Art
and Class Struggle
Andrew
Cooper
In ancient Celtic history domination meant loosing your tongue.[1]
We will not be concerned with taste here but speech and how art becomes an
organ of speech. Art can open out hidden
relationships between people, things and the world we inhabit; how then does
art realise its potential to question and open out hidden relations including
the social relations of art itself?
In developed capitalist countries
the freedom of art appears like a totem for the social freedom of criticality, but
to what ends? Acknowledging the reality of class antagonism in its fullest
sense, who does this ‘image of freedom’ serve?[2]
Exclusion often accompanies serious critique and this negates the aim of
changing the social and economic relations that determine distribution of resources
and ownership of property necessary for public interaction with art. This is the
wall of class antagonism that we must come up against. Far too often, in the demarcation
of an autonomous 'safe' space we have the fiction that art is independent
rather than interdependent. Real autonomy is a position in relation to other
social relations that we are able to investigate unimpeded; it is neutralized
when fetishised as an unquestioned ‘image of freedom’ within narrow
unacknowledged constraints. Social conditions affect how many people have
access to and how easy it is to gain time and resources to practice art. In
many capitalist countries we are living at a cross roads: many of the daughters
and sons of the proletariat[3]
have taken the opportunity of hard-won post-war, progressive education policies
to study art practice. Despite issues of interpolation into notions of
capitalist meritocracies we should acknowledge that new resistance and
questioning of exploitation has emerged, the student protests and teach-ins in
2010 are one example.[4] The tide of
these reforms has been on the ebb for several decades. After 2008 we are at a
point in history when rights for future generations are being removed as access
to tertiary education becomes increasingly limited, with high tuition fees and
the increasing prevalence of business ideology.
Unmasking the often unseen
conglomerate of forces of phenomena can potentially lead to revolutionary
change[5].
What if we were to truly acknowledge the interdependence of all productions of
social relations and culture? Included in this would be deracinating images and
metaphors which art is heir to, opening up new potentials; Marx himself uses imagery
as powerful tools of communication[6],
delving into the symbolic structure of what appears
as ‘common sense’ –the powers of the imagination should not be relinquished to
capitalism. Artists must be producers[7], shaping a culture, creating
interfaces between whom and what art acts upon. How can we shape a culture as a
collective act, creating soil for a new necessary art of sustained resistance
and struggle?
Full Work Here
[1] See Tony
Harrison’s poem ‘National Trust’ (www.poetryarchive.org) ‘Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr (Cornish-)
'the
tongueless man gets his land took.'
I first came across this image of removal
of tongues in a copy of a Victorian book I no longer possess on Irish Celtic
Mythology which stated that conquered tribes had their tongues removed.
[2] See Alain Badiou ‘Philosophy and Desire’, (Infinite Thought) where he talks about
the limitations placed on philosophy, and the importance of revolt, risk,
universality and logic
[3] I’d like to
compare this with the condition of the proletariat described by Trotsky in ‘The
Communist Policy Toward Art ‘
[4] "There was a free teach-in at 5 o'clock and various
speakers came and talked about the consequences of the cuts on the arts and
education. "When we tried to leave, we couldn't as there was a confusion
over which exit to use. Some students wanted to get into the Turner prize
gallery itself and they began to chant, 'break down the doors, free education
for all'. A lecturer at the Tate Gallery Occupation 2010 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/06/student-protests-turner-prize)
[5] Much of the thinking here has been shaped by considering
Delueze's Difference and Repetition, in particular Chap 3 ‘The Image of Thought’. Also Brian Massumi, -A
User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia:Deviations from Deleuze and
Guattari
[6] Marx lays bare the relations that create commodity
fetishism, but he warns that we may think a commodity is a simple thing, but is
in fact not so easy to understand. He describes a table which takes on a life
of its own and dances as a commodity. This is a famous example but there are
many other images of allegory, metaphor in volume one of Capital.
[7] See the ‘Author
as Producer Walter’ by Walter Benjamin’
With thanks to Battini
Sreenivasa Rao, Dean Kenning And John Cussans for editing feed back. This writing forms an abstract and outline of
ongoing research for the Historical Materialism Conference
(New Delhi, 3-4 April 2013)
