The Utopian Globalists (eBook)

Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919 - 2009

Jonathan Harris (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-118-31679-5 (ISBN)

Infos

An innovative history and critical account mapping the ways artists and their works have engaged with, and offered commentary on, modern spectacle in both capitalist and socialist modernism over the past ninety years.

• Focuses on artists whose work expresses the concept of revolutionary social transformation
• Provides a strong historical narrative that adds structure and clarity
• Features a cogent and innovative critique of contemporary art and institutions
• Covers 100 years of art from Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist ‘Monument to the Third International’, to Picasso’s late 1940s commitment to Communism, to the Unilever Series sponsored Large Artworks installed at London’s Tate Modern since 2000.
• Includes the only substantial account in print of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Montreal ‘Bed-in’
• Offers an accessible description and interpretation of Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ theory

Jonathan Harris is Professor in Global Art and Design Studies at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. Prof. Harris’s work has consistently explored questions of state power, culture, art, ideology and social order, particularly in Europe and America over the last century. His The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (2001) remains a classic text, and he has published 17 books as editor, author and co-author, including Globalization and Contemporary Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

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THE UTOPIAN GLOBALISTS Crossing continents, historical periods and cultural genres, Jonathan Harris skilfully traces the evolution of utopian ideals from early modernism to the spectacularised and biennialised (or banalised as some would say) contemporary art world of today. Michael Asbury, University of the Arts, London The Utopian Globalists is the second in a trilogy of books by Jonathan Harris examining the contours, forces, materials and meanings of the global art world, along with its contexts of emergence since the early twentieth century. The first of the three studies, Globalization and Contemporary Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), anatomized the global art system through an extensive anthology of over 30 essays contextualized through multiple thematic introductions. The final book in the series, Contemporary Art in a Globalized World (forthcoming, Wiley-Blackwell), combines the historical and contemporary perspectives of the first and second books in an account focused on the mediatizations shaping and representing contemporary art and its circuits of global production, dissemination and consumption. This innovative and revealing history examines artists whose work embodies notions of revolution and human social transformation. The clearly structured historical narrative takes the reader on a cultural odyssey that begins with Vladimir Tatlin s constructivist model for a Monument to the Third International (1919), a statement of utopian globalist intent, via Picasso s 1940s commitment to Soviet communism and John and Yoko s Montreal Bedin , to what the author calls the late globalism of the Unilever Series at London s Tate Modern. The book maps the ways artists and their work engaged with, and offered commentary on, modern spectacle in both capitalist and socialist modernism, throughout the eras of the Russian Revolution, the Cold War and the increasingly globalized world of the past 20 years. In doing so, Harris explores the idea that the utopian -globalist lineage in art remains torn between its yearning for freedom and a deepening identification with spectacle as a media commodity to be traded and consumed.

Autor

Jonathan Harris is Professor in Global Art and Design Studies at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. His work has consistently explored questions of state power, culture, art, ideology and social order, particularly in Europe and America over the past century. His The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (2001) remains a classic text, and he has published 17 books as editor, author and co-author, including Globalization and Contemporary Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Inhalt

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: The World in a Work of Art 1

Global Order, Social Order, Visual Order 2

'Globalization' and 'Globalism' in Th
eory and Practice 10

Capitalism and Communism as (Failed) Utopian Totalities 16

Ideal and Real Collectivities 23

1 Spectacle, Social Transformation and Utopian Globalist Art
34

Spectacular Cold War Communisms and Capitalisms 35

Alienation/Separation and State Power 44

System, Totality, Representation and the 'Utopian
Imaginary' 51

The 'Conquest of Space', Spectacular Art and
Globalist Vision 57

2 The Line of Liberation: Tatlin's Tower and the
Communist Construction of Global Revolution 76

Revolutionary Rupture, Structure and Sense 77

Space and Symbolism 85

Beyond Order 95

Collectivity and Necessity 103

3 Picasso for the Proletariat: 'The Most Famous
Communist in the World '118

Commitment to the Cause, Right or Wrong 119

Picasso as Screen 129

Image, Persona, Mediations 139

Picasso ' s Use and Exchange Value 147

4 Some Kind of Druid Dude: Joseph Beuys's Liturgies of
Freedom 165

Tatlin for the Television Generation 166

The Beuysian Spectacular Persona 171

The Spirit of the Earth 179

Process, Performance, Metabolic Transformation 185

Political Actions 191

5 'Bed-in' as Gesamtkunstwerk: A Typical Morning
in the Quest for World Peace 211

Sugar, Sugar 212

A Sequestered Zone of Peace 217

Just My Imagination 225

A Man from Liverpool and a Woman from Tokyo 229

6 Mother Nature on the Run: Austerity Globalist Depletions in
the 1970s 246

Transmission, Replacement, Negation, Deletion 247

West/East-North/South 253

Banality as Tactic 260

Austerity Globalism's Body-Politic 265

'Development' Exposed 272

7 Nomadic Globalism: Scenographica in Christo and
Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag 287

The Negation Negated 288

Art, Business, Diplomacy 292

The Materials of Spectacle 296

Form as Sedimented Content 299

Seductive Acts of Occlusion 306

Conclusion: From the Spiral to the Turbine: A Global Warning
316

Large Rooms Full of Wonderful Curiosities 317

The Void of Possibilities 320

Disappeared 323

Index 333

Rezensionen

"Though theoretically sophisticated, this volume is
accessible and engaging. Summing Up: Recommended.
Upper-level undergraduates through
professionals/practitioners." (Choice, 1
September 2013)

"Crossing continents, historical periods and cultural genres,
Jonathan Harris skillfully traces the evolution of utopian ideals
from early modernism to the spectacularised and biennialised (or
banalised as some would say) contemporary art world of
today."

- Michael Asbury, University of the Arts, London

Textauszug

Introduction

The World in a Work of Art

Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece # 70 (In Process) Global. November 1971:‘Throughout the remainder of the artist’s lifetime he will ­photographically document, to the extent of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner. Editions of this work will be periodically issued in a variety of topical modes: “100,000 people,” “1,000,000 people,” “10,000,000 people,” “people personally known by the artist,” “look-alikes,” “over-laps,” etc.’

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2001 [1973]): 261.

‘This diversification of possible historical life reflected the gradual ­emergence, following the collapse of the great official enterprise of this world, namely the Crusades, of the period’s unseen contribution: a society carried along in its unconscious depths by irreversible time, the time directly experienced by the bourgeoisie in the production of ­commodities, the founding and expansion of the towns, the commercial discovery of the planet – in a word, the practical experimentation that obliterated any mythical organization of the cosmos once and for all.’

Guy Debord, Thesis 137, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books: New York, 1995 [1967, in French]): 100–1.

Global Order, Social Order, Visual Order

For this beginning, consider two artefacts, two artworks, illustrated here by two photographs (Figures 0.1 and 0.2). The first shows a large object placed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London in 2009–10, viewed, and entered, by many tens of thousands of people. The second shows a model from 1919, made a year or so after the Russian Revolution, for a planned enormous tower in Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg), which, given the then available technology, could not have been built. These two constructions, Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is – the tenth contribution to the Unilever series of large artworks installed in the Hall since 2000 – and Vladimir Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third International stand, I shall argue, at either end of an intelligible and poignant history of what I call ‘utopian globalism’ in modern art, culture and society. This is my term for an idea of worldwide social transformation to be brought about within a modernity recognized to be global in its nature and effects; it is an idea that was given visual form and material substance by artists committed to a vision of the world beyond the limits and values of tyrannical government, capitalist social order and acquisitive materialism.

Figure 0.1 Miroslaw Balka, How It Is (2009), Tate Modern Turbine Hall. © Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Notions of globalization and modernism are, by now, reasonably familiar, whilst the term ‘globalism’ is perhaps less so. This Introduction will clarify the meanings that have accrued to these terms and their significant ­interrelation within my argument. However, it may prove difficult to convince you that Tatlin’s model and Balka’s box on stilts represent punctual ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ in such a history. Tatlin’s model for a soaring structure ­symbolizing the communist ideal certainly was the first ambitious contribution to twentieth century revolutionary modernist internationalism – a tradition of visionary thinking and making that was avowedly utopian, gripped by an optimistic belief in the power of materialized imagination. In contrast, Balka’s squat metal container, entered via a shallow-angled ramp and, like Tatlin’s proposed tower, part ‘sculpture’, part inhabitable ‘architecture’, afforded the experience, when I visited it, of a blackening, sinister totality as one proceeded into its interior space – as well as an uncertain, if not wholly disconcerting, physical and social relation extended to the others also ambulant or motionless within the structure.

Figure 0.2 Photograph of Vladimir Tatlin, Model for a Monument to the Third International (1919). From Ivan Puni’s book Tatlin (Protiv kubizma), 1921. Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Tatlin’s model, foundation for a memorial to the ‘Third International’ world communist movement sparked into life by the successful ­Bolshevik-led uprising in Russia in October 1917, disappeared during the 1920s, and since then the only surviving visual traces of his imagined tower have been a number of spectral black-and-white photographs.1 Given the mythic ethereality of Tatlin’s creation, meaningful comparisons with Balka’s actual, physical box of 2009 – big, perhaps, in relation to many contemporary artworks, but tiny compared to Tatlin’s giant structure which, it was proposed, would straddle the river Neva in Petrograd – perhaps seem far-fetched, even unfair. Nevertheless, I shall claim that How It Is represents a recent poignant addition, as well as a kind of historical conclusion, to the utopian globalist lineage traced within the chapters of this book. Balka’s structure does so in the sense that, along with other works in the Unilever series, it represents an attempt by the selected artists to demonstrate that contemporary art can still compellingly ‘figure’ – that is, give expressive visual and material form to – a politically and aesthetically radical critique of the world’s social order in the first decade of the twenty-first century. My pursuit of this argument will mainly serve, though, to conclude the book – ‘endings’ always being practical necessities in historical accounts, if often also involving speculative claims of their own. For example, I shall suggest as further examples of ‘late’ utopian globalism, in what is now its multinational corporate-patronal phase, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, a yellow glowing disc of light hung at one end of the Turbine Hall in 2003–4, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007–8 Shibboleth, an incision cut into the stone ground of the length of part of the Hall, creating an earthquake-like micro-chasm that has been left to scar the gallery’s floor (Figures 0.3 and 0.4). Both appear to allude to the potential human-made environmental and socio-political catastrophes now facing the earth, its peoples and all of life on the planet.2

Within this account of utopian globalist art of the last ninety years, spanning Tatlin’s tower to the Turbine Hall’s programmatically spectacular array of distracting visions and enigmatic objects, it will become clear that claims relating to modern and contemporary art’s socio-critical purpose have interlocked with its utopian-visionary function in a variety of ways across this era. The development of these modes and practices has, in addition, become seemingly inevitably more closely bound up with technologically dynamic mass media forms of representation and dissemination. For, in this lineage, photography, film, television, video, mixed media installation and now internet communication technologies have become – certainly along with persisting practices of drawing, painting and sculpture – ­constitutive of globalized contemporary art, as well as significant facets of utopian globalist aspiration for transformative social change. Such ­extending and adaptive processes were active within the early twentieth-century ‘modern’, as well as within our own ‘postmodern’ and contemporary, conjunctures. These are the times, spaces, means and forms that link Tatlin’s tower and Balka’s box.3

Figure 0.3Olafur Eliasson,The Weather Project (2003), Tate Modern Turbine Hall.© Gijsbert Hanekroot/Alamy.

Figure 0.4 Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007), Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Anton Hammerl/PA Archive/Press Association Images.

My account in Chapter 5, for example, of a televisual event, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Bed-in’, held in the pursuit of world peace, conducted in late May 1969 at a Montreal hotel, is concerned with such an instance of a galvanizing mutation in utopian globalist communicative process. It will become obvious through this – and the other case studies – that I am not seeking here to claim paradigmatic status for any particular utopian globalist work. Even less am I concerned to argue for any such work’s autonomy from capitalism as a system, from the specific social order in which it emerged, or from the broader forms of western spectacular life generated from the mid-twentieth century’s decades onwards. Tatlin’s unrealized tower does stand, however, in a kind of ideal anteriority to the utopian globalist monuments (and molehills) that actually were built in its historical wake. Their makers’ principles of radical social transformation came to ­differ fundamentally: earlier on in the twentieth century, these were close, or closer, to institutionalized communist...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.1.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport ► Tanzen / Tanzsport
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Schlagworte: Art & Applied Arts • Art History & Criticism • begins • communism • Cultural • embodies • examines artists • Globalist • Historical • History • Kunstgeschichte • Kunstgeschichte u. -kritik • Kunst u. Angewandte Kunst • narrative • notions • odyssey • Reader • Revolution • Statement • Structured • tatlins constructivist monument • Transformation • utopian • Vladimir • whose • Work
• ISBN-10: 1-118-31679-7 / 1118316797
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-31679-5 / 9781118316795