by David Riff
On Tuesday August 14th, the afternoon session was a discussion Chto delat had been planning for quite some time in connection to the new issue “Debates on the Avant-garde.”
The connection of the words “new issue” and “avant-garde” sounds strange. But still. Chto delat is, in a way, constituted around precisely this debate, so that the issue has been in planning almost since the very beginning of our activities; in that sense, it is not a new issue of our newspaper at all, but the first and only issue. Since we are working a post-Soviet Russian context, the issue of the historical avant-garde is utterly unavoidable, as Western readers will imagine.
For the magazines week, we wanted to bring at least some of this into the context of the documenta 12 magazines project, and to show that we are not alone. There is, perhaps not a new international, but a group of people all over the world who are leading Marxist aesthetic debates focused (or defocused) around earlier discussions of the 1920s-30s.
Unfortunately, many of the people whom we had invited couldn’t come. Thus, I want to begin this post with a list of the unknown, and then briefly describe what happened at the workshop.
Keti Chukhrov and Igor Chubarov from Moscow, didn’t show up. Igor and Keti are attached to Moscow’s Institute of Philosophy and are students of the post-structuralist philosopher Valery Podoroga. Keti has written on Ezra Pound and music theory; Igor has been doing research on productionism and the notion of labor. His contribution to the most recent issue of Chto delat can be found here.
Both Keti and Igor have been intensively involved in leftist projects of the Moscow art scene, and important positions in an ongoing polemic on the avant-garde that flared up around 2002, slightly before Chto delat was founded. They were meant to transport the somewhat excessive performative atmosphere of this debate – carried out in Russian on a private mailing list – to the current context.
We had also invited Jelena Vesic from Belgrade, and Kerstin Stakemeier from Hamburg. Both are curators with a clear political committment. Jelena coedits Prelom, a Marxist journal for philosophy and image politics; Kerstin coedits Phase 2, a more classical Marxist publication to emerge from the German antifa movement. As curators, both have worked with artists whose practices are linked to the avant-garde as a political project.
Jelena recently worked with a group of artists called Henry VIII’s Wives from Glasgow, who are developing participatory practices to finally build Tatlin’s Monument to the III. International in bits and pieces all over the world. Jelena organized the installation of one cross beam of the monument in New Belgrade. Kerstin, an expert on Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Lissitsky, later hosted the group at a project space in Hamburg called “Actualisierungsraum,” where she and her colleague Nina Koeller host small exhibitions and panel discussions. Neither of them came. Jelena missed her plane (though she is here, and will be posting to this blog); Kerstin couldn’t make it for personal reasons.
Finally, we really wanted our friend and honorary member of Chto delat Zanny Begg to be with us. Zanny is an artist, curator, and critic, also with a strong background in political activism. She is currently writing her dissertation on the question of whether artistic-activist practices after a renewal of new global movements and struggles can be considered as a new avant-garde.
Together with Dima Vilensky, my co-editor of Chto delat, Zanny has written a piece on this question for the new issue, illustrating it with very nice, ironical comics that serve as a counterpoint to the sobriety of the central questions she tackles there: can or should recent political art declare a fidelity to the avant-garde as a notion, and how, in fact, should this fidelity be structured. Zanny couldn’t come because she lives in Australia. Though it initially seemed that she would stay on in Europe until the end of the summer to continue the collaboration, she had to go back because of a teaching committment and couldn’t join us.
One key person did come, namely the writer John Roberts from London, who has written extensively on the Marxist aesthetic debate, which experienced a radicalizing actualization in London of the 1980s-90s. Roberts is part of a more radical, clearly Marxist British left that veered far off from publications like New Left Review, and opted for a more radical approach to aesthetics. John came to Moscow and Petersburg
Roberts is a soften-spoken Brit with a wry sense of humor. I was extremely glad to meet him. He is in dialogue with people like Julian Stallabrass, Esther Leslie, and Ben Watson, and is a regular contributor to journals like Radical Philosophy and Third Text, and much of their debate focuses on Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno, and how their theories play out in a contemporary context. Like Igor Chubarov, John is also very interested in the productionists, and especially their perhaps most radical figure, Yuri Arvatov. John is perhaps the most theoretically rigorous of his colleagues, using a philosophical, rather abstract language reminiscent of the later Adorno.
We had asked John Roberts to give a lunch lecture, actually, and had planned a more lengthy workshop with short presentations and discussions. This didn’t work for organizational reasons, but it is somehow hard to imagine a documenta public sitting through John’s lecture in a public space. So we decided ask John to read a semi-open in Kabinett 2, and to follow by a broader, seminar-type discussion with the magazines week workshop participants.
At first, the grey lecture space was packed. John Roberts read a version of the text printed in Chto delat, which you can find here. There were only a few slight but significant deviations. The audience was predominantly German, so most people were reading along in the newspaper, which we had distributed for free, rustling the pages. At some point in the middle of John’s talk, everyone turned the page at the same time. This was quite funny.
I will not summarize John’s lecture, entitled “Avant-gardes after Vangardism,” but its main point was that the notion of the avant-garde still has work to do and cannot be reduced to a pose of post-catastrophic mourning in the sense of many debates that were taking place before and during the rise of what called itself post-modernism. The stringent dialectic of John’s text, expressed in abstract philosophical terms familiar to readers of Adorno, creates a kind of opacity that most Bildungsbuerger will have trouble with, sensing its underlying, swallowed, understated political radicalism, a sense of outrage at private property and petit bourgeois aspirations that is only barely repressed.
So by the time John’s talk was over, half of the audience had left. In this sense, John’s talk was exactly the opposite of Irina Sandomirskaya’s, which I wrote about in yesterday’s post. I think it was a great and very symptomatic counterpoint; Irina – who I would describe as a Benjaminian liberal a little to the right of Susan Buck-Morss – did not join the discussion unfortunately.
In the second part of the discussion, John whose last I stupidly failed to note, made some brilliant commentaries: the avant-garde, he said, as a notion is a asocial desire or negativity that needs to be social and positive; this dialectic continues, he claimed, and has great political meaning, and cannot be given over to neoliberal cultural production. Andrea Geyer and Ashley Hunt both also got involved in the discussion, and added that recaptures of avant-garde legacies become especially important when neo-conservative politics and cultural approaches claim a far greater radicality than the supposed “avant-garde” which is accused of being retrograde. We agree with her completely, and discussed how this applied to the Russian situation, where “avant-garde” rhetorics and techniques are appropriated to butress a modernizing claim.
In general, the avant-garde discussion was not really what we had hoped for, simply because five important contributors were missing. Their presence might have made the whole affair more accessible to a general documenta 12 public. Even internally, it was a little difficult to flesh out the concrete practices and their distribution over different localities, as Ashley Hunt noted, but I think we were still able to give people a decent sense of our positions. But in general, there is always a danger of slipping into familiar confrontations between a newer “critical” left in cultural production and an older, more orthodox Marxist left, which all participants of our current debate are quite careful to avoid. We – i.e. people closer to more classical Marxist projects – consciously use discursive opacity and/or deceptive bluntness to mask our rather more radical intentions, cluttering up our totalizing horizons, while our more “liberal” colleagues try not to pressure us too much about the terms of our committments, and write them off to our marginal status under conditions of peripheral capitalism, accepting them as an “important piece of the puzzle.” This conflict-avoidance is not a good thing. It means that we are somehow stuck in our respective fetishisms, and unable to consolidate to really change the world instead of just interpreting it.
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