be performing a specific socio-control role, namely preventing social transformation by narcotising the people and pushing them into a numb, opium dream of indifference. Not only had Nietzsche converged the Marxist modus operandi by proclaiming “art is the opium of the people”, but went further to regard it as “anaesthetic” and it is toward this end offered by contemporary art that Nietzsche objects, not to art per se. Nevertheless, in identifying in his self the Dionysian-artist Nietzsche was able to draw a distinction between aesthetic timeless art and “metaphysical or narcotic-art,” which as he notes in Dawn, “is both the effect and cause of alienation from human reality.”[xi] Shifting once again, he suggests a nihilistic-art transitional state, saving thus, aesthetics from total renunciation.
In the post-Wagner period, Nietzsche broadens and deepens his critique, launching a double assault upon culture by expressing aggressiveness toward “the pleasure-seeking and lack of conscience of the artists which would like to persuade us to worship where we no longer believe”[xii] and “the greedy, insatiable, undisciplined, disgusted, harassed men of the present day… [who demand] a picture of blissful exultation and unwordliness to set beside their own dissoluteness: so that they can forget themselves and breathe again, perhaps indeed to bring back with them out of this forgetting an incitement to flight and reformation.”[xiii] The dialectical interaction between the artist and the audience became debased in essence and this twofold décadence facilitates the preconditions for the degradation of culture. The intoxication fused by metaphysical-art accommodates the separateness and declination of individuals within the ranks of society, forking them in social alienation, greed and indifference that are engineered by their own anonymity. Intoxication, a virus transmitted by metaphysical-art’s contaminated syringe, spread from artist to artwork to audience and vice versa. The unbecoming of culture – the process of art turning artefact turning commodity and the “artist for the future” turning into “panderer of low tastes” – contaminates and condemns society with the vicious infection of escapism; the one that half a century later, the Situationists would recognise as boredom: “We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom”[xiv]- read a graffiti slogan in the flame-flooded streets of Paris in May 1968.
On the counterscale belies Nietzsche’s realisation of the pure activist spirit incarnating his non-narcotic Dionysian-values. It is the spirit that strives to reawaken public conscience by challenging conformed common rationality; by mocking or revaluating the set values of religion, aesthetics, philosophy, etc. and by envisioning release, liberation from despotism, world harmony and holism –the core of the Dionysian condition- by improving the audience and ultimately their future. To that end, Nietzsche recognised a necessary intermediate stage, the “aesthetics of convalescence,” required to “sustain humanity in the face of scientific exposure to its ‘general untruth and mendaciousness,”[xv] “a cult of the untrue,” “a counterforce against our honesty… a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves... [making] as an aesthetic phenomenon existence still bearable to us.”[xvi]
Confronted with morality, as if for the first time, the people who have been stripped naked from the “the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses” of the Gesamtkunstwerke and called instead to live “life as an aesthetic phenomenon” of the Ubermensch, run the risk of exile into “solemnity, heaviness and seriousness.”[xvii] Existence and the world as they stand, seem unjustifiable and harsh to those promptly awakened from the Cartesian realm. Their situation demands a period of recovery and upon concluding it will they be in a position to live life as an aesthetic and moral phenomenon. Aesthetics of convalescence are by nature intoxicant, but their necessity is of practical reasons. At this instance, they are the art for recovery, not for the recovered – they merely provide the means by which humans will be able to transform their lives into aesthetic phenomena and thus fulfil their liberatory project. According to Young, the liberatory project amounts to the fact that such transformations of the outlook demand and are equivalent to, nothing less than the transformation of the self.[xviii] The process of alteration is as much internal as it is external.
On completing the circle of metamorphosis, one becomes the ultimate human being, (who is no other that Zarathustra, the tragic Herculean) thus arriving in what Nietzsche calls the “Dionysian-artist.” It is the individual who has sufficiently recovered from the apathy of his time and who has succeeded in becoming an artist-in-self and not just an artist-in-life. This “higher breeding of humans,” are the kind of ultimate individuals who live their lives as an aesthetic phenomenon, like Faustians and Manfredians. “Egoists engaged in a titanic struggle with the forces of limitation and control”[xix] who have achieved a “freedom above things”, who have “become artists who produce, not (or not primarily) ‘the art of works of art’ but rather their own lives.”[xx] “Life and art are One”, proclaims Tristan Tzara, “the modern artist does not paint, he creates directly.”[xxi] First and foremost then, the “will to life as an aesthetic phenomenon, is an impulse toward freedom.”[xxii] It is the one who has rejected the notion of a universal man-made God because he has found Oneness internally. The tragic soul is fundamentally Arian -no longer Apollonian- for it continually and fearlessly strives against the law of mankind and Divinity. In denying God, the Dionysian denies accountability and by doing so, he redeems the world.[xxiii] The nihilistic nature of Zarathustra desires only for destruction, because new order can only emerge through the chaos.
Dionysian-aesthetics are necessarily the aesthetics of situations. Situations impregnate changes and it is only through those that the future may be delivered. Contradictory to this, the status quo seeks only to abolish the future by tightening its strangulating lineage bondage: “in spectacular time the past continues to dominate the present.”[xxiv] Zarathustra, is not a temporal character constrained by the limitations of mortality, but an untimely hero whose superfluity of life lives on through his deeds in the memory of men (hysterophemia[xxv]). His fame befits from the fact that he may never reach his goals (Nietzsche himself never became the Anti-Christ) but he nevertheless sets his high standards, portraying the impossible as possible, and being in that sense, a uncommitted realist.
Moore concludes that Zarathustra embodies Nietzsche’s aesthetics, who as a dichterphilosoph (poet-philosopher) he has reached their apotheosis.[xxvi] Nietzsche too, recognises the singularity of this work in Ecce Homo when he writes: “This work stands all together alone. Let us leave the poets aside: perhaps nothing at all has ever been done out of a like superfluity of strength. My concept ‘Dionysian’ has here become the supreme deed; compared with it all the rest of human activity seems poor and conditional.”[xxvii] All in all, the Dionysian-artist incarnated into Zarathustra, “can stand alone, in and against the world, refusing to serve any abstract system, and rejecting all authority.” The only limit to this fine balance is that it’s a one way road. It is a hard task taking the world upon one’s shoulders, Nietzsche knew that very well; and there can be no remorse or regrets, no turning back; for the revolution of everyday life ought to never become a finite or complete task. It is infinite so that it may renegotiate life, time after time, ultimately becoming life herself. It is untimely so that it may fight the established order, time after time, without ever going overground, without ever becoming the establishment. It is no longer the case of art versus life, nor art in conjunction with it. For Zarathustra, art equivalences life, because to art is to act; and to act is to art – the anarchic superego, elsewhere the true free spirit, may be released and realised only through the deconstructive art of action that leads to a real reconstructed future for the action of art to occur in square terms.
Nietzsche’s post-Wagnerian aesthetics, of course, do not answer the question as to whether Nietzsche was indeed an anarchist. He was not, and yet he was, but that is of little significance to the essence of the current project. By penning down a number of important points on aesthetics he did, indeed, tangle himself to revolutionary footpaths, and in many cases recognises it to be doing so. Anarchists have found grounds to roam and some strong-language to quote. And yet, this too is of little significance to the shape of this project. What has become the relative significant is his analysis on the “tripartite evolution of the concept of art”[xxviii] that would take society out of the murk by revolutionising the modern (wo)man and ultimately setting up an ideal society of Dionysian-artists. I speak of “relative significance” because the tripartite evolution of art in Nietzsche’s aesthetics does not interest me retrospectively. On the contrary. Nietzsche’s thought never seemed to be disadvantaged by his dating as a 19th century thinker and the 20th century was undoubtedly punctual in fulfilling, up to a point, his aesthetic proverbs, doing so with a hammer. I say that it had done so “up to a point” because the metamorphosis of the human society is far from over, the process remains up to today, incomplete. Nietzsche’s theory does not appear to be as systematic in application as it is in theory, however, it may be positively suggested that it has formulated a pattern which inspires further systematic research.
This project engages with a sample of 20th century European avant-garde movements, looking in particular at the period from early 1910 to late 1960, where in which contemporary Anarchism lays claim over a number art groups’ revolutionary sensibility.[xxix] My intention is not to provide a critical review of the isms from an aesthetic point of view as such, but rather 1) to check to which extend Nietzsche’s model stands any coherence in practise by following the birth, character and death of these movements; and to 2) to gather those points which according to my best judgement would constitute these avant-garde movements as revolutionary for their century and whether their sensibility is compatible with the tautology of the Anarchic-Nietzschian tradition (which has been drawn for the sake of this essay, and only on the congruence of aesthetics).[xxx]
WHAT DOES DADA MEAN? – One ought to start with the right question for one to get on the right track. “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING” according to Tristan Tzara’s Manifesto (1918). What begun as an “artistic activity and entertainment” of self-exiled expatriates denouncing the World War, became an international anti-art movement and a forum of anarchic ideas, stretching from Paris to New York. The hardship and absurdity of the war, in the minds of the dissatisfied young artists, was contrived for the most repressive, foul and materialist reasons by its psychopath architects and corrupted engineers. Witnessing their world shredding to pieces in the “death-throes and death-drunkenness of this time,”[xxxi] the Dadaist artists turned the menace against the very source of the inflicted intoxication, making Dada “the requiem of their society as it stood and the primitive beginning of a new one.” This was to be in deed, the project of convalescence art in the Nietzschian theory – “the transvaluation of all values” and the destruction of all that prevented its becoming.
In Nietzsche’s post-Wagnerian logistics, first, there was the annihilation of art. Then came the art of nihilism. “Art became a negation: in Goya, in Beethoven, or in Géricault one can see the change from celebrant to subversive within the space of a life time.”[xxxii] The majestic Nietzschian mind, masterful and prophetic, foresaw the coming of what would become the most important anti-art movement of the 20th century. “No,” he says, “if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art – a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists, for artists only!”[xxxiii] For André Breton, Dada was a state of mind, the artistic free thought – for Picabia’s noir pessimism, it was, like the hopes, beliefs and idols of his contemporaries, “nothing.” By being playful by nature, Dada was to achieve morality, without becoming either immoral or amoral.
“The Dadaists’ revolt involved a complex kind of irony, because they were themselves dependent upon the doomed society and the destruction of it and its art would thus mean the destruction of themselves as artists. So in a sense Dada existed in order to destroy itself.”[xxxiv] Nietzsche had recognised from the very beginning the mortality of the “aesthetics of convalescence” and required it to be so, primarily because it was a midway from the “intoxication of metaphysical art” to the “intoxication of health” and not a destination in itself. Dada was doomed because in Nietzsche’s Dionysian-society there would no longer be a need for such an art – (wo)men becoming “poets of their own lives;” and on the other, because only the possibility of a “total revolution” could ever liberate such a form of art from its own systemic. Ultimately, the case of Dada “could not or would not break free of the forms of bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the world, but, while art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with reality it criticised, it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it function objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted to destroy.”[xxxv] Dawn Ades marks how Breton effectively killed Dada in 1922 by inscribing it to the book of the History of Art.[xxxvi]
The toxic irony and the blissful nihilism of the Dada movement stood as a placebo of the intermediary “period of dissolution” between the insanity of the ascending world order and the healthier future of the convalescent. Unlike metaphysical art which was designed to further alienate and emphasise the gulf between art and the daily life of “those everyday souls who in the evening are not like victors on their triumphal chariots but rather like tired mules who have been whipped too much by life,”[xxxvii] Dada was reconnecting the phallic cord between culture and society, but only after it sought to abolish its pre-historic attitudes. “Art in its period of dissolution – a movement of negation for its own transcendence within a historical society where history is not yet directly lived – is at once an art of change and the purest expression of the impossibility of change.”[xxxviii] In a reflective manner, Hans Arp wrote in 1948: “we searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times,” “dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order. Dada wanted to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today by the illogical senseless.”[xxxix]
From the military slaughterhouses to the capitalist slaughterhouses, the debauchery of culture had made art dependent on the society and the artists on the bourgeoisie. Art was produced, not created, and the artists were “paid wage-labourers”, “mercenaries in spirit”, “bankers of language.” From the very beginning Dadaism identified its main enemy: the bourgeoisie and the accompanying stagnate rationality. Its attacks were incoherent and diverse, obeying to no particular logic or order and having no particular style. Dada had a life and a rationality of its own: committing excessive, irrational and provocative gestures like its heroes (Jaques Vache and Arthur Cravan) and stage-managing scandals that were sometimes entertaining and playful (e.g. Tzara’s simultaneous poems), sometimes irritating and controversial (e.g. Bretons mock trials) and sometimes instances of critical reflection (e.g. Duchamp’s urine basin).
In Zurich, Dada bore the aspect of a new art movement that was experimenting with collage and attacking poetic language. Ball and Arp were looking for a new art to replace the “outworn and irrelevant aestheticism of their time.” Tzara and Picabia’s intentions, on the other hand, were much more of the mocking, ironic and destructive kind, exploring and exploiting their social identity as artists. In Berlin Dada had taken a specific political-polemic form, both radical and merciless, raging against the established expressionist spirit that was dominating the society in 1917. The harsh post-war years of famine, shame and disillusionment had led the Germans to turn towards the arts for comfort and German Expressionism, with its clearly escapist tendencies, inwardness and abstraction was the best relief formula for cultural constipation of the “city tightened stomachers of mounting thundering hunger.” German Dadaism, thus, adopted a remarkably harsh and aggressive insistence on reality, holding that “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.”[xl] German Dadaism, extravagantly political, counted anarchists and communists within, and their new medium, photomontage became a vital tool of political propaganda and libel in the hands of the artists.
On a general level, it is apparent that the Dadaists, despite their dissimilarities, were working from “an artistic distance” and as a counterforce to the despotisms and heaviness of their society: either by rubbing reality at (their) face or by mocking it, or by trying to generate new set of values and reinvoking people’s faith in life as an aesthetic phenomenon. Whilst the terror of war and socio-economical unstableness were still echoing in the ears of the bleeding continent; from its very beginning, the 20th century was loaded with ideals and some of the noblest ones were to be found in the voice of the vanguards.
Some of the most radical critiques on culture that regulated the aesthetic concepts of the 20th century came from Picabia’s assertiveness of the non-superiority of artists as creators, claiming that artists had mislaid and tricked their contemporaries into embracing in a religious zeal the notions of art and culture as those stood in and for the capitalist system. “Artists are cleaners,” they can beautify but they can no longer create beauty, “don’t be taken in by them. The real modern works of art are not made by artists but quite simply by men.” At first sight, the reader might think that this contradicts Nietzsche’s conception of the convalescence aesthetics. It does not. Both Picabia and Nietzsche speak of the awakening of the Dionysian-artist within every individual and although they do not share the same terminology, the significant meaning is the same. Both repulse the established authorship of the deteriorating culture over the arts, and when Picabia speaks of “artists as cleaners,” he could well be meaning the Schopenhauerians and Wagnerians of his era. In fact, those artists who kept replastering the rotten structure.
Picabia continues: “The umbical cord between the object and its creator is broken,” there is not fundamental difference between a man-made and a machine-made object, “the only personal intervention possible in a work is choice.”[xli] Marcel Duchamp took up the latter point and explored it extensively. Already from 1914 he employed “ready-mades,” one-handily deploring and changing cultural attitudes with his trojan horses. “The choice of these ready-mades was never dictated by an aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction on visual indifference, which at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste, in fact a complete anaesthesia.”[xlii] By removing the notions of “good” and “bad” taste from the labelling of an object, Duchamp was not only creating an obscurity as to what is or is not a work of art but he was deliberately disorientating the viewer from forming an opinion based on his established notions of aesthetics that resided in habit and brainwashing. Above all, Duchamp aimed to liberate the object from his creator and from his spectator, isolating it as an idea that could stand as itself. “There is no rebus, there is no key. The work exists, its only raison d’être is to exist. It represents nothing but the wish of the brain that conceived it.”[xliii] Nothing could rival the beauty of the objects dispensed by the industrial era and the manufacture of his “toute faite,” by merely declaring them to be so, they asserted the status of artworks. Artistic authorship and authenticity were also extensively challenged in the light of transvaluation.
The most radical thesis of the European avant-garde during the revolutionary upheavals of 1910-1925 was that art must cease to focus on transforming the world into imaginary and become the wheel of transformation of real, lived experience. But as a closing afterthought, even the Dadaist vicissitude in the nature of creativity could not escape the Marxist critique of the origin of religious myth and ideology which also applied successfully to the rebellion against bourgeois art: that too was “at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against that distress.” Dada’s liberating effects could not last: “Dada flared up and burnt out as an art sabotaging art in the name of reality and reality in the name of art”; but what it could do was pave the way, inspire and trigger a new a new circle of revolution.[xliv]
Surrealism, as the new circle of revolution, was “born out of a desire for positive action, to start to built again from the ruins of Dada;”[xlv] in some ways replacing, in others reconstructing the Dadaist sensibility, and claiming to be giving back to the artist her raison d’être. Many Dadaists converted into Surrealism, forming a group around the most dominant figure of the movement, André Breton, already from 1922. The dividing line between Dada and Surrealism in the early days was hazy because their relationship was of idiomorphous complexity. Surrealism inherited Dada’s political agenda and the bourgeoisie as its enemy, and theoretically it continued to attack traditional forms of art with its experimental courses. Their significant difference sums to the fact that Surrealism erected theories and principles where what was there before was only Dada’s anarchism.
From 1922 to 1924, and before Surrealism emerged as an art movement, Breton, Eluard, Aragon, Ernst and Crevel were already experimenting with hypnotism and drugs, automatism and dreams. Freudian psychoanalysis was at the heart of the project but with a relative twist. Whilst Freud’s dream interpretation aimed at curing mental and emotional illness in order to substitute his patients back into the society in a state of “bourgeois normality,” the Surrealists acknowledged the empowerment in the “act of spontaneous creation” as that arose through the unconscious and believed that it was possible to explore and unify the human psyche by embracing neglected areas such as dreams and unconsciousness. In many ways, the Surrealists contradicted Freud because their far-stretching into whatever lied beyond the immediate reality was only for the sake of extracting inspiration and liberation of (not liberation from) their desires.
By attacking the logical construction of sentences and charging “logos” with forces and energies previously not associated with the coherent meaning of words, Surrealists’ developed the plasticity of the word, liberating language from its everyday conformity and its use as a communicational, representative and socio-control tool.[xlvi] Arp ‘wrote’ by chance, Tzara recited simultaneously with two others; Ball, Hausmann, and Schwitters engaged in abstract phonetic poetry. Lautreamont’s chants where distantly echoing: “As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”[xlvii]
The original Surrealist group understood clearly, at least during its prime time “that social repression is coherent and is repeated on every level of experience and that the essential meaning of revolution could only be the liberation and immediate gratification of everyones’ repressed will to live.” As a revolutionary avant-garde their task was invent and engage in an experimental life-style and art-making that would be “simultaneously self-expressive and socially disruptive, of extending the perimeters of lived experience.”[xlviii] Never the less, down the road, Surrealism relapsed into traditional forms of expression and self-same forms of pretentious immortality, as those are to be found in the works of Dali for example. Breton’s preoccupation with “automatism”[xlix] was taking the movement into a mystic dimension, gradually abandoning their founding reformative pledge, in favour of “the subjective integration within the spectacle of scandalous marketing commodities.”
Pierre Naville, one of the first editors of La Revolution Surréaliste, refuted the possibility of surrealist painting, as there not being such thing as “the unconscious randomness of the gesture” nor “the pictorial representation of dream imaging.” He perceived the surrealist work to be a “spectacle”, “memory and pleasure of the eyes: that is the whole aesthetic.”[l] In the English Section of the Situationist International one reads that Surrealism was deduced to the fate shared by all revolutionary possibilities of the period, as the “suffocating bureaucratic reformism” was wiping them out. “The Surrealist attempt to supersede art and politics in a completely new type of revolutionary self-expression steadily degenerated into a travesty of its original elements: the most purely celestial art and the most abject communism.”[li]
Originating from, and in response to “surrealism’s spurious doctrines”[lii] and the growing apolitical stance of the Parisian scene, the COBRA group[liii] sub-emerged from the collaboration of a range of small-scale experimental international art platforms, in 1948. Christian Dotrement, the key figure in the COBRA movement was to dispatch himself from the Belgian surrealist group upon disagreement on issues about mysticism and the Communist Party. He formed in 1947 the Revolutionary Surrealist Group so “to renew surrealist experimentation, to affirm its independence and the simultaneous necessity for common action,”[liv] stressing the importance of collective action and the surrealist experimentation essentially within the context of everyday life. The group aimed to liberate popular art from the historically imposed art forms and the reigning bourgeoisie that imbedded a state of dependence and cultural individualism upon the artists, highlighting the revolutionary role of art in the society. Renovated art, according to the group, was the art that characterised vital, direct and collective expression.[lv] The International of Experimental Artists placed significant importance on a number of concepts concerning desires, the unknown, freedom, revolution and urbanism. Desires for example, are interlinked with the unknown and freedom, in so far that it is impossible to know a desire without satisfying it. The artist’s desire for freedom was a desire for a state that was unknown to her, but at the same time, revolutionary; essentially because “the satisfaction of desire is revolution.”
One of the movement’s major projects and its most significant legacy was the creation of a new urban environment – which would stand in opposition to the rational architecture of Le Corbusier. Quoting Colle from the first issue of COBRA, “…buildings must not be squalid or anonymous, neither should they be show pieces from a museum; rather they must commune with each other, integrate with the environment to create synthesised ‘cities’ for a new socialist world.”[lvi] COBRA’s concept of “unitary urbanism” was developed by Constant and carried this conception with him into the Situationist International.
The Lettriste movement was launched in post-war Paris by Isidore Isou who claimed that the evolution of any art is characterised by two phases –“amplic and chiselling.” The amplic phase is a period from augmentation through-to exhaustion. The artistic development reaches a declinational stage, which then, is followed by the chiselling phase, when the achievements of the amplic period are refined and eventually destroyed.[lvii] He considered himself to be the poet that would complete the current chiselling phase that begun with Dadaism and with his lettrist discoveries, initiate a new amplic period. Lettrism was the first movement to make an important break from Surrealism by affirming its death and “it was through this breach that other avant-garde heresies were able to break away from Breton’s malign and dictatorial influence.”[lviii] The group experienced its own schism, later in 1952 when a number of its members formed the Lettriste International, a cultural group which intended to lead a cultural revolution rather than creating mere cultural works.
The Lettristes were mainly preoccupied with sound poetry with an emphatic transgenderness into visual production. As the name of the group implies, “letters were seen to form the basic unit from which works should be created.”[lix] The aesthetic contemplation of the Lettriste movement went on to produce concrete poetry and lettrist films. Their soundtracks “had neither a ‘specific’ nor a ‘non-specific’, relation to the picture and could be treated as ‘a product by itself,”[lx] and the images were deliberately boring or manufacturedly distorted: by scratching, tearing and drawing directly onto the processed stock.
Lettrism pursued the logical conclusion of Dadaism; in a different perspective, however, it may be seen to represent in the 1950s what Dada represented in the 1920s. Lettrist formulas were politically orientated and with an attitude that may be characterised as nihilistic. In practise, the lettrist vanguards were more interested in levelling their art-craft by reducing image and coherence to the bare minimum. Guy Debord’s film, “Screams in Favour of de Sade,” for example, contained no images at all. The feature lengthily consisted of blackened film with only the click of the projector as the soundtrack. Occasional random dialogues and white flashes of light on the screen subdued the attention of the audience until the twenty-four final minutes of absolute silence.
One might argue, however, that the Lettristes never quite understood that art, unlike expression, is a bourgeois construction, and although taking pride in dethroning the surrealists, they failed to built upon the discoveries of the Berlin Dada. From Isou and Lemaitre’s political writings and theorising on all aspects of life, appears Lettrist’s inclination toward Utopian tradition in general and 20th century avant-garde in particular. Overall, Isou’s resystemising of “all sciences of language” into his new discipline which he called “hypergraphology” never really escaped the Lettriste circles.
Schisms in the Lettrist Movement led to the formation of Lettriste International (LI) and the Ultra-Lettristes. Lettriste International, in particular, consisted of left-wing revisionary lettrists such as Bernstein, Debord, Wolman, Dahou, Conord and Fillon, who were profoundly influenced by the Marxist revisionism of the French “intellectual” climate in the 1950s and thus pursued to develop as a political group and not just as a cultural one. In an open letter published in Combat (1952) the dissident lettrists wrote: “We believe that the most urgent exercise of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they present themselves in the name of freedom.”[lxi] Abandoning entirely the literary endeavours of the Lettriste Movement, LI’s activities were “provisional, subject to experiment, and change,” proposing radical projects of what they considered to be revolutionary. The political character of the group radicalised even more so, once they reformed into Situationist International.
LI preoccupied with offspring urban theories of the Lettriste Movement and COBRA. Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formula for a New City (1953), singles out as their most important piece of writing on architecture and urbanism: “banalisation” which was sweeping the planet was forcing consumerism and hypnotisation upon everyone. No longer struggling against poverty, the modern man became obsessed with materialism and its commodities. Chtcheglov believed that the Spectacle was absorbing any impulse for life or desires that would contradict it. Hence, it was becoming “essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favour of these desires.”[lxii] Chtcheglov saw cities as sites of “vision and time” and Architecture as the means of modifying life. The exact nature of these new visions and the general phenomena associated with these drifts, remained to be established via experimentation with patterns of behaviour in urban environments, what Kabyle described in a general term as, “psychogeography”.
In Chtcheglov’s “experimental city” everyone would be assigned to their own “cathedral” – different districts in the city would correspond to diverse feelings “that one encounters by chance in everyday life.” Debord’s Introduction To A Critique of Urban Geography (1955) affirmed that “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” That was equivalent to suggesting that architecture’s solicitations ought to be able to organise the urban space in accordance to the desires of the people.[lxiii] LI’s theories and results included the much boasted “construction of situations.”
However, the various “psychogeographical games and exercises” that members of the LI indulged in did not produce any kind of data from which any serious research could progress. Similar to the Surrealists, they had their minds set upon reaching what lied “beyond” the visible urban screen, demonstrating through their various experiments that “the concept of urbanism was as much psychological and physiological as it was geographical”[lxiv] with an implicit idea of nomadic existence.
The other chief interest of the LI was “detournement”: plagiarising pre-existing aesthetic elements and integrating them into a superior construction. On Methods of Detournement (1956), Debord and Wolman wrote: “The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes…in fact it is necessary to finish with any notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous “inspired” works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits.”[lxv] On a universal scale, the very system of human technology and thought development is based on detournement, when synthesising information of established knowledge with the element of creational or accidental discovery. But detournement in LI’s sensibility was much more radical because it attack “slavish citation,” holding an anti-systemic attitude towards authorship and copyrights, as well as established common knowledge.
The LI amalgamated with the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB) to form the Situationist International in 1957, following the “First World Congress of Liberated Artists” in late 1956. Sources refer to numerous rivalries between members of the SI, LI, COBRA, IMIB and the Nuclear Art movement and their departing or deporting on various occasions – however, the initial members were: Bernstein and Debord of the LI, Gallizio, Jorn, Olmo, Simondo and Verone of the IMIB and Ralph Rumney of the non-existent London Psychogeographical Association (LPA). Some of Debord’s early published thoughts on culture prefigured that his era lacked any “revolutionary political action” to undermine “the modern possibilities of production” seeing a revolutionary programme in culture as the necessary link to his revolutionary political agenda. On the progression of culture from Futurism to Dadaism to Surrealism and from there to the vanguards of the 1940s and 1950s, he commented that Dada had “delivered a mortal blow to the traditional conceptions of culture,” and Surrealism provided “an effective means of struggle against the confusionist mechanisms of the bourgeoisie” declaring necessary to take up the “original surrealist project” (experimentation) and carry it through to its logical conclusion. Indeed many Situationist artists, such as Gallizio, Melanotte, Jorn and Constant, achieved international fame as ‘Experimental’ and ‘Industrial’ artists.
In 1958 the Gruppe Spur constituted the German section of the SI – sharing Jorn and Constant’s belief in “the collective, non-competitive production of art” which would sustain the cultural revolution within the frame of centralised unitary urbanism – stood in sharp contrast with Debord and Bernstein’s sectarian vision of a revolutionary creativity totally separated from the existing culture: “It must be understood once and for all that something that is only a personal expression within a framework created by others cannot be termed a creation. Creation is not the arrangement of objects and forms, it is the invention of new laws of arrangement.”[lxvi] The division of opinions within the ranks of the Situationists heightened in 1961 when Jorn resigned and Vaneigem was recruited, splitting the group into the Scandinavian Second Situationist International (the Situationist Bauhaus) and the French (Specto-)Situationist International (1962). Their obvious fraction adhered on questions of art, though many scholars maintain that both groups failed to make a proper distinction between the concepts of art and culture.
The second theoretical device which distinguished the specto-situationists is the concept of the “spectacle”. One of the points drawn from Nietzsche’s meditations on aesthetics relates to the declinational Western culture whose thematic centralises in the disparity of the spectators from their self. “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? – It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.”[lxvii] This is, so to speak, a principally Situationist argument in contemporary terms, summarised by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”[lxviii]
Nietzsche’s conclusions as to how narcotic-art intoxicates people and tames any social reform by providing alienated images and dispatching the subject from the world, is in terms with Debord’s Marxist paraphrasing theorisation on the society which, “while eliminating geographical distance, this society produces a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation”[lxix] and “Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very centre that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness… Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, a global social practice split into reality and image.”[lxx]
-------------------------CONCLUSION
Lack of space and time constitute impossible the
Julian Young comments that “there is, in Nietzsche, no single view of art (or of very much else). Rather his career divides up into different periods distinguished from each other by sharply contrasting attitudes to and about art.”[ii] Even if one disagrees with Young’s theses on, and periodisation of, Nietzsche’s aesthetics, marks Moore, this point remains indisputable. On what in particular relates to this subject, Nietzsche remained loyal to one essential premise of his aesthetical philosophy, i.e. the Dionysian archetype in art. It was ever present in all his attempts to solute the problem of universal suffering and existential absurdity. But the considerable shifts that occurred in the axis of significance in the aesthetics-society relation, in his writings between the years of writing The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Ecce Homo (1888), signify extreme switching “from asserting the quintessential importance of art to denouncing art as redundant”[iii] overall.
Prima volta to his renunciation of the Wagnerian-aesthetics as the affirmative epitome of the European bourgeoisie, they essentially represented “the supreme form of art” with a vital task: to rescue the eye of the beholder “from gazing into the horrors of night and releasing the subject, with the healing balm of illusion, from the convulsive stirrings of the will.”[iv] Art was, in a Schopenhauerian mode, the medium “through which life is made both possible and worth living”[v] for “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”[vi] Still under the Gesamtkunstwerke spell and affirming the Kantian notion of amoral aesthetic contemplation, Nietzsche denounced action because, Moore notes, regeneration for Nietzsche could occur through the medium of art alone, providing necessary illusions that made life endurable whilst facilitating men in higher levels of consciousness: “Man is not longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the prima Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication”[vii] – but at the cost of inaction.
The subterranean changes that take place in Nietzsche’s philosophy and aesthetics occur around 1876, the year of his breaking with Wagner. In all subsequent publications on the renowned Dionysian condition in his aesthetics, Nietzsche envisages radical psychosocial transformations effectuated through “necessary wars”, “higher breeding of humanity” and “remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements” that “will again make possible on earth that superfluity of life…”[viii] His anti-Schopenhauerian aesthetics recite in the middle of his revolutionary mist. Julian Young summarises Nietzsche’s radical change of stance at this transitional stage from the liberatory perspective: Nietzsche’s ongoing preoccupation with the “release” of humans from “the struggle against misfortune” sums up to the renunciation of all power (coercion and control) and the improvement of those parts of the world which have been recognised as alterable.[ix] Unlike his previous reluctance towards social-activism and unsurprising confinement into an idealist reformation through art, Nietzsche renegotiates the verges previously at asymphonic distance, between art and activism, in Human All Too Human.
In his revised theory, there are two ways to go about when misfortune strikes: either its effect on our feelings has to be changed or the cause of misfortune has to be removed. Religion, art and metaphysical philosophy effectuate the first; they affect people’s feelings, partly by varying the way human beings judge experiences and partly by erecting pleasure from positive and negative emotions. A few years back, Nietzsche would have retreated to, and insisted on, the consolation of metaphysical work and the passive acceptance it dictates over the human subject, like the ancient Greek’s destitution towards his own destiny. In a volte face fashion he now affirms the opposite. “The more a person tends to reinterpret and justify, the less will he confront the causes of the misfortune and eliminate them; a momentary palliation and narcotisation… The more the rule of religions and all narcotic arts decreases, the more squarely do men confront the real elimination of misfortune…”[x]
His profound devaluation of art can only be justified in the light of his apparent repulse toward his contemporary art practises which he characterised as narcotic and considered them to be performing a specific socio-control role, namely preventing social transformation by narcotising the people and pushing them into a numb, opium dream of indifference. Not only had Nietzsche converged the Marxist modus operandi by proclaiming “art is the opium of the people”, but went further to regard it as “anaesthetic” and it is toward this end offered by contemporary art that Nietzsche objects, not to art per se. Nevertheless, in identifying in his self the Dionysian-artist Nietzsche was able to draw a distinction between aesthetic timeless art and “metaphysical or narcotic-art,” which as he notes in Dawn, “is both the effect and cause of alienation from human reality.”[xi] Shifting once again, he suggests a nihilistic-art transitional state, saving thus, aesthetics from total renunciation.
In the post-Wagner period, Nietzsche broadens and deepens his critique, launching a double assault upon culture by expressing aggressiveness toward “the pleasure-seeking and lack of conscience of the artists which would like to persuade us to worship where we no longer believe”[xii] and “the greedy, insatiable, undisciplined, disgusted, harassed men of the present day… [who demand] a picture of blissful exultation and unwordliness to set beside their own dissoluteness: so that they can forget themselves and breathe again, perhaps indeed to bring back with them out of this forgetting an incitement to flight and reformation.”[xiii] The dialectical interaction between the artist and the audience became debased in essence and this twofold décadence facilitates the preconditions for the degradation of culture. The intoxication fused by metaphysical-art accommodates the separateness and declination of individuals within the ranks of society, forking them in social alienation, greed and indifference that are engineered by their own anonymity. Intoxication, a virus transmitted by metaphysical-art’s contaminated syringe, spread from artist to artwork to audience and vice versa. The unbecoming of culture – the process of art turning artefact turning commodity and the “artist for the future” turning into “panderer of low tastes” – contaminates and condemns society with the vicious infection of escapism; the one that half a century later, the Situationists would recognise as boredom: “We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom”[xiv]- read a graffiti slogan in the flame-flooded streets of Paris in May 1968.
On the counterscale belies Nietzsche’s realisation of the pure activist spirit incarnating his non-narcotic Dionysian-values. It is the spirit that strives to reawaken public conscience by challenging conformed common rationality; by mocking or revaluating the set values of religion, aesthetics, philosophy, etc. and by envisioning release, liberation from despotism, world harmony and holism –the core of the Dionysian condition- by improving the audience and ultimately their future. To that end, Nietzsche recognised a necessary intermediate stage, the “aesthetics of convalescence,” required to “sustain humanity in the face of scientific exposure to its ‘general untruth and mendaciousness,”[xv] “a cult of the untrue,” “a counterforce against our honesty… a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves... [making] as an aesthetic phenomenon existence still bearable to us.”[xvi]
Confronted with morality, as if for the first time, the people who have been stripped naked from the “the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses” of the Gesamtkunstwerke and called instead to live “life as an aesthetic phenomenon” of the Ubermensch, run the risk of exile into “solemnity, heaviness and seriousness.”[xvii] Existence and the world as they stand, seem unjustifiable and harsh to those promptly awakened from the Cartesian realm. Their situation demands a period of recovery and upon concluding it will they be in a position to live life as an aesthetic and moral phenomenon. Aesthetics of convalescence are by nature intoxicant, but their necessity is of practical reasons. At this instance, they are the art for recovery, not for the recovered – they merely provide the means by which humans will be able to transform their lives into aesthetic phenomena and thus fulfil their liberatory project. According to Young, the liberatory project amounts to the fact that such transformations of the outlook demand and are equivalent to, nothing less than the transformation of the self.[xviii] The process of alteration is as much internal as it is external.
On completing the circle of metamorphosis, one becomes the ultimate human being, (who is no other that Zarathustra, the tragic Herculean) thus arriving in what Nietzsche calls the “Dionysian-artist.” It is the individual who has sufficiently recovered from the apathy of his time and who has succeeded in becoming an artist-in-self and not just an artist-in-life. This “higher breeding of humans,” are the kind of ultimate individuals who live their lives as an aesthetic phenomenon, like Faustians and Manfredians. “Egoists engaged in a titanic struggle with the forces of limitation and control”[xix] who have achieved a “freedom above things”, who have “become artists who produce, not (or not primarily) ‘the art of works of art’ but rather their own lives.”[xx] “Life and art are One”, proclaims Tristan Tzara, “the modern artist does not paint, he creates directly.”[xxi] First and foremost then, the “will to life as an aesthetic phenomenon, is an impulse toward freedom.”[xxii] It is the one who has rejected the notion of a universal man-made God because he has found Oneness internally. The tragic soul is fundamentally Arian -no longer Apollonian- for it continually and fearlessly strives against the law of mankind and Divinity. In denying God, the Dionysian denies accountability and by doing so, he redeems the world.[xxiii] The nihilistic nature of Zarathustra desires only for destruction, because new order can only emerge through the chaos.
Dionysian-aesthetics are necessarily the aesthetics of situations. Situations impregnate changes and it is only through those that the future may be delivered. Contradictory to this, the status quo seeks only to abolish the future by tightening its strangulating lineage bondage: “in spectacular time the past continues to dominate the present.”[xxiv] Zarathustra, is not a temporal character constrained by the limitations of mortality, but an untimely hero whose superfluity of life lives on through his deeds in the memory of men (hysterophemia[xxv]). His fame befits from the fact that he may never reach his goals (Nietzsche himself never became the Anti-Christ) but he nevertheless sets his high standards, portraying the impossible as possible, and being in that sense, a uncommitted realist.
Moore concludes that Zarathustra embodies Nietzsche’s aesthetics, who as a dichterphilosoph (poet-philosopher) he has reached their apotheosis.[xxvi] Nietzsche too, recognises the singularity of this work in Ecce Homo when he writes: “This work stands all together alone. Let us leave the poets aside: perhaps nothing at all has ever been done out of a like superfluity of strength. My concept ‘Dionysian’ has here become the supreme deed; compared with it all the rest of human activity seems poor and conditional.”[xxvii] All in all, the Dionysian-artist incarnated into Zarathustra, “can stand alone, in and against the world, refusing to serve any abstract system, and rejecting all authority.” The only limit to this fine balance is that it’s a one way road. It is a hard task taking the world upon one’s shoulders, Nietzsche knew that very well; and there can be no remorse or regrets, no turning back; for the revolution of everyday life ought to never become a finite or complete task. It is infinite so that it may renegotiate life, time after time, ultimately becoming life herself. It is untimely so that it may fight the established order, time after time, without ever going overground, without ever becoming the establishment. It is no longer the case of art versus life, nor art in conjunction with it. For Zarathustra, art equivalences life, because to art is to act; and to act is to art – the anarchic superego, elsewhere the true free spirit, may be released and realised only through the deconstructive art of action that leads to a real reconstructed future for the action of art to occur in square terms.
Nietzsche’s post-Wagnerian aesthetics, of course, do not answer the question as to whether Nietzsche was indeed an anarchist. He was not, and yet he was, but that is of little significance to the essence of the current project. By penning down a number of important points on aesthetics he did, indeed, tangle himself to revolutionary footpaths, and in many cases recognises it to be doing so. Anarchists have found grounds to roam and some strong-language to quote. And yet, this too is of little significance to the shape of this project. What has become the relative significant is his analysis on the “tripartite evolution of the concept of art”[xxviii] that would take society out of the murk by revolutionising the modern (wo)man and ultimately setting up an ideal society of Dionysian-artists. I speak of “relative significance” because the tripartite evolution of art in Nietzsche’s aesthetics does not interest me retrospectively. On the contrary. Nietzsche’s thought never seemed to be disadvantaged by his dating as a 19th century thinker and the 20th century was undoubtedly punctual in fulfilling, up to a point, his aesthetic proverbs, doing so with a hammer. I say that it had done so “up to a point” because the metamorphosis of the human society is far from over, the process remains up to today, incomplete. Nietzsche’s theory does not appear to be as systematic in application as it is in theory, however, it may be positively suggested that it has formulated a pattern which inspires further systematic research.
This project engages with a sample of 20th century European avant-garde movements, looking in particular at the period from early 1910 to late 1960, where in which contemporary Anarchism lays claim over a number art groups’ revolutionary sensibility.[xxix] My intention is not to provide a critical review of the isms from an aesthetic point of view as such, but rather 1) to check to which extend Nietzsche’s model stands any coherence in practise by following the birth, character and death of these movements; and to 2) to gather those points which according to my best judgement would constitute these avant-garde movements as revolutionary for their century and whether their sensibility is compatible with the tautology of the Anarchic-Nietzschian tradition (which has been drawn for the sake of this essay, and only on the congruence of aesthetics).[xxx]
WHAT DOES DADA MEAN? – One ought to start with the right question for one to get on the right track. “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING” according to Tristan Tzara’s Manifesto (1918). What begun as an “artistic activity and entertainment” of self-exiled expatriates denouncing the World War, became an international anti-art movement and a forum of anarchic ideas, stretching from Paris to New York. The hardship and absurdity of the war, in the minds of the dissatisfied young artists, was contrived for the most repressive, foul and materialist reasons by its psychopath architects and corrupted engineers. Witnessing their world shredding to pieces in the “death-throes and death-drunkenness of this time,”[xxxi] the Dadaist artists turned the menace against the very source of the inflicted intoxication, making Dada “the requiem of their society as it stood and the primitive beginning of a new one.” This was to be in deed, the project of convalescence art in the Nietzschian theory – “the transvaluation of all values” and the destruction of all that prevented its becoming.
In Nietzsche’s post-Wagnerian logistics, first, there was the annihilation of art. Then came the art of nihilism. “Art became a negation: in Goya, in Beethoven, or in Géricault one can see the change from celebrant to subversive within the space of a life time.”[xxxii] The majestic Nietzschian mind, masterful and prophetic, foresaw the coming of what would become the most important anti-art movement of the 20th century. “No,” he says, “if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art – a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists, for artists only!”[xxxiii] For André Breton, Dada was a state of mind, the artistic free thought – for Picabia’s noir pessimism, it was, like the hopes, beliefs and idols of his contemporaries, “nothing.” By being playful by nature, Dada was to achieve morality, without becoming either immoral or amoral.
“The Dadaists’ revolt involved a complex kind of irony, because they were themselves dependent upon the doomed society and the destruction of it and its art would thus mean the destruction of themselves as artists. So in a sense Dada existed in order to destroy itself.”[xxxiv] Nietzsche had recognised from the very beginning the mortality of the “aesthetics of convalescence” and required it to be so, primarily because it was a midway from the “intoxication of metaphysical art” to the “intoxication of health” and not a destination in itself. Dada was doomed because in Nietzsche’s Dionysian-society there would no longer be a need for such an art – (wo)men becoming “poets of their own lives;” and on the other, because only the possibility of a “total revolution” could ever liberate such a form of art from its own systemic. Ultimately, the case of Dada “could not or would not break free of the forms of bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the world, but, while art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with reality it criticised, it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it function objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted to destroy.”[xxxv] Dawn Ades marks how Breton effectively killed Dada in 1922 by inscribing it to the book of the History of Art.[xxxvi]
The toxic irony and the blissful nihilism of the Dada movement stood as a placebo of the intermediary “period of dissolution” between the insanity of the ascending world order and the healthier future of the convalescent. Unlike metaphysical art which was designed to further alienate and emphasise the gulf between art and the daily life of “those everyday souls who in the evening are not like victors on their triumphal chariots but rather like tired mules who have been whipped too much by life,”[xxxvii] Dada was reconnecting the phallic cord between culture and society, but only after it sought to abolish its pre-historic attitudes. “Art in its period of dissolution – a movement of negation for its own transcendence within a historical society where history is not yet directly lived – is at once an art of change and the purest expression of the impossibility of change.”[xxxviii] In a reflective manner, Hans Arp wrote in 1948: “we searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times,” “dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order. Dada wanted to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today by the illogical senseless.”[xxxix]
From the military slaughterhouses to the capitalist slaughterhouses, the debauchery of culture had made art dependent on the society and the artists on the bourgeoisie. Art was produced, not created, and the artists were “paid wage-labourers”, “mercenaries in spirit”, “bankers of language.” From the very beginning Dadaism identified its main enemy: the bourgeoisie and the accompanying stagnate rationality. Its attacks were incoherent and diverse, obeying to no particular logic or order and having no particular style. Dada had a life and a rationality of its own: committing excessive, irrational and provocative gestures like its heroes (Jaques Vache and Arthur Cravan) and stage-managing scandals that were sometimes entertaining and playful (e.g. Tzara’s simultaneous poems), sometimes irritating and controversial (e.g. Bretons mock trials) and sometimes instances of critical reflection (e.g. Duchamp’s urine basin).
In Zurich, Dada bore the aspect of a new art movement that was experimenting with collage and attacking poetic language. Ball and Arp were looking for a new art to replace the “outworn and irrelevant aestheticism of their time.” Tzara and Picabia’s intentions, on the other hand, were much more of the mocking, ironic and destructive kind, exploring and exploiting their social identity as artists. In Berlin Dada had taken a specific political-polemic form, both radical and merciless, raging against the established expressionist spirit that was dominating the society in 1917. The harsh post-war years of famine, shame and disillusionment had led the Germans to turn towards the arts for comfort and German Expressionism, with its clearly escapist tendencies, inwardness and abstraction was the best relief formula for cultural constipation of the “city tightened stomachers of mounting thundering hunger.” German Dadaism, thus, adopted a remarkably harsh and aggressive insistence on reality, holding that “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.”[xl] German Dadaism, extravagantly political, counted anarchists and communists within, and their new medium, photomontage became a vital tool of political propaganda and libel in the hands of the artists.
On a general level, it is apparent that the Dadaists, despite their dissimilarities, were working from “an artistic distance” and as a counterforce to the despotisms and heaviness of their society: either by rubbing reality at (their) face or by mocking it, or by trying to generate new set of values and reinvoking people’s faith in life as an aesthetic phenomenon. Whilst the terror of war and socio-economical unstableness were still echoing in the ears of the bleeding continent; from its very beginning, the 20th century was loaded with ideals and some of the noblest ones were to be found in the voice of the vanguards.
Some of the most radical critiques on culture that regulated the aesthetic concepts of the 20th century came from Picabia’s assertiveness of the non-superiority of artists as creators, claiming that artists had mislaid and tricked their contemporaries into embracing in a religious zeal the notions of art and culture as those stood in and for the capitalist system. “Artists are cleaners,” they can beautify but they can no longer create beauty, “don’t be taken in by them. The real modern works of art are not made by artists but quite simply by men.” At first sight, the reader might think that this contradicts Nietzsche’s conception of the convalescence aesthetics. It does not. Both Picabia and Nietzsche speak of the awakening of the Dionysian-artist within every individual and although they do not share the same terminology, the significant meaning is the same. Both repulse the established authorship of the deteriorating culture over the arts, and when Picabia speaks of “artists as cleaners,” he could well be meaning the Schopenhauerians and Wagnerians of his era. In fact, those artists who kept replastering the rotten structure.
Picabia continues: “The umbical cord between the object and its creator is broken,” there is not fundamental difference between a man-made and a machine-made object, “the only personal intervention possible in a work is choice.”[xli] Marcel Duchamp took up the latter point and explored it extensively. Already from 1914 he employed “ready-mades,” one-handily deploring and changing cultural attitudes with his trojan horses. “The choice of these ready-mades was never dictated by an aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction on visual indifference, which at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste, in fact a complete anaesthesia.”[xlii] By removing the notions of “good” and “bad” taste from the labelling of an object, Duchamp was not only creating an obscurity as to what is or is not a work of art but he was deliberately disorientating the viewer from forming an opinion based on his established notions of aesthetics that resided in habit and brainwashing. Above all, Duchamp aimed to liberate the object from his creator and from his spectator, isolating it as an idea that could stand as itself. “There is no rebus, there is no key. The work exists, its only raison d’être is to exist. It represents nothing but the wish of the brain that conceived it.”[xliii] Nothing could rival the beauty of the objects dispensed by the industrial era and the manufacture of his “toute faite,” by merely declaring them to be so, they asserted the status of artworks. Artistic authorship and authenticity were also extensively challenged in the light of transvaluation.
The most radical thesis of the European avant-garde during the revolutionary upheavals of 1910-1925 was that art must cease to focus on transforming the world into imaginary and become the wheel of transformation of real, lived experience. But as a closing afterthought, even the Dadaist vicissitude in the nature of creativity could not escape the Marxist critique of the origin of religious myth and ideology which also applied successfully to the rebellion against bourgeois art: that too was “at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against that distress.” Dada’s liberating effects could not last: “Dada flared up and burnt out as an art sabotaging art in the name of reality and reality in the name of art”; but what it could do was pave the way, inspire and trigger a new a new circle of revolution.[xliv]
Surrealism, as the new circle of revolution, was “born out of a desire for positive action, to start to built again from the ruins of Dada;”[xlv] in some ways replacing, in others reconstructing the Dadaist sensibility, and claiming to be giving back to the artist her raison d’être. Many Dadaists converted into Surrealism, forming a group around the most dominant figure of the movement, André Breton, already from 1922. The dividing line between Dada and Surrealism in the early days was hazy because their relationship was of idiomorphous complexity. Surrealism inherited Dada’s political agenda and the bourgeoisie as its enemy, and theoretically it continued to attack traditional forms of art with its experimental courses. Their significant difference sums to the fact that Surrealism erected theories and principles where what was there before was only Dada’s anarchism.
From 1922 to 1924, and before Surrealism emerged as an art movement, Breton, Eluard, Aragon, Ernst and Crevel were already experimenting with hypnotism and drugs, automatism and dreams. Freudian psychoanalysis was at the heart of the project but with a relative twist. Whilst Freud’s dream interpretation aimed at curing mental and emotional illness in order to substitute his patients back into the society in a state of “bourgeois normality,” the Surrealists acknowledged the empowerment in the “act of spontaneous creation” as that arose through the unconscious and believed that it was possible to explore and unify the human psyche by embracing neglected areas such as dreams and unconsciousness. In many ways, the Surrealists contradicted Freud because their far-stretching into whatever lied beyond the immediate reality was only for the sake of extracting inspiration and liberation of (not liberation from) their desires.
By attacking the logical construction of sentences and charging “logos” with forces and energies previously not associated with the coherent meaning of words, Surrealists’ developed the plasticity of the word, liberating language from its everyday conformity and its use as a communicational, representative and socio-control tool.[xlvi] Arp ‘wrote’ by chance, Tzara recited simultaneously with two others; Ball, Hausmann, and Schwitters engaged in abstract phonetic poetry. Lautreamont’s chants where distantly echoing: “As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”[xlvii]
The original Surrealist group understood clearly, at least during its prime time “that social repression is coherent and is repeated on every level of experience and that the essential meaning of revolution could only be the liberation and immediate gratification of everyones’ repressed will to live.” As a revolutionary avant-garde their task was invent and engage in an experimental life-style and art-making that would be “simultaneously self-expressive and socially disruptive, of extending the perimeters of lived experience.”[xlviii] Never the less, down the road, Surrealism relapsed into traditional forms of expression and self-same forms of pretentious immortality, as those are to be found in the works of Dali for example. Breton’s preoccupation with “automatism”[xlix] was taking the movement into a mystic dimension, gradually abandoning their founding reformative pledge, in favour of “the subjective integration within the spectacle of scandalous marketing commodities.”
Pierre Naville, one of the first editors of La Revolution Surréaliste, refuted the possibility of surrealist painting, as there not being such thing as “the unconscious randomness of the gesture” nor “the pictorial representation of dream imaging.” He perceived the surrealist work to be a “spectacle”, “memory and pleasure of the eyes: that is the whole aesthetic.”[l] In the English Section of the Situationist International one reads that Surrealism was deduced to the fate shared by all revolutionary possibilities of the period, as the “suffocating bureaucratic reformism” was wiping them out. “The Surrealist attempt to supersede art and politics in a completely new type of revolutionary self-expression steadily degenerated into a travesty of its original elements: the most purely celestial art and the most abject communism.”[li]
Originating from, and in response to “surrealism’s spurious doctrines”[lii] and the growing apolitical stance of the Parisian scene, the COBRA group[liii] sub-emerged from the collaboration of a range of small-scale experimental international art platforms, in 1948. Christian Dotrement, the key figure in the COBRA movement was to dispatch himself from the Belgian surrealist group upon disagreement on issues about mysticism and the Communist Party. He formed in 1947 the Revolutionary Surrealist Group so “to renew surrealist experimentation, to affirm its independence and the simultaneous necessity for common action,”[liv] stressing the importance of collective action and the surrealist experimentation essentially within the context of everyday life. The group aimed to liberate popular art from the historically imposed art forms and the reigning bourgeoisie that imbedded a state of dependence and cultural individualism upon the artists, highlighting the revolutionary role of art in the society. Renovated art, according to the group, was the art that characterised vital, direct and collective expression.[lv] The International of Experimental Artists placed significant importance on a number of concepts concerning desires, the unknown, freedom, revolution and urbanism. Desires for example, are interlinked with the unknown and freedom, in so far that it is impossible to know a desire without satisfying it. The artist’s desire for freedom was a desire for a state that was unknown to her, but at the same time, revolutionary; essentially because “the satisfaction of desire is revolution.”
One of the movement’s major projects and its most significant legacy was the creation of a new urban environment – which would stand in opposition to the rational architecture of Le Corbusier. Quoting Colle from the first issue of COBRA, “…buildings must not be squalid or anonymous, neither should they be show pieces from a museum; rather they must commune with each other, integrate with the environment to create synthesised ‘cities’ for a new socialist world.”[lvi] COBRA’s concept of “unitary urbanism” was developed by Constant and carried this conception with him into the Situationist International.
The Lettriste movement was launched in post-war Paris by Isidore Isou who claimed that the evolution of any art is characterised by two phases –“amplic and chiselling.” The amplic phase is a period from augmentation through-to exhaustion. The artistic development reaches a declinational stage, which then, is followed by the chiselling phase, when the achievements of the amplic period are refined and eventually destroyed.[lvii] He considered himself to be the poet that would complete the current chiselling phase that begun with Dadaism and with his lettrist discoveries, initiate a new amplic period. Lettrism was the first movement to make an important break from Surrealism by affirming its death and “it was through this breach that other avant-garde heresies were able to break away from Breton’s malign and dictatorial influence.”[lviii] The group experienced its own schism, later in 1952 when a number of its members formed the Lettriste International, a cultural group which intended to lead a cultural revolution rather than creating mere cultural works.
The Lettristes were mainly preoccupied with sound poetry with an emphatic transgenderness into visual production. As the name of the group implies, “letters were seen to form the basic unit from which works should be created.”[lix] The aesthetic contemplation of the Lettriste movement went on to produce concrete poetry and lettrist films. Their soundtracks “had neither a ‘specific’ nor a ‘non-specific’, relation to the picture and could be treated as ‘a product by itself,”[lx] and the images were deliberately boring or manufacturedly distorted: by scratching, tearing and drawing directly onto the processed stock.
Lettrism pursued the logical conclusion of Dadaism; in a different perspective, however, it may be seen to represent in the 1950s what Dada represented in the 1920s. Lettrist formulas were politically orientated and with an attitude that may be characterised as nihilistic. In practise, the lettrist vanguards were more interested in levelling their art-craft by reducing image and coherence to the bare minimum. Guy Debord’s film, “Screams in Favour of de Sade,” for example, contained no images at all. The feature lengthily consisted of blackened film with only the click of the projector as the soundtrack. Occasional random dialogues and white flashes of light on the screen subdued the attention of the audience until the twenty-four final minutes of absolute silence.
One might argue, however, that the Lettristes never quite understood that art, unlike expression, is a bourgeois construction, and although taking pride in dethroning the surrealists, they failed to built upon the discoveries of the Berlin Dada. From Isou and Lemaitre’s political writings and theorising on all aspects of life, appears Lettrist’s inclination toward Utopian tradition in general and 20th century avant-garde in particular. Overall, Isou’s resystemising of “all sciences of language” into his new discipline which he called “hypergraphology” never really escaped the Lettriste circles.
Schisms in the Lettrist Movement led to the formation of Lettriste International (LI) and the Ultra-Lettristes. Lettriste International, in particular, consisted of left-wing revisionary lettrists such as Bernstein, Debord, Wolman, Dahou, Conord and Fillon, who were profoundly influenced by the Marxist revisionism of the French “intellectual” climate in the 1950s and thus pursued to develop as a political group and not just as a cultural one. In an open letter published in Combat (1952) the dissident lettrists wrote: “We believe that the most urgent exercise of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they present themselves in the name of freedom.”[lxi] Abandoning entirely the literary endeavours of the Lettriste Movement, LI’s activities were “provisional, subject to experiment, and change,” proposing radical projects of what they considered to be revolutionary. The political character of the group radicalised even more so, once they reformed into Situationist International.
LI preoccupied with offspring urban theories of the Lettriste Movement and COBRA. Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formula for a New City (1953), singles out as their most important piece of writing on architecture and urbanism: “banalisation” which was sweeping the planet was forcing consumerism and hypnotisation upon everyone. No longer struggling against poverty, the modern man became obsessed with materialism and its commodities. Chtcheglov believed that the Spectacle was absorbing any impulse for life or desires that would contradict it. Hence, it was becoming “essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favour of these desires.”[lxii] Chtcheglov saw cities as sites of “vision and time” and Architecture as the means of modifying life. The exact nature of these new visions and the general phenomena associated with these drifts, remained to be established via experimentation with patterns of behaviour in urban environments, what Kabyle described in a general term as, “psychogeography”.
In Chtcheglov’s “experimental city” everyone would be assigned to their own “cathedral” – different districts in the city would correspond to diverse feelings “that one encounters by chance in everyday life.” Debord’s Introduction To A Critique of Urban Geography (1955) affirmed that “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” That was equivalent to suggesting that architecture’s solicitations ought to be able to organise the urban space in accordance to the desires of the people.[lxiii] LI’s theories and results included the much boasted “construction of situations.”
However, the various “psychogeographical games and exercises” that members of the LI indulged in did not produce any kind of data from which any serious research could progress. Similar to the Surrealists, they had their minds set upon reaching what lied “beyond” the visible urban screen, demonstrating through their various experiments that “the concept of urbanism was as much psychological and physiological as it was geographical”[lxiv] with an implicit idea of nomadic existence.
The other chief interest of the LI was “detournement”: plagiarising pre-existing aesthetic elements and integrating them into a superior construction. On Methods of Detournement (1956), Debord and Wolman wrote: “The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes…in fact it is necessary to finish with any notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous “inspired” works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits.”[lxv] On a universal scale, the very system of human technology and thought development is based on detournement, when synthesising information of established knowledge with the element of creational or accidental discovery. But detournement in LI’s sensibility was much more radical because it attack “slavish citation,” holding an anti-systemic attitude towards authorship and copyrights, as well as established common knowledge.
The LI amalgamated with the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB) to form the Situationist International in 1957, following the “First World Congress of Liberated Artists” in late 1956. Sources refer to numerous rivalries between members of the SI, LI, COBRA, IMIB and the Nuclear Art movement and their departing or deporting on various occasions – however, the initial members were: Bernstein and Debord of the LI, Gallizio, Jorn, Olmo, Simondo and Verone of the IMIB and Ralph Rumney of the non-existent London Psychogeographical Association (LPA). Some of Debord’s early published thoughts on culture prefigured that his era lacked any “revolutionary political action” to undermine “the modern possibilities of production” seeing a revolutionary programme in culture as the necessary link to his revolutionary political agenda. On the progression of culture from Futurism to Dadaism to Surrealism and from there to the vanguards of the 1940s and 1950s, he commented that Dada had “delivered a mortal blow to the traditional conceptions of culture,” and Surrealism provided “an effective means of struggle against the confusionist mechanisms of the bourgeoisie” declaring necessary to take up the “original surrealist project” (experimentation) and carry it through to its logical conclusion. Indeed many Situationist artists, such as Gallizio, Melanotte, Jorn and Constant, achieved international fame as ‘Experimental’ and ‘Industrial’ artists.
In 1958 the Gruppe Spur constituted the German section of the SI – sharing Jorn and Constant’s belief in “the collective, non-competitive production of art” which would sustain the cultural revolution within the frame of centralised unitary urbanism – stood in sharp contrast with Debord and Bernstein’s sectarian vision of a revolutionary creativity totally separated from the existing culture: “It must be understood once and for all that something that is only a personal expression within a framework created by others cannot be termed a creation. Creation is not the arrangement of objects and forms, it is the invention of new laws of arrangement.”[lxvi] The division of opinions within the ranks of the Situationists heightened in 1961 when Jorn resigned and Vaneigem was recruited, splitting the group into the Scandinavian Second Situationist International (the Situationist Bauhaus) and the French (Specto-)Situationist International (1962). Their obvious fraction adhered on questions of art, though many scholars maintain that both groups failed to make a proper distinction between the concepts of art and culture.
The second theoretical device which distinguished the specto-situationists is the concept of the “spectacle”. One of the points drawn from Nietzsche’s meditations on aesthetics relates to the declinational Western culture whose thematic centralises in the disparity of the spectators from their self. “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? – It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.”[lxvii] This is, so to speak, a principally Situationist argument in contemporary terms, summarised by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”[lxviii]
Nietzsche’s conclusions as to how narcotic-art intoxicates people and tames any social reform by providing alienated images and dispatching the subject from the world, is in terms with Debord’s Marxist paraphrasing theorisation on the society which, “while eliminating geographical distance, this society produces a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation”[lxix] and “Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very centre that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness… Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, a global social practice split into reality and image.”[lxx]
-------------------------CONCLUSION
Lack of space and time constitute impossible the
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1. In so far as the avant-garde groups are concerned, there is no doubt that they all shared a common, revolutionary character, both towards culture and politics. Dada and Lettrism both bore a self-destructive, chiselling character that marked the renaissance of the concepts of art within the given culture via Surrealism and Situationism[lxxi] respectively. Analogically, Surrealism and Situationism, both engaged in transit experimentation in the search of the ‘unknown’; the former retrieving into ‘subconscious’ automatism, the latter into urbanism; sort to speak, acquiring a metaphysical-character from a point onwards. A second common point recites in their polemic programme of conflicting “with the dominant social system through collapsing the distinction between artist and spectator,” and generating “a generalisation of creativity.” But of the two, only Specto-Situationism remained faithful to its purpose. Finally both movements received vast (un)popularity and attention, but also severe criticism: Late-Surrealism, on the one hand, was severely attacked by COBRA and Lettrism, whenst becoming a prominent art movement in its time; Lettriste/Situationist International, on the other, experienced numerous frictions between the group members and continuous fractions of the group and is infamously remembered for the May ’68 events. A last similarity recites in the ‘dictatorship’ of the two most prominent figures, Andre Breton and Guy Debord. The former achieving centrality within the movement, the latter turned it into sectarian.
2. As far as to whether the Nietzschian pattern of aesthetic evolution is applicable to the 20th century avant-garde movements, unfortunately has not been fully and convincingly established. In his favour, the revolutionary vanguards of the 20th century define in the most absolute and remarkable way Nietzsche’s second stage of cultural evolution and justify the grounds upon which one would characterise them anarchic, both in essence and in practise. On the counterscale, there seems to be an overlapping between the aesthetics of convalescence and the Dionysian-artist. Whilst the former marks a period of the cultural life, the latter implies a status of the society in the cultural life which, unfortunately, remains up to today, unattended. Further on, a period of convalescence does not exclude the Dionysian-artists, as Nietzsche would have been, for example, for his own times; but Dionysian-artists, of any period, are always outnumbered.
3. The degradation of culture has been hastily outlined but enough to underline the dependence of arts upon the totalitarian, so called free-market, system. The terminology used, is perhaps rusty but it only seems so, because we have become accustomed to our cultural blindfold. We dismiss ‘banal’ terms out of superficial political correctness rather than any substantial insight as to what they represent. The revolutionary avant-gardes succeeded in reforming art, and in that sense, the evolution of Nietzsche’s aesthetics is totally justified. Perhaps if I was willing to accept that and only that, my project would have been a successful one. But they were unsuccessful to reform culture as a whole, and in that sense, Nietzsche’s prototype of the Dionysian-society is, to say the least, utopian.
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------------------------AFTERTHOUGHT
Who Friedrich Nietzsche is and the quality and amount of philosophical and literatural tradition he has left behind, the author is in no position to even begin imagining, let alone to critically present it in this essay, you may rest assure. I literally stumbled across his writings as I was researching various sources on the degradation of culture with a relative subjective bias towards the topic. My prejudice towards culture is not exclusively a partiality toward the contemporary arts, which seem reactionary but not revolutionary; but rather, a general discontent, even a sense a revolve, against our ahistoric, illiberal, illusion-fused, faceless, technocratic society; the lack of ideals and re-chewing on chiselling ideologies which have ceased long ago to be fertile grounds for optimum thought. It is disappointment that prompts me to look backwards, often with nostalgia, since I am removed from the past – in vain trying to reason why have things have gone so terribly wrong. Beforehand, I am aware that this is a fatigued subject and one which I cannot wish to grasp or complete fully or even contribute to constructively. My primary aim was to leaf-through a number of themes that interested me, including: anarchism, revolutionary art, 20th century avant-garde movements, situationism and Nietzsche. In the process I came across further appealing concepts, like urbanism. The task became to try and tie them all together under a coherent perspective. Then again, this essay might only be best remembered as how the author slaughtered Nietzsche’s interpretation in eight-thousand words (cossie-cossa). That and this is the idea.
Perhaps it is too much to ask of art. Perhaps it is too much to ask of the artists; to be creative, revolutionary, philosophers, theoreticians, wise, impulsive, radical, free-spirits, superhuman, inhuman and real human all at once, committed to a cause and just that: to change the world. A world that they are as much to blame as anyone else. A world that they have as much power to change single-handedly as anyone else. A world that is too big and too diverse to ever fully grasp and yet which we squeeze in a four-letter word… and suddenly we believe it to be that small. Nietzsche was wrong, and yet he was right again. I have no more faith in art now than I did before, because I have less faith in the culture that subsides at the simplest commands of the system. A culture without ideals and with no real future other than one day mincing under the immense weight of its corpses and its bombs. When the Dadaists were issuing art’s death certificate, it was only because they were too true in realising that the whole infrastructure of the society was rotten. Societies recycle because we are all human bones, so much is true, but they never reform because the last of the corrupted architects never dies soon enough. The seeds of evil fertile the ground each time the sunflower turns its head towards the light, and ‘for how much longer?’ we wonder, and ‘there isn’t any more space left’ we think, but there again another leaf springs and soon enough it grows…
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posted by Vlada Jan at 3:21 PM
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