Anarchism in the arts

Off the top of me 'ead.

Michael Moorcock - sci-fi writer

Alt.country musicians

Steve Earle

Jon Langford (Waco Brothers)

If not anarchists as near as damn it.

Pissaro the impressionist artist was an anarchist.

and of course the cartoonist Donald Rooum

And John Olday, cartoonist

There is an article about kafka/Anarchism here...

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/04/20/7543492

er well I know one of his books has a character who likes Chomsky...

And do you mean Lord Byron above?

Ideally waht we'd like for enrager is enough info for a small page about all these kindsa people - basic bio info (when born and died - I can do that), and a couple of other bits like what's their connection to revolutionary politics - links to any writings etc., a links to some of their art.

Ooh also there are loads of poets - I guess lots of them are in the Visions of Poesy book by Freedom Press...

Unusual to see discussion of arts on forums like this unless it's "which bands do you like". There seems to be an interesting distinction between artists whose personal politics are anarchist, and those who's work expresses or suggests anarchist ideas, or both.

I'm a saxophone player and all of my recent musical activity has been within free-improvised music - which for me at least provides one of the most frequent examples of anarchist methods of organisation in practice. Not all (by any means) of the musicians I work with are anarchist, but some are, and many have either sympathy or interest in anarchist ideas.

From the point of view of performance, there is rarely discussion beforehand of what is going to occur, and since there's no composition to be played (notated, graphic, verbal or otherwise), no individual has any ability to predetermine the course of events which will take place or to direct them unilaterally during performance. The content, structure, duration etc. is decided by the musicians playing while it occurs, through the decisions they take and by listening and responding (or not) to the contributions of other musicians and to the possibilities of their instrument. Therefore all the musicians performing are immediately on an equal footing, without any semblance of the roles of soloist, composer, conductor, lead singer etc. and by nature, decisions are made collectively (even though this is done via non-verbal and generally non-visual communication).

Organisation of gigs, releases of recordings etc. can be slightly more traditional, but are still pretty much collectively run, most are non-profit (not necessarily by choice), and operate with neither corporate backing nor government funding (unlike nearly all "radical" visual art, punk and rock groups, and authors with mainstream publishing/distribution deals).

There's a very tiny audience for this stuff, so not many people know about it (or like it when they hear it), but I find it difficult to stay out of discussions like this when there are a few thousand people playing/listening to improvised music, some of whom I'd imagine are similar to myself - hold strong political views but do little about them - who could potentially add to the numbers of people involved in the anarchist movement. I'm also sure there are some anarchists dissatisfied with both mainstream and radical-lifestylist corporate (musical) product who might find something more fulfilling in music that genuinely operates non-hierarchically, spontaneously, collectively, as opposed to just including some of the vocabulary in lyrics, but otherwise operating completely within corporate musical and economic models.

A lot of this has to do with a term that I've only been noticing recently: "Creative Industries". There was an item on the news about "Creative Week" where the main guy behind it was interviewed. I can't remember anything he said except for one thing "We want to help creatives develop their ideas and introduce them to markets" - i.e. the only way for someone to develop within any kind of artform should be to commodify their own output at at the earliest opportunity, with the state providing backing to them in the form of "professional development" - getting them into the arms of a marketing company asap. All this combined with talk of social housing for artists in London being introduced for the sole purpose of preparing the ground for regeneration/gentrification, not because they're poor, because they're the vanguard of the geographical expansion of the City (Spitalfields? anyone), makes me very uneasy.

Example - I did a very odd gig at a tiny local East End pub, guy came up to us and asked us if we'd play at his gallery in Finsbury Square that Saturday afternoon. Not having anything booked, and finding it odd that someone liked the music that much in what was otherwise a fairly hostile environment, we turned up on the Saturday to find out it was the Bloomberg Space - yes Bloomberg the massive financial company, which none of us had really heard of. www.bloomberg.com

Turns out they sponsor the Serpentine, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA - all visual art spaces which represent avant-garde art with a degree of recognition, and plenty more places as well. The Bloomberg spaces is actually the (six storey high) entrance hall of their office block, you can imagine how surprised we were expecting the gallery to be about the size of my front room. These places house works by artists whose politics are or were often completely opposed to the companies that either openly (Becks Futures at the ICA) or more subtlely (Bloomberg) support these places, and in the case of Becks actively and openly try to influence the content and context of the work that is shown in those places, to the point where the ICA, state-funding and all, becomes little more than an extension of Becks' tube adverts.

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PTP. It's worth mentioning that although there's little or no state funding of improvised music in the UK, there's quite a lot in some other countries - Switzerland and Austria have big funding structures which support this music, although I don't know much at all about the detail of how that works.

At the moment, any connection between improvised music and the corporate art world is fairly anomalous - there's little interaction and most is due to the personal tastes of people involved in that scene. The somewhat related Sound Art scene (field recordings, not necessarily improvised electronic music), is more closely intermingled. Most of this is due to people realising they can get funding if they write "Artist Statements" instead of normal boring musician bios. Most of the funding in this country as far as I'm concerned is got through misrepresenting what people are actually doing as "Sound Art" as opposed to music, and thus moving into a different bracket of allocation. I don't see any large scale co-option from either the capitalist or state-funding power centres, although there'll always be people trying to get some extra dough.

As to production itself, even the "big" labels(all of which I know of being one-man operations) in this music rarely sell more than 1000 of each CD they release, internationally, often half that. And a lot of releases are CDRs made to order. So although there's CDs being produced, and record labels and websites etc., the numbers are tiny and it's generally more of a means of communication internationally than a source of income - CDs might break even after a while, but rarely much more than that, but they do allow people to arrange meetings/gigs with people they otherwise wouldn't be able to overseas.

"Is the ability to avoid getting sucked in to capitalist art structures ultimately down to the personal and collective integrity of peformers?"

I think music that can't be replicated (emphasis on live performance, each performance unique) successfully is inherently resistant to capitalist art structures - the genre fwoabw has been around since the '60s, so it's lasted longer outside the mainstream music industry than Punk, most indigenous folk musics etc. etc. have, all of which have become firmly seized by the major labels and modified for mass consumption pretty soon after they were developed/discovered over the past thirty-forty years.

Some of the Sonic Art/Sound Installation people who are more or less connected with the scene are trying with various degrees of success to get into the capitalist art scene, but that's different stuff anyway, despite there being cross-over.

PTP.

I don't think the political content of anything protects it from co-option, and in fact may aid co-option in some senses.

On Whitechapel High Street, not far from Freedom, there's a clothes wholesaler which in general looks much like any other you see in the East End, except that their T-Shirts have slogans like "Destroy" and narchy on the front.

I don't know anything about the company, but there's every reason to believe that those T-Shirts were made in sweat shops in the Philippines, or for that matter in sweat shops in Norfolk. They also are firmly within the trend of the past thirty years of offering various sub-cultural or counter-cultural lifestyles as off-the-rail clothing products. In other words, those T-Shirts (short of further information about the company) are not only capitalist commodities, but they're using the (albeit negative) "branding" of Anarchism as a marketing point. Much as it's possible to see thousands of supposedly rebellious teenagers all wearing exactly the same corporate produced clothing at concerts or CD signings (I'm thinking specifically of groups like Marilyn Manson who appear to have vast swathes of merchandise, and whose products can be bought in exactly the same places, from the same companies, as Britney Spears or Eminem or whoever else), the content of a product/artwork doesn't necessarily secure it's separation from the methods of production and sale used for its dissemination.

Similarly, my only aural experience of Chumbawumba was of their "I get knocked down, but I get up again" song in the mid-'90s, when I was living in Clacton-On-Sea in Essex. At that time, I'd just started going to nightclubs underage, and I my only memory of that song is as an irritating summer one hit wonder with an annoying associated dance, no different from La Macarena or for that matter Aga Doo by Black Lace. I had no idea of it's supposed political content, and nor for that matter did any of the other attendees of the night club who'd start lurching up and down when it came on. That music was being presented in exactly the same way as all the other shite that was played at the club, and was responded to the same way, it was also mass produced on CD, possibly available from Woolworth's (responsible for something like 40% of chart-recorded sales) etc. etc. The production and consumption of something are much more important than any message supposedly attached to it. There are obviously many more, possibly better examples.

This goes for political music or art or anything else you care to mention. The process of its production is much more important than what it says or doesn't say.

On the same point I recently had a book recommended to me:

Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books)

I've not read the book, and all I've seen is excerpts in my friend's book - "minute particulars - Meanings in music-making in the wake of hierarchial realignments and other essays" (Eddie Prévost), who recommended it to me before his was published a couple of weeks ago.

So I can't really comment on it, but here's an extract from a review I just found of the book (don't like reading reviews before I read things very much, so this is culled almost at random, but it seems pretty intersting)

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/CIAcultCW.html

Last thing before I go out. Here's a website which appears to be set up entirely to sell Che Guevara and related merchandise - T-Shirts, Mugs, Mouse-Mats etc. Does the (albeit simplistic and fairly dubious) political content of those products have any bearing on the fact that all that site does is make money out of people's aspirations to rebellious lifestyle? (including collecting over £1000 (257 x £4) from contributors to "an art work to be displayed internationally as part of an [artists against the war/] campaign. " see the news section for that.)

http://www.fidelche.com/index.php

I think as soon as art becomes explicitly "anarchist" in the sense of the content having clear/oblique anarchist references, as opposed to the production/consumption of the art working within implicitly anarchist methods of operation, it's likely to lose any of the impact it could potentially have. Explicitly political lyrics or imagery tend to simplify most arguments or sentiments, no matter how genuine, to a point where they're likely to be meaningless. Look at Madonna's anti-war single - the presentation/music was little different than any of the rest of the crap she produces, merely some of the images and language were modified. Any anti-capitalist or anti-pop or anti-war art forms are immediately defined only negatively against perceived threats/enemies, a positive attempt to reinforce the values that those enemies are threatening rarely comes into it, and if it does, it's often a reactionary move towards musical forms (folk for example) which seem to represent some kind of golden age.

Tried to find an EMI issue with A Las Barricadas, but couldn't. Did however find this guy:

http://www.battiato.it/discografia/anni90/collection_esp.brokenlinkhtm who has a song with that lyric, but it's called "Up Patriots to Arms" so maybe not. Have a feeling that might not be quite the same. On that note though, I wouldn't be surprised if the Nonesuch Explorer Series put out a CD with field recordings of songs by the Spanish Anarchists though.

Not vast amounts of @ t-shirts on the net, but here's some:

http://www.proletarianthreads.com/tshirts/

note the "Revolt" underwear, and chumbawumba cds for sale.

There's one other thing about lyrics. I doubt, if listening to it, I'd be able to tell whether A Las Barricadas was anarchist or not, since I don't speak any Spanish. Similarly with the Guthrie song you mentioned (don't know it), or with something like Mingus' song from the late '50s "Fables of Faubus". The lyrics in songs about specific cases usually necessitate that the listener understands the context of the events they cover, otherwise they very quickly lose relevance. Things like that can be good for preserving accounts of events, but I don't think they necessarily have an inherent resistance to co-option.

Have you seen "Bob Roberts"? - it's a film from the late '80s/early '90s where a republican senate candidate does message-reversed country versions of Bob Dylan songs as the main focus of his campaign.

Here we go:

To the barricades!

Black storms shake the sky

Black clouds blind us

Although death and pain await us

Against the enemy we must go

The most precious good

is freedom

And we have to defend it

With courage and faith

Raise the revolutionary flag

Moving us forward with unstoppable triumph

Working people march onwards to the battle

We have to smash the reaction

To the Barricades

To the Barricades

For the triumph

of the Confederation

I said:

Mate, I don't want you to spend another 3 months trawling obscure music websites, but this song just doesn't make the grade. Apart from sounding like a Fast Show sketch, it makes no reference to anarchism, an anarchist organisation, working class self organisation, class war, a stateless society, revolution etc, etc.

I'll carry on defending anarchist art!

Went to the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow on Saturday. Very good stuff - but no mention of any link to anarchism. I thought he was pretty much a straight Socialist?