THE ARTS IN OUR TIME

THE ARTS IN OUR TIME

THE ARTS IN OUR TIME

A WORKING DEFINITION

The Arts in our time are nothing but a distraction - encouraged in order to prevent us understanding the shape of our reality and lives. They survive as part of the 'media' whose aim is to distract us from some essential facts - e.g. the polarisation of annihilative power; the permanent arms economy; the fact that peace is synonymous with the brink of war; that half can treat as waste (planned obsolescence) what could be nourishment for the other - starving - half. Also, that in the technologically advanced half we have become enslaved by a notion of rationality to the extent that we can no longer perceive the totally irrational framework within which this so-called rationality operates - (It is better that 500 men be killed in Vietnam rather than 1000. Today one can read in the papers of a French couple who committed suicide because they where unable to understand the complexities of taxation. Truly, our control over our lives becomes increasingly diminished.)

Within our society freedom exists only among styles - there is rarely a negative alternative offered. Now is the time to demand such alternatives - in negation lies our greatest possible hope. Abstract landscapes, objects, minimalism, 'theatre' of revolt, aleatorism, indeterminism etc. are merely styles -gimmicks to help the artist sell himself.

It is time now for the Great Refusal; to demand the end of repression exercised by the provision of the 'goods'; to reclaim life from the media; to insist on freedom as an absolute and negative ' 'Freedom from politics, freedom from economics, freedom from the mass persuaders' (H. Marcuse). Then perhaps art may re-enter life -as play, as celebration, as critique - but not this apology for life!

March 4 1968

THE GREAT COMMUNICATIONS BREAKDOWN

Possible prelude to the Incarnation of Ecstasy

Those who seem to communicate have nothing to say.

Those who are unable to communicate have the world to say, but lack as yet the means of appropriating it.

Those who seem to communicate have nothing to say, with the exception of those laying bare the falseness of this world, and they are marked men. The only time passion enters the lives of those who seem to communicate is in reacting against such truth, then their repression becomes manifest.

Those who are unable to communicate now, will appropriate the world with passion, a passion born of truth, their repression will have been broken.

The breakdown in communications arises from the fact that there is no commune, there is only isolation, separation; a separation power must continually reinforce if it is to maintain itself, i.e. maintain itself at the top, kicking our mouths shut. The problem is not new; it is built into any hierarchical society.

Where there is no communication there is no effective opposition to power. A genuine communication now arises in moments of opposition, from rebellion to revolution. In moments of transgression the present suddenly becomes real. (For individuals there may be the unuttered communications of love, not a love worn bare by repetition), it is communication, but it is not opposition, though the poetry of opposition is there: 'When a love relationship is at its height no room is left for any interest in the surrounding world' Freud.). In moments of opposition, of transgression, a single word can sing throughout our being, revealing its true meaning. Lautreamont's dictum - Poetry must be made by all - reveals another facet it is made by the total person. Between re-united persons there is genuine communication, and as such, the 'problem' disappears. As Marx said a revolutionary society draws its poetry from the future, there can be no revolutionary society that is not integrally poetic.

What passes as communication now is patently absurd, even the Dictionaries define communication as intercourse between persons. Can anyone still accept that communication exists in the work-place, in education, in the mass media, the underground press, i.e. in modes that are essentially one-way? When the modes extend as far as possible temporally and spatially there is no room or time left in which to reply; our numbness is the only response power wants. From our work, wherever, whatever that may be, we are expected to move to our allotted place in the leisure scene - an armchair before the TV, a seat in the stalls, a chair in the precincts of further education. We are administered unto ceaselessly, there is no time to query the nature of the operation, and surplus energy will be sapped by boredom. What is generally termed communication; we would rather call orders to remain passive.

In the realm of ideology, from religion to ecology, economics to high art -i.e. all partial critiques - communication must in principle fail, it will remain fragmentary. One has only to look at the situation among 'experts' e.g. among a group of electro-therapeutic freaked out psychiatrists, here, anywhere, as the specialization increases, the numbers who can exchange information even in a limited field decreases. The law moves inexorably to the one-man authority, isolated his thought reaches the brick wall of established values. Lack of dialectic perpetuates the status quo. Realisation of this kind of situation forced even the specialists themselves to seek an inter-disciplinary discipline - Cybernetics, Communication Theory - this appeared to be the answer. (No matter that it was another specialisation). Communication could be rendered abstract and thus handled. All that was needed was a framework: Sender - message - receiver - feedback - etc; diagrams with boxes and arrows. Never did the new specialists worry about what might be communicated. As long as a plan could be established the % of shit could be stepped up arbitrarily. (The idea seems to have died of course.)

Apart from certain moments - those in which we experience liberation - what we seem to communicate seems almost invariably to belong to the past or the future. What is required (by power) is that we ignore the present, a present whose general emptiness would appall us. In reality the emptiness is merely multiplied in the past and future. But it is clear that in any true society memory would be of no account, the future too becomes irrelevant - only the present can matter. Now it is the present of repression, the revolutionary possibility is defined by the present of liberation. 'Wewant everything and we want it now'.

Yet that there is communication now is undeniable. This is the communication of the real, shaped by our true existence. It is marked by anguish, bitterness and raw acerbity, also by the irreducible hope to have done once and for all with 'a world that scandalises us'. Its task is hardly easy, fighting an entrenched ideology, one that slanders it, refuses to acknowledge its existence, suppresses it or pathetically tries to reintegrate it. Soon however that dominant ideology will have no option but to recognise the forces trampling at its door - and then it will be too late. From its slanders, stupidity etc. (Could anyone believe Nixon's speech when he said the aims of American rebel youth were his own?) - a new polarization is emerging. The opposition is fragmented as yet, inevitably in any hierarchically defined society, where the introjections of false values is far from easily overcome by the individual remorselessly conditioned to accept the world as he finds it. In an acceptance culture nothing can be accepted.

If the demand is everything and now, who besides the revolutionaries demand it? Unconsciously anyone who is oppressed. There are also children, those free still from the domination of the reality principle, those whose lives are defined by the present. We can see them communicating effortlessly, inventing the present in their play. In adulthood, play is defined again and again by rules from the past. In fact the game is almost beaten out of us in adolescence, we are forced to submit to rules we have had no hand in forming, rules codified by law, habit and passivity, rules that require we leave our desires back in that golden age of childhood. (There is of course no question of minimising the brutality to which children are subjected, but one has to admit that desires could still rise to the surface and lead to action, and that such freedom had an other-worldly beauty, one that we recognise nostalgically.). But out of childhood we are more systematically subjugated - rendered other. In adolescence however that otherness - (be like others, your elders and betters) - is resisted. The language of adolescence tries to resist that of power - i.e. parental authority and all substitute parents. The situation promotes that all too familiar. 'You talk to her, I can't', that characterises the conflict of the forces of order and individual revolt. It is a revolt born of anguish, an incommunicable feeling, the other side of the coin of love it needs so urgently. Yet even when this is found, it is hemmed in by the repressive agencies of social mores. And what is the fate of love? It is a universe of truth we construct in an untrue world, it is a small model, that it too becomes untrue is accountable to the fact that it is battered .to death in the banality of an everyday life where falsehood is the norm.

Love of other things? Love of Rock, the great rallying force of youth culture? Alienation moves into new areas. Rock may seem to unite the individual with himself, but it does so by isolating him from the world, it becomes an escape. Early rock 'n' rollers appearances were greeted by riots! (some still are) - for the music creates an energy, demands participation, but it actually produces quasi-participation, expressed in the frustration of the riots. No one would deny that it is big business; a whole new teenage culture has been built around youth's aspirations, aspirations produced by the machine itself. Magazines from the 'underground' cater to the new interest; they are superseded as one grows out of 'that phase' by a new set: Rolling Stone or IT are replaced by Hi-Fi News or New Society. The plethora of administered culture is necessary, we might be bored by New Society or whatever, but there is always the carrot of next week's issue or tomorrow's viewing. Distanciation via the media is the rule; distanciation without the media is taboo.

Those singled out (isolated) for higher education are likely to find their course dead. But how else can it be in this society, do they think the University or College is independent? Arguments about investments in Rhodesia, or research for Dow are of small magnitude compared to the University or College function as a bastion of established values. No denial from any Vice-Chancellor can change that; such denial is again one-way communication, and as such has no truth value. Certainly the 'expansion of knowledge' must go on, research continue, no one denies that in some fields this is worthwhile. But the general nature of what is taught can only be along prescribed lines, those decreed by a dominant ideology in order to streamline and safeguard its position. What kind of dialogue can there be with someone whose survival depends on a static order of things 'Take your notes and regurgitate them, I will recognise them as mine (or rather whoever we take as authority), and you can receive your reward.' Those in Modern Philosophy, Fine Art, or Fuel Systems who might attempt a total critique of that discipline are not likely to remain unfingered, they are more likely to be shown the door; in Institutes of Higher Learning - dialectics is banned.

Even those who try to speak a non-dialectical truth as they see it, regarding the situation they are in, is generally impossible in terms of dialogue. At a student meeting people do so, but a similar meeting at which the Staff is present will effectively shut their mouths. Is there any clearer indication of the repressive nature of power. Yet to talk of 'power' is still to invite the naive response 'It's all in your head'.

Is the violence of the factory floor, or that inflicted on an office boy or ward orderly in their heads? To say nothing of the inhabitants of the, under-developed countries. But that violence should breed counter-violence should surprise nobody, not even those in power. Power in fact has its moments of difficulty - strikes, occupations etc. - and in all cases these crises of authority mark a breakdown in communications. 'Talks broke down today the strike continues' is definition and general pattern. The old words, the veils drawn over the truth, become threadbare; their absurdity becomes obvious as they are seen to reflect a decaying (diseased and also virulent) order. But most such moments can be saved, pulled back into the dominant 'order of things (it is not the order of persons that characterises this world). A key word is produced - coined might be a more apposite term - e.g. 'Participation'. But once this is sought in reality, its poverty as a word becomes obvious, for it is merely a word. Maybe the poverty of the situation is not immediately apparent, but this will surely become evident when it is understood in two different ways: 1) by power; 2) by those who bought it (they were bought). But in the interregnum, power will of course move to preserve itself, will try to perfect it's powers of reification, moving into new areas, establishing false communication about false needs, trying to remould our passivity. While the US youth movement revealed the limits of consumer culture, blocking one of the escape routes of power, revolution itself soon revealed that it could become another commodity, for how long one wonders?

At the back of the struggle in the factory or lecture room lurks the question of representation, foundation stone of our so-called democratic*system. (* Concise Oxford Dictionary: 'Government by the people, direct or representative' .What nice ambiguity, one reading for power, another for the masses, one realised, the other awaiting its day.) The system is built around the notion, it presupposes that someone else can express our wishes, can communicate for us. What shit. What Union Official already removed from the workers' everyday routine can know anything of the reality they face, let alone the desires they hold. Can my local M.P. act on my behalf? Even if I believed in Parliamentary democracy, what do I do if his beliefs belong on an opposite wing? (They always will be). The notion is clearly absurd, only the basic ambiguity, the lack of movement can maintain the edifice. The one-Party State is a world-wide phenomenon. There can be no feedback to the people, because there is no (free) input from the people; there is only the detached mouthpiece of the people of the people issuing instructions to the people, instructions devised by power.

On a cultural front we are asked to consider the universal truths of art, a message communicated from the artist to me. Has he not encoded a message for me to decipher? Without exaggeration we can say that 95% of the messages we might decode, are not worth the bother, they are essentially contemplative and elite-oriented. Their message reflects the dominant ideology, be it that of the Romanesque, that of Socialist-Realism with its picture of the monumental State, or the free form or nihilist reduction, served up in the liberal version of the State. The question is quite simple, what kind of art can one expect in a repressive State? When art can no longer preserve the 'promesse de bonheur', or function as critique, then it is no longer fit for human consumption and can be discarded (this should have happened years ago). The artist who accepts the world as he finds it (opting out does just that) seems to automatically forfeit his potentiality of imaging that promesse, he precludes the possibility of real communication. In opting out because he finds society unable to accept him, or finds society unacceptable - i.e. regards it as bankrupt, he ignores the fact that the cultural is likewise bankrupt, and to the same degree. That society has to be changed at its root values. Dada intuitively realised this, from the destruction of the language of art and language itself it hoped to move to the destruction of the old world. Aragon wrote the real demands of the age: 'No more artists, no more authors, musicians, sculptors, religions, republicans, royalists, imperialists, anarchists, socialists, bolsheviks, politicians, proletariat, democrats, bourgeois, aristocrats, army, police, nations. Of these follies we want nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.'

Into such a void could only be sucked a new form of life. The limitations of Dada could only create a void, into which they themselves were sucked, wearing full artistic regalia - with a few noteworthy exceptions, those who don't figure in the history books. Still one shouldn't minimise what they tried, nor the passion with which they tried. Their negation of a world of accepted values was quite different from the resigned nihilism of today's avant-garde with their meaningless gestures. That they are meaningless means they can happily be taken up by the media machinery, totally devoid of any message they can be pumped out with the rest of the messages that are basically false - false in that they conceal the real potentialities of this world. Unable to communicate the artist communicates with himself, whispers his defeat to his own ears. But he is still spectacularising something: earth, snow, a photograph, you name it he can remove it from its context call it art, or whatever he wants. No one expects a stone to speak to us (or paint) - communication is denied. The media happily pushes this year's new thing - earth, lyric abstraction or whatever. It is neatly labelled, handily made compact for instant assimilation - this void. 'This is a new life style. Welcome to the void. Tune in and drop out of the game of living, it isn't worth it. Accept death now, learn to live with it. We can produce it for you. You just have to listen to us. We can keep you on the cultural circuit, we'll keep you informed'. And they will, about fuck-all. One has just to look at our cultural history; there it lays, acres of frozen moments, layer upon layer in galleries, libraries and bookshops. (It is precisely the form that freezes it), the moment of the past frozen solid, and trying to freeze us with it. We are expected to accept this past, because now there is nothing. Freud was right in talking of the terrible price we pay for culture, wrong in thinking we had to pay it.

A note on lies

(our lies, not those of power): -

There are two basic kinds of lie: 1) that to cover up the poverty of our lives, 2) that which defies authority.

1) Goes under the name of exaggeration, romanticising, daydreaming. In itself it betrays the lie of the world as it is - as a construct of unfilled and thwarted possibilities. In this world lies of this kind are a natural response.

2) Is the simple lie that cheats power - e.g. No, I did not pinch daddy's wallet / screw the bosses wife / (arrive three hours late for work etc.. Neither form of lie will be necessary in any true society the first would be transformed into a practical critique; the second situation need no longer require that it be shielded in this way.

Conclusion

Power breeds despair; despair breeds an alternative power, this alternative power must unite our individual despairs, unless we are to accept an ultimate reification; one that puts not only the words of the existing order into our mouths, but will attempt to reify actual desires. Such reification is attempted now, but is also resisted now. However the reification of language - i.e. group-oriented or class-structured - naturally leads to a situation whereby allies do not recognise each other. Only a lack of dialectic on the part of 99% of left-wing groups can lead to there being 99 sects, only a lack of dialectic can lead to the continual introjection into their own, structure of the values and norms they supposedly oppose.

However there is no doubt our allies are everywhere, those rendered inarticulate, isolated but as yet not aware of WHY - these people are the potential force of revolution. Revolution is an act of transgression, transgression is the poetry of this world, it establishes communication of the individual with himself and en masse. Communication is the poetry of the individual reunited with himself, the poetry of lovers no longer isolated in their two-ness, the poetry of a world become sane and whole. It is hardly too much to ask. It is certainly enough to fight for.

Bash Street Kids.

Newcastle on Tyne (Late 1960s)

Introduction

The title of this exhibition is taken from Lautreamont and Marx respectively; it indicates the basic themes and links radical art and revolutionary politics. With this union the traditional notion of art often seems to disappear, and the concept of politics take on an added dimension. The exhibition itself illustrates the theme visually, the catalogue texts supplement this. The message is sometimes obvious, sometimes subliminal.

One of the recorded slogans of the May Revolution in France last year read: "1936 - Derniere couche de peintuire". In seizing the means of communication as best as it could - and this it did most successfully, millions were aware of the wall slogans - the revolutionaries made it clear by the very nature of the slogans that this was a new type of revolutionary situation. Lenin's definition ''Revolution is the Festival of the Oppressed' was near to realization. Poetry had come to the streets again. The Commune reborn, not in the form but in the spirit of 1871 when similar creative force had appeared. In Russia, when the Revolution was young, poetry had manifested itself there - on the streets. When, following the suppression of the May events, one could read journalists of the bourgeois press lamenting the disappearance of 'a poetic quality of life'; then one can be doubly sure that poetry had passed from form to matter.

This exhibition is concerned with certain themes related to that slogan ' 1936. ..' For many 'primitive' societies painting, poetry etc. have no such life-span, as forms they had never in effect existed. The fantastic poetry of the Naven for example is part of a natural environment, everyone's environment. At the time when one might have witnessed the Naven ceremonies one might also have heard individuals in Russia declaring that art had outlived its usefulness -"the collective art of the future is collective life". In France Dada had attempted to assassinate culture. Surrealism following in the wake had proposed a new non-repressive reality principle, one accessible to all ''Surrealism is within the compass of every subconscious'. These things have a similar and essential core - the non-hierarchical - classless society. On the Iatmul people Gregory Bateson writes: 'In this community there are no steady and dignified chiefs 'indeed no formulated chieftainship at all -but instead there is a continuing emphasis on self-assertion'. ('L'anarchie c'est je' - slogan, Paris, May 1968). Such a factor is not one usually explored by art historians for a variety of reasons. It is however a guiding principle of this exhibition. But the difficulty of 'exhibiting' such a factor is obvious. It could be done better in book form. What has been attempted is to document the reactions of artists to such a revolutionary state. The variety of exhibits and their contradictions might point to the fact that it need not be the monolithic featureless block we might deduce it to be from self-styled 'Western' versions, or their projection by one-man's imagination - i.e. Utopian novels etc. So-called classless societies are obviously not that for a variety of reasons: their bureaucratic organization - higher functionaries must receive higher salaries than lower ones: 'Repressive men carry their repression into the new society' (Marcuse) i.e. the introjection of bourgeois values into the new state merely perpetuates some aspects of the bourgeois state. The break with such ideology - with the reality principle itself - can perhaps only be effected by imagination. Phantasy is that part of the consciousness which has retained its independence from the reality principle. Hence the new rationality of last May's rallying cry ' 'L'imagination au pouvoir'. The political and economic revolutions that have been accomplished are part-revolutions: they are reforms. Admirable reforms perhaps. Reforms one can still hope and work for in certain areas - the real exploited labour areas in the West - the Third World. But such reforms, in the West, leave untouched the problems of our everyday penury (lack of control over decisions which vitally affect us, increasing emphasis on non-participation from the work place to leisure time, the near-impossibility of being able even to opt out or a society that seems antagonistic to one).

One of the criticisms inherent in the exhibition is directed against the idea of imagination enslaved. Artistic imagination, I believe, needs to be set free from the confining notion of form - sculpture, painting, happening etc. - in order to intervene directly in our everyday lives. Freed of form it might be revealed as a common property to all men. Such freedom is vital to the process of revolution and to a post-revolutionary situation (new society).

The attack on art as such is long standing and has come from various quarters. A fairly crude, behaviourist position1 characterized the writings of some of the Russian men of the 1860's - e.g. Pisarev. He asked himself the blunt, tactless but still relevant question: 'It (culture) is all very beautiful but can it possibly be true, that is, does it fit the condition of man?' ...It is, he said 'a parasitical plant which feeds continually on the sap of human toil'. The disappearance of culture in Pisarev's view, was to be succeeded by the emergence of a 'non-cultural' scientific culture, whose ideal was neither invented nor abstracted but found and left where it alone could be represented - in actual and living phenomena.2 ) This is not a far-call from the constructivist thesis of the 1920's. The idea was also central to early surrealism: 'Admit that literature and painting are the saddest paths leading anywhere' (Breton). Marcuse, under the guiding light of Freud but denying Freud's pessimism on the essential factor that the reality principle cannot be changed, has thrown another 1ight on the subject: 'The aesthetic quality of enjoyment, even entertainment, has been inseparable from the essence of art, no matter how tragic, how uncompromising the work of art is. Aristotle's proposition on the cathartic effect of art epitomizes the dual function of art: both to oppose and to reconcile: both to indict and acquit; both to recall the repressed and repress it again ' 'purified'. People can elevate themselves with the classics: they read and see and hear their own archetypes rebel, triumph, give up or perish. And since all this is aesthetically formed, they can enjoy it - and forget it'. 3 )

Both surrealists and constructivists had only scorn for bourgeois capitalism and its achievements. The demand for change was seen, as now, to be of necessity - total. Art comes under attack as part of the system. Its avant-gardism is seen as mere packaging of an outworn commodity. It functions too readily as part of the media, part of the 'spectacle' that serves as a substitute for our own lives. It is a distraction encouraged, it often appears, to prevent us questioning the system; keeping up with the schisms of minimalism or whatever can be a fulltime occupation. If it is part of the system, then its dangers can be compared in effect, if not magnitude, to TV's effects in the last 2 decades which will certainly have played an enormous role in lowering the consciousness of the working class. A class whose importance to the revolution is fundamental. If Marcuse is right, as I believe he is, in his analysis of culture - he may justly be criticized for ignoring the working class and positing too much hope in the intelligentsia. What of course is needed is a fusion of the two, and this is the extraordinarily difficult task at this juncture. That the need was recognized by surrealists and constructivists and that they were unable to move from analysis to real action at least leaves us with some guide. In remaining faithful to an ideal the surrealist group aborted its real chances of moving into the area of actuality. The constructivists, after the Revolution, working unknowingly within a framework of falsehood could act; and thus make propaganda for a machine that clearly betrayed the ideals of 1917. However, what is clear is that Mayakovsky, Vertov or Tatlin could on occasion touch the pulse and soul of the Russian worker, they used a language that communicated ' Mayakovsky's agit-poems, Tatlin's Tower, Vertov's 'Kino-eye' films. They were literally able to function in the factory and the street, and not in producing anything remotely escapist. Yet, due to what in retrospect we may call a false-consciousness; they were often expressing a reactionary party-line, the line of the Five-Year Plans, the call to slave harder etc. Work became a fetish that was insufficiently challenged. Lissitzky though would anticipate surrealism when writing that 'communism will have to be left behind because suprematism -which embraces the totality of life's phenomena - will attract everyone away from the domination of work'.' Five years later the cover of 'La Revolution Surrealiste' called forth 'And War on Work'. 'Never Work' was one of the most frequently written slogans last May. The whole work ethic is one of the principal props of capitalism - whether it be in the Russian State or Western versions. It is only beyond the performance principle and its basis on work that a non-repressive reality principle can be envisaged. In fairness to constructivism it might be argued that in its early, heroic, Utopian phase, while undoubtedly extolling labour it also envisaged a technology that would have been advanced enough to lead to a considerable labour reduction. (The kind of technology people such as Buckminster Fuller predict will free us from the domination of work). While in its later phase - that of the factograph -a film such as 'Man with a Movie Camera' is also a hymn to leisure activities. One might too make the point that despite Gastev and the Americanisation fervour, despite the man = machine equation that Meyerhold seems to have celebrated, there was in the latter's work, and in the theatre of his pupil Eisenstein, a counter-force clearly anti-mechanolatric - that force came from the circus, it represented the play element. It was clearly evident in Meyerhold's early productions in collaboration with the constructivists - Popova and Stepanova, and more than evident in Eisenstein's work at Proletcult, including 'Strike'. The circus not only counteracted the spectre of mechanical man, it also related directly to the culture of the Russian masses Americanisation and clowning produced as lunatic a poetry as did the artist-engineer. The play instinct was far from being dominated by the work-instinct. Here, one might quote Buckminster Fuller:

Much the most exciting part about technology is not the technology or automation at all, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday relations of what we term the naivete and idealism of the child'. It is an interesting fact that Fuller not only extends constructivism, but relates all to the surrealist quest: 'Surrealism relives in exaltation the best moments of childhood'. However, Fuller seems to avoid the question: his predicted state of affairs is hardly likely to come about under the present social structure which moves rather to the opposite pole -reduction of human potential to a new nadir. Even a move from alienated labour to alienated leisure (long predicted, still not in sight) is hardly a stupendous advance. I find it impossible to believe that there is going to be the slightest surrender of power and its instrumentation. Fuller seems unduly idealistic. In 1927 Naville would criticize the surrealists for their idealism; and consequently break with them. His criticism was just. So though was Breton's reply ' the economic and political revolution was revolution half-formed (Revolution by day, but not by night). Both sides were right, and no common ground seemed really evident.

If constructivism was also romantic and idealist in much of its oeuvre, it did to some degree succeed in changing the world. While the surrealists were asking 'What should one do with Notre Dame?' Answer: 'Replace the towers by a glass cruet, one bottle filled with blood, the other with sperm. The building will become a sexual school for virgins' someone in Russia, following in the wake of constructivism had changed his church into a tank. The Revolution in architecture, design and typography had however to succumb to a new totalitarianism. The fact that the constructivists built so little should not, I feel, cause us to neglect the idea of changing the physical environment (at an Architectural conference in Berlin about 2 years ago - students hung banners saying ''Stop Building' and 'All Buildings are beautiful'). The constructivist projects are more than paper dreams, simply looking at the dreariness and monotony of twentieth century towns then turning to Melnikov, Leonidev etc. shows that we have yet to learn some vital lessons. The idea that we take to the air in Tatlin's ornithopter becomes less and less a fantasy, more and more a necessity.

The fact is that following its Utopian phase constructivism returned to the here and now; the material to be used was the fact, the fact as photo, as reportage etc. However, 'art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it'. Hence, despite their denials of art they still shaped their reactions and records in a dynamic form. Futurism lived on, even in those forms Lef listed as being those in which it moved ' 'slogans, leaflets, montages, popular songs, signs, cinema hoardings....film documentaries, marches for processions, photographs. ..' Among the film documentaries are Vertov's 'Kino-eye' series and 'Man with a Movie Camera'. In this film Vertov seems to be saying 'This is everyday life in the new Socialist (Soviets plus electrification) State that is to come into being'. It is everyday life of the time, but transformed, energized by the Proun force which Lissitzky had left for others to harness. This is the perceptual dynamic of a Revolutionary Society. 'Man with a Movie Camera" is Utopian, but made with the elements of the present; as such it is also critique, critique of an actual monolithic State. The other side of the coin was then being developed in Paris. There, Breton, Aragon and others were aimlessly wandering the streets in search of 'objective chance' - those fabulous coincidences that appear to bring ones subconscious into harmony with the subconscious of a city. Breton's account of such events ''Nadja' - is a surrealist masterpiece, and much closer to that constructivist masterpiece 'Man with a Movie Camera.' than we are usually given to think. The streets and buildings in 'L' Age d'Or' are also subject o the will of a dynamic that we impose on them, in this case its source is

"LOVE. ..LOVE. ..LOVE...LOVE"

But this too is an avant garde film, one shown to 'special' audiences, rather than the oppressed whom it urged 'to satisfy their hunger for destruction' and 'abolish a society made up of different classes'.

Paradox! The artistic elements of last May's events were obvious: quotations from Breton were among the most frequently used wall-slogans. But the artistic revolution was seen as finished (1936 to be exact), the limitations of surrealism had been recognized: the monotony of the automatic text and the dream recital given as literature4 , the recuperable quality of its art works, reduced so often to a new form of stocks and shares. Breton's idea of the object whose construction is outside all aesthetic consideration and hence within everyone's creative scope (it seems to me the best pieces were made by the poets or their wives) may remain true, but such objects are hardly likely to discredit the world of appearances, One might equally expect this from the plethora of worthless objects already in the stores; but these are part of the system, part of the 'creation of ever more parasitic and unproductive labour', part of the vicious consumer-consumed circle. Perhaps though the surrealist object may be related to such things as Rodchenko's mobiles? Very different formally and functionally, their similarity is one of heresy. Produced by Marxists and, to varying degrees, conceived within a socio-economic framework, they relate to productivity in a highly ambiguous way. And, since their authors would have denied that they were simply 'art' one might be justified in making comparisons and criticisms outside the scope of art. However, we treat them as works of art, to me some of the most interesting produced in this century. But for many they belong to the past, there is no path continuing from them, they are a half-way house; now the action is seen as outside.

The ideal remains - poetry must be practised. And indeed it was (though not by all), from the Barres Trial to the events of 'Nadja'; in Russia 8000 people took part in the re-enactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace; in 1927 there were 7000 Blue Blouse groups in the factories, clubs etc. I have already spoken of the poetry of the barricades. Revolution is Poetry. There is poetry in all those acts which break the system of organization. 'The way to possibility lies through the road marked no thoroughfare'. ('Trespassers will be liberated'). In the move property becomes damaged; the inhabitants of Paris find their walls daubed with slogans; the press becomes paranoiac - they forget the violence which calls forth this violence - the dead in Vietnam, Bolivia etc; the violence of the factory floor, the violence of poverty. But as Monnerot wrote 'there is nothing about which the indispensable, ignoble, sacramental question 'who does it belong to' cannot be asked'. This is a civilization which seems to indict itself. If I quote the Iatmul or the Senoi then this is because some aspects of their culture seem admirable. Not of course the brutality to which they are exposed by their environment. It is not necessarily a question of regression back from the affluent society (though freedom from certain commodities would be an enrichment). Liberation depends on progress, rational progress, not progress measured in terms of profit. Technology can be an instrument of liberation, but not a technology creating and satisfying false needs; a liberatory technology is one freed from present restrictions, under changed ownership - i.e. common ownership. Such will surely depend on a changed consciousness, our present consciousness having as built-in norms - competitiveness, acquisitiveness. That it can be otherwise does seem proven in the examples of some 'primitive' societies.

The problem of effecting the 'small' change of consciousness that could lead to a revolutionary proletariat (simple realization that they are being swindled) is difficult enough, so that to suggest that the goal is existence under a non-repressive reality principle may seem absurdly Utopian. But, the conditions for both changes do at least exist, and have on occasion been realized. The new proletariat is anyone who desires to change this world. Not only the exploited classes, but anyone who responds to the promptings of our consciousness by the artists, poets and doers who have broken the organization of appearances. Be it Malevich on his death-bed, triumphing over totalitarianism with a pure poetry; Breton lecturing in Haiti and causing a Revolution; those unknown Paris communards demolishing Thier's house in 1871, or painting the magnificent slogan in the Sorbonne in 1968: 'I take my desires for reality, for I believe in the reality of my desires' etc. etc. - there is no hierarchy. Our instincts may be triggered, we must then act. How to act is one's own problem. This exhibition has documented some of the ways, ways taken by a very specific group of people. That one can only document the history of an elite, history being mainly the history of an elite, is no doubt regrettable. But in the present context ('art outside the frame' within a museum) to document that other history would probably be a more tabooed undertaking than this, where the risks of disarmament and containment are certainly present.

Ronald Hunt

• 1Nevertheless one incorporated in the wider critiques of Breton and Marcuse.
• 2Eugene Lampert: Sons against fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution: Oxford 1965.
• 3H. Marcuse: Eros and Civilization Boston 1955.
• 4In this respect the Senoi in Malaya were the real surrealists, There, dream interpretation was practised daily, in families and groups. Once such interpretation action was based they had known no violence for a very long time.

(What has been put down here must not become an inspiration for a new cult of written hate which will serve as a final excuse not to act)

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Nobody today can claim any longer that this is the golden age of art unless they are exceedingly short-sighted and their minds have capsised. The art critic, Nigel Gosling, in a recent newspaper review on painting and sculpture headed: 'Among The Doldrums' says; 'No committed art lover could survey the present London art scene without disquiet. Over the past year the atmosphere has changed dramatically for the worse. Some of the most adventurous galleries are either defunct or declining (Signals, Fraser, Indica, Hamilton)'. According to Gosling, there are many reasons for this - economic ones among them - and, hopefully concludes, that this decline will only be short-lived. We hope in the following talk to show that such a decline among the arts is inevitable and any hope or belief in the resurrection of the arts is not only stupid but naive. In particular, we will be concentrating on intermingling and necessarily over-simplifying four movements: Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Constructivism, all of which attempted a definitive break with conventional methods of expression.

These movements are in the process of a fresh reinvestigation but this reinvestigation has been carried out badly. By now everybody must be aware of the increasing number of publications devoted to Dada, Surrealism, Futurism and Constructivism. Inevitably, the centre has been taken by academics who completely miss the point. Some like Christopher Middleton, with his researches on Dada, has done some good work but because it is only scholastic, no attempt is made to relate it to the present situation. This approach merely subverts the essence of Dada but in a bad way. It thus becomes a bookish term for an academic who survives through subsisting on art scholarships ' which any Dadaist worth his salt would have laughed at.

However, the concentration on one past period within the 20th century, has produced another, stranger contemporary type of academic. Unlike the Middleton's and their ilk, this type of person is able to emotionally comprehend the active, involved nature of Dada and Surrealism etc but because of a narrowed down perspective, is unable to escape from his own niche. This type of person is better for having managed to sweep away much of the garbage which has accrued around these movements.

Two can serve as examples and both are American. In Chicago, Franklin Rosemont of Rebel Worker has, more or less, grasped the original essence of Surrealism. His was trhe first of the radical groupings now springing up in America and the first to connect Surrealism with an insurrectionary act (vandalism/destruction etc) against this society. This could mean ( as the New York group Black Mask would accept) that Black Power = Surrealism. Recently, Rebel Worker pamphleted the opening of a Picasso exhibition in Chicago. The flyer rightly attacked Picasso for his failure to even understand Cubism; his recent friendship with passe poets and painters ( the senile Eluard) and even worse, his friendship with General Franco, the fascist caudillo. The conclusion of Rebel Worker on Picasso's work was 'Burn Baby Burn'. Now this sounds fine but its also worth pointing out that Rosemont has so steeped himself in Surrealism that he sounds like an aping, latter-day Andre Breton. The Picasso flyer is couched in the same language as; Have You Ever Slapped A Corpse, the vitriolic manifesto published by the Surrealists on the death of Anatole France. Furthermore, Rosemont's Rebel Worker cannot break away from the fiery polemical Surrealist style, nor from decorating the paper with the occasional Surrealist artefact. This inevitably comes across as hollow in a situation which is now different and demands a new approach with a new language.

In New York, Henry Flynt, a Communist Party member, has really attempted a breakthrough and grasped what Constructivism really stood for in Russia after 1917and in contrast to the general conclusion now pushed, that sculptors like Gabo and Pevsner are Constructivists. Flynt recognises that as vital mediums; film, street popular music and applied design have made 'high' art ' painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, classical music etc, reactionary activities, doing more harm than good. However, because Flynt's limits his analysis to a discussion of mediums and projects and no matter how perceptive, lacks real vitality. There is no discussion of the revolutionary life which some Surrealists and Dadaists tried to live - a life lived so directly that it necessarily tends towards precluding any type of representation. Perhaps the best of it we really don't know anything about.

Now, with new revolutionary rumblings throughout the world, the need to propose a new radical critique affecting the very foundations of our lives has become essential. We must recognise that a revolutionary experimental reality outstrips the most radical proposals. The key to this is in the past 50 years and lies as much in the failure of Bolshevism as Dada.

But first of all, why is it that commentators/writers etc split these movements up and never attempt to understand them in some kind of togetherness? After all, weren't these movements different manifestations of the same continually developing spirit? Now a new man is coming into being; a man who is not compartmentalised; a man for a new age of revolution when much more than specialisation is required. A total comprehension, encompassing inadequacies as well as excellence must become all. Marinetti thus becomes equally as much a revolutionary as Andre Breton. We need to put all together and not to discuss them separately. We will treat them with the respect, or disrespect, they deserve. We also take upon ourselves the right to abuse the term revolutionary. For us, anyone who acts in order to sabotage this society is a potential revolutionary. In Legitimate Defense, (1926) Andre Breton wrote: 'I say the revolutionary flame burns wherever it chooses and that it is not up to a small group of men in the period of waiting we are now living through, to decree that it can only burn here or there.' Dada is against the expensive life.

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Dada corporation for the exploitation of ideas.

Dada has 391 postures according to the sex of the president.

It transforms itself - affirms-says at the same time the opposite

- without importance-shouts fly casts.

Dada is the chameleon of swift and interested change.

Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is idiotic.

Long Live Dada. Dada is not a literary school

- trend, howls.

(Tristan Tzara 1920 )

In its iconoclasm, Dada like Russian Futurism, developed from small beginnings into one of the most aggressive and marvelous attempts to free life which the 20th century has come up with. It became radical in the true sense of the term. Dada began life as a club for entertainment where poets recited and painters displayed their latest avante garde works. Many still believed in art but with the pace quickly hotting up - even in Zurich - art was occasionally transcended. As Tzara said at the time: 'The new artist does not paint or write, he creates directly', suggesting that desire could no longer be channeled into art forms because in a renewed life, art will not exist because beauty will no longer be contemplated but possessed directly. This means, beauty will no longer be a contemplative mode rendered passive through painting, music, theatre and cinema. It will be lived. It will be possessed.

Let's take a further look at these categories:

Painting and Sculpture

For us today, the consciously artistic Dadaists have no meaning. People like Ball, Arp, Janco, Sophie Tauber, even Picabia and many others. Either through fear or lack of awareness they were merely trying to update older traditions by calling bits of coloured wood, circles, splashes, dots etc art when in fact these things exist all around us without an 'art' interpretation. We may notice them - or not - depending on how we feel. It's doubtful whether the Dadaists saw them as 'art' like that as that appalling stereotyping relating to the so-called arts revival, has really only come about over the last few years and can now place the term 'art' over reactionaries like Lichtenstein, Dick Smith, Tony Caro, Philip King etc. This capitalising on the rather ludicrously and pointless artefacts of original Dada has subsequently produced a narrow re-manifestation evident throughout Absract Expressionism to Pop, Mini, Nart, Funk etc.

Those who look for something different, the unusual, artistic objet d'art, find a mentor in Marcel Duchamp whose early radicalism vis; The Readymades - the bicycle wheel, the bottle rack, the urinal etc ' has collapsed into a slick non-art art of instant museum objects. Oldenburg, Spoerri, and Warhol are typical examples. Duchamp who originally tried to anaesthetize his aesthetic responses obviously didn't go far enough. It was but a short step to: 'gee, isn't everything wonderful' Already in 1915, Duchamp was embarking on that boringly profound invention, The Large Glass ' that polyglot combination of Cubism and Dada. If Duchamp had really grasped the inner trajectory of Dada, wouldn't such a lasting statement have proved impossible? Other, more ethical people quickly passed through this 'no' state and moved on not fucking around waiting for belated attention. He is now acceptable to our glossy magazine culture because there's a side of Duchamp that was smart enough to satisfy a growing 20th century shallowness which could be satisfied by cultivating mystique. His irony of indifference doesn't really present a threat because it can possess a conservative diameter and the quasi-refusal embodied in black humour can find its mass extension in every cynic who plays the system. Duchamp also finds his raison d'etre in the new indifference; in the 'baby, play it cool' syndrome. Now every sub-artistic abomination raised in tissue paper thinks he's the new Duchamp. We don't want anymore of them with their hush puppies, their cheroots and their denim jackets.

These purveyors of trivialised neo-artistic products exist only because a previous social system is still with us ' a social system still linked to the inescapably grand surroundings of the high class dwelling - via its intermediary, the art gallery. Neo-Artists cater for this system by producing non-documentational objects which glorify the bourgeoisie by, (unintentionally perhaps?) mimicking the methods of con men. These anti-art art objects become fake luxuries which survive to the extent that a luxury consuming elite supports them.

Poetry

Poetry as a vital and beautiful force and like all the other traditional artistic forms has hovered for many a decade on the brink of disappearance. Poetry forcing its way into real life can no longer be contained on the page of a book. Since Baudelaire, the whole emphasis of French poetry was moving towards the relinquishing of conscious control even moving to the point where accepted language became inadequate. Part of the Surrealist fascination with Rimbaud had something to do with him leaving poetry behind. As for poetry itself, by the 20th century it was moving into another arena, that of the readymade or the sound poem and putting an end to the written page and individual recitation.

In the civil war in Russia, a transformed poetry acquired a collective character not merely content with anonymous authorship as there was also anonymous circulation. Henceforward, the works of new authors were no longer recited by individual speakers to a small and restricted audience but declaimed by the masses in public squares in a sort of choral without music. The technical aid of megaphones, loud speakers and gramophones were also put into service. During the war against the white guard, General Ludenich, Demian Bednyi's war songs were communicated to the insurgents this way. The effect of these recitations it was claimed (true or false?) was not only to increase the fighting spirit of the insurgents but caused Ludenitch's soldiers to desert in crowds joining the rebels.

Whatever, poets since those times unable to squarely face their historical dilemma have tried to make poems on the end of poetry. Or rather build poems on the end of poetry. The concrete poem ( much favoured by the cultural pimps at the I.C.A.) and the phonetic poems of Henri Chopin and Jackson MacLow etc. Others, not as sophisticated as the Europeans, have continued with the old forms even attempting to fashion a modernity in language crafted upon its epitaph. The majority of the American Beats, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, etc, belong to this category and because they have made a name for themselves precisely because they embraced the emptied husk of a former rich and explosive means of expression, now exist as a repressive force among a reawakening American youth which having, in their niavity appropriated them, do not realise as yet that by themselves they could go a lot farther without the encumbrance of their poet leaders. Now that we are beginning to get rid of all leaders, let's get rid of the poets as well.

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Music

'He is going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row'

Music is in a state of de-composition (pun) among classical leftovers, pop as well as the avant garde even though record sales have reached a new maximum. Classical music now has become nothing more than a reminder of an on-going slave/master mentality. Its past sublimity is clearly over with and its major function now is to remind us of the power of aristocratic patronage whilst intimidating the 'ordinary' man with the pretence of genius. Those people who think you can still listen to it purely for its aesthetic beauty without reference to its role as guardian of traditional power and money really are out of it. Beethoven, Bach etc because they are still pillars of an establishment discredited by Dada 40 years ago are still in line for some rough treatment. And the fact that classical music is still revered in a country like Russia really does mean its revolution is long dead and gone, forming as it now does, a new labour aristocracy based around snob values. In the West, it's alarming to see among the young a growing number of Bach worshippers who've probably been encouraged by such pop groups as Procul Harem. It's as bad as its counterpart, the hippy re-invention of God.

Like the rest of the dismantled high art traditions, music gradually dribbled into everyday life through Satie's furniture music, Weburn's silences and Gage's concept of Indeterminacy. Whilst all this may have provided the opening through which liberation could be spied in the distance, it's immediate outcome has been a long waylaying, even a new hip imprisoning of form. Despite Cage's well publicised rejection of concert etiquette, the performer/audience separation and structures of harmony, rhythm etc, he remains careful to maintain himself within the dominating paradigm of high art music. The previous musical laws have been replaced by their powerful shadow, a demanding set of non-rules in say, the dead-pan, straight faced presentation of nothing but common sounds but sounds chained to the privileges of a market recognising a musical hierarchy. For example, an LP of Kurt Schwitters sounds - the Ur Sonata - costs £15, c/o the Lords Gallery. Somebody said we'd never have to pay for the air we breathe but we now have to pay for the sounds in over plus we continually hear in daily life.

And saddest of all: Jazz is Dead. Beginning as a bowderalised expression of Negro oppression, jazz through a coming together of disparate musical traditions derived mainly from work song, blues and the polyglot dances in Congo Square in New Orleans, quickly but ineluctably began to follow the trajectory of western classical music and as 'the reluctant art' gradually acquired bourgeois status. Charlie Parker was possibly its finest expression but this man, continually pushing at the boundaries of harmony, finally reminds us of the greatness of Mozart. On the brink of atonality he inevitably hastened the demise of jazz, a music which then dissolved into a fury of sound caught half-way between a recent irretrievable past and a something not realised: the something of a total revolution.

But, POP TOO IS BREAKING APART! The former vitality pop music had a few years ago in records like the Stones', 'I can't get no satisfaction', 'Paint it Black' and Bob Dylan's 'Desolation Row' has been replaced by the dreamy mysticism of latter-day Beatles relying as they do on a quick, DIY, fake contemplation without the psychic pain which was once a necessary part of Eastern contemplation. In sentimentality they are the contemporary equivalent of Stephen Foster. More abuse than this is needed to demolish the Beatles. Come the revolution we will take personal delight in stringing them up, one by fucking one.

Pop music now can move in no vital direction other than subversion even if only to tail end its increasingly rebellious consumers. Small attempts within an inflexible framework are already being made. Frank Zappa of The Mothers of Invention with one foot in 'Intro' - the most pernicious hip periodical of all - and the other in the drop out scene pathetically tries to subvert the hippies. He's obviously going to become one of the last cults and with 'the scene' disintegrating a present non-involved form of pop music will place more emphasis on violence in an attempt to satisfy the more demanding desires emanating from an increasingly repressive life. FLOWER POWER WILL BE REPLACED BY NETTLE POWER. And along with it, the scene will begin to shake as real subversion will never be accepted by the communications media and the DJs. Look how they neglected Mick Jagger when in prison. The record companies then just didn't want to touch him. A recent report in the Daily Mirror says that a new 'breakthrough' can be envisaged in the late 60s - this 'breakthrough' being no more than an up-dated ballad music - a contingent of Cliff Richard's! Every kid would laugh at this. Furthermore, many young people know the established pop scene is fading. It is getting drearier by the minute. Radio one and its continual repetition of past hits is just a start.

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'Hell appears so much more fascinating and bizarre than heaven...Think of us as erotic politicians' (The Doors)

A break will occur but it won't be a breakthrough it will be a breakup. That simulated apocalypse, The Doors' eleven and a half minute nightmare, 'The End' may become real. The spectacle is beginning to destroy itself from within its own terms. Bob Dylan intends to compose nothing more other than his own funeral music. On the one hand the live performances by the dull groups are diminishing as beat clubs are said to be closing ( are they??). On the other hand, electronic vibrations demand live performances, This must be one step nearer to a truly subversive, though long gone, street music with its long forgotten collective rhythms. Sounds of everyday life are played around with echoing the artistic vanguards of decades ago e.g. Napoleon the Fourth, the Jet in the Box Tops 'The Letter' etc). In New York, the Fugs had to leave the big recording studios behind complaining about their 'slick pornography'. In England, the instrumental virtuosity of The Cream with their motto: 'Forget the message, forget the lyrics, just play', subconsciously (?) comes near John Cage's remark; 'percussion music is revolution, at this stage in the proceedings, a healthy lawlessness is permitted, rubbing, smashing, hitting.'

But can these inherent potentialities be fulfilled by these very same people as fame is now beginning to be disliked by the growing rebellion of young people in the most highly developed countries. Ed Saunders of The Fugs acquired some status, enough to appear on the cover of Life magazine. Everybody in the growing movement on Manhattan's Lower East Side when they heard about it, dashed out in glee to grab a copy. Sometime later and very drunk, Ed Saunders was heard to say, 'I've sold out, I've ruined my reputation by becoming famous'.

These people, whether they like it or not, use the system for their own ends. The Cream - their name supports it - retain the hierarchy of expert against the non-expert. Within a concert hall and its extension, the beat club, this hierarchy can be maintained. The general competitiveness of our society finds expression on the dance floor. The coolest chick and raver gets endless self-satisfaction at the expense of all those who don't. Envy, greed onanistic separation - no less potent on the dance floor - than elsewhere, find here a very raw expression. It is here that socially the life of the young - your life - is decided. If your no good at playing this new repressive game, well you've had it.

But away from this atmosphere, on the street where there's 'the breath of the possible' good things can begin to happen to all convention, old and new alike. The stylised pattern can easily break up, odd inversions occur and commodities can get used for other ends than intended. In the Detroit riot (summer '67) Light My Fire - the hit record by The Doors - was used for obvious purposes. Examples like this could be multiplied. It was the spontaneous street nonsense songs of Robert Jasper Grootveld that had much to do with sparking off the rebellious Dutch Provo movement. But this was more than music: it was a lever in the release of discontent and Provo was to end finally in a big riot. Previously and in other circumstances, like in Russia after the revolution, music had a tendency to dissolve itself and get lost among a new, more total feeling. Perhaps the factory whistle and hooter blow-outs are such examples? Now, their memory can only exist in a void and merely a hopeful signpost to the day when the new revolutionary concepts of non-compartmentalisation bring into being a celebration of work and play no longer experienced as opposites.

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The theatre of cruelty as just another version of pleasant theatre

Legitimate theatre today has completely lost its hold over people simply because the simulated 'reel life' of the cinema has surpassed it through its greater technical capabilities. Theatres are closing everywhere despite constant attempts by Arts Council funding to keep them open and people would far rather watch TV or go to the pub. There are two forms of theatrical presentation. The real establishment theatre of Shakespeare, Shaw and Ibsen etc and the so-called 'underground' performance most exemplified in the Living Theatre productions which basically revolve around a ludicrous contradiction where life tries to overcome a false staging concept. Hip directors like Peter Brooke, Lamoena and Julian Beck ( who each day tries to look a little more like Antonin Artaud) belong to this trajectory. Initially people of this ilk made the basic mistake of trying to integrate Dada, old ethnic rituals and latterly, the Happening into the theatrical form whilst still putting a premium upon acting ability and adding a bit of Brechtian realism for good measure'''..Acting is Dead. Theatre is Dead'

After the Russian revolution theatre assumed a broader significance. It descended to the street level in the re-constructions of the storming of the Winter Palace and in the acrobatic bio-mechanics of Meyerhold and Evreinov. True it was interesting but it's no longer relevant, not even for that street theatre equipped with puppets which made revolutionary propaganda around day to day events. However, these formal devices inherent in Constructivist theatre, particularly the regimented figures of orchestrated masses comes to close for comfort to the ultra-conditioning of the inhuman calisthenics of Mao's China.

However, Artaud's laborious conception of theatre has also failed. He believed that theatre could change while civilisation remained the same, or rather, that civilisation could change through his 'cruel' theatrical assault. Nonetheless, Artaud took the Surrealist emphasis on life rather than art, returning to the archaic rituals of ancient cultures with their supposed power to influence events and to transform yourself but because ethnic rituals were reinterpreted within the boundaries of a dying theatrical form, its power to affect people was lost. Balinese 'theatre' is as inapplicable today as the baneful example of the Bolshevikh Central Committee.

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On Film

It's in this form that the constructivist idea still has great potential. For us, film commonly means cinema for 'entertainment'. It has ossified at a half way stage; a stage which Henry Flynt refers to as 'novelistic cinema', a cinema with a story, a plot and actors with one man directing all proceedings. In fact a kind of procedure rather like all previous 'art' products; an interim form taking much from the theatre. Griffith and Eisenstein quickly exhausted this form in, Intolerance, Birth Of A Nation, Strike and October. Nothing much has happened along these lines since. Both Griffiths and Eisenstein's later films don't match up to their earlier efforts. Most film directors belong to this tradition from the better ones like Renoir, Lang and Ford, to that degeneration inherent in Resnais, Godard and the young Americans of Warren Beattty's Bonnie and Clyde. Each new film belonging to this general genre seems more feeble than the last and commensurate with a long period of reaction. Basically fim has become a popular form of compensation for the emptiness of existence itself. Other film genres, those that are fantastical, also seem to have only held together for a short duration. The great humour of Stennet, of Chaplin and Keating and the manic Surrealist films of the early Bunuel lacked staying power, never to be repeated. The dregs of 'crazy' cinema can be seen in The Jokers and the dregs of mordant fantasy in those unsympathetic privileged characters abounding in Fellini's, Juliet Of The Spirits.

Despite appearances to the contrary, the recent spate of underground movies aren't an alternative and don't offer an alternative. Underground cinema merely desires to rise to the level of legitimate cinema. It's no longer even a cellar cult. Andy Warhol now makes 'short' films which are 90 minutes long falling in line with the required box office time. His films are now shown at the real ritzy cinemas patronised by the New York cultural elite and for an astronomical entrance fee. Six years ago, Kenneth Anger was earning 300 dollars a year. Now his annual income is over 16,000 dollars a year: That's underground film for you!

The amount of films produced in an actual revolutionary period now would be greatly reduced as real life would offer far, far, far more than any big screen simulation. The only film that may be needed ( as far as you can predict) are kind of documentary, educational films for a transformed TV quite unlike the passive, drug-inducing machine we now have at our finger tips. Perhaps at such a time, only film makers like Vertov or Esther Shubb will be seen as the only relevant film makers of the 20th century? Who knows? Vertov with a gang of cameramen spread far and wide, traveled throughout Russia filming episodes of a transforming life and environment. The film stock was then sent back to a central office where it was edited for distribution. Editing thus became the one and only film making task through a kind of collective, communal task. Moreover, Vertov's comments on cinema are probably the best that have ever been put down on paper.

But until the revolution, such is the alienation of the screen, that any film becomes inevitably repressive and a further buttress to the system. In any case, true documentaries and real educational films wouldn't be allowed to exist on our networks anyway. The furniture designers, Charles and Ray Eames, have launched short films giving out information on the nuts and bolts of their designs but really it's for the business community to view and is nothing more than a selling mechanism. Bad then.. Film makers who would like to make real documentaries, instead of escapist crap, are in advance, prevented from doing so because the people supplying the money for production costs and what have you would put a stop to any truthful presentation. The BBC will hardly show a mildly critical film never mind anything hard hitting. The power elite who control all media, make certain TV is hung-up on every respectable, dead weight, bourgeois value imaginable. The constant repetitions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are no coincidence. It's all part of a strict policy. And all that contingent of 'radical' young blood - the satirists '-you know, those who were going to change the system from within, whatever happened to them? Seeing them now, the John Bird's and David Frost's brings homicidal impulses welling up within us. TV is impossible to watch apart from having a guffaw at its seediness.

The proliferation of all media is leading us further and further away from personal participation. Who can honestly believe now that ' free' media, 'free' TV, 'free' cinema, is going to free anybody?

The cinema replaced theatre, the functional object of everyday life replaced the artefact but Constructivism didn't mean, as some fools would have us believe, that the artist is superceded by the businessman (who we all now suffer under), the reporter, the photographer etc , accepting at the same time, a limited pragmatic view of life safely ensconced within bourgeois hierarchy. The Constructivists, as their name suggested wished to reconstruct life, believing in a revolutionary becoming which they were in the initial moments of experiencing. They were fascinated by technology but they wanted to see technology in the service of a liberated humanity ' 'a Chicagoism of the soul' - as Mayakovsky eloquently put it. Modern cyberneticians could learn a great deal from the general attitude behind Constructivism. What the Surrealists said about themselves could equally be said about the Constructivists: 'We should be judged, a priori, by the non-specialisation of our efforts'. The Constructivists literally attempted to move through the whole of life applying their radical consciousness to its reconstruction. Knowing little about technical details, their sharpened intuition, no matter what, often quickly led them to the right technical solution.

El Lissitsky felt that every object had to be redesigned and reconstructed and it was the central concept behind his notion of 'Proun'. El Lissitsky's real conception behind Proun has been lost from view overlaid by a basic view which sees him as a precursor of functional commodities in a consumer society. Today, for instance, the entire design process is sustained and tailored to an enormous advertising campaign aimed at the creation of needs through the psychological manipulation of consumers. It doesn't really matter: to sell is the basic criteria................

(the following section is missing eaten by mould or else subject to Marx's "gnawing criticism of the mice")

................Engels decided as long ago as 1844 that; 'utility is the only just basis of exchange but who is to decide the utility of an article'. He concluded that, 'only by getting rid of private property can we get rid of the opposition between the real inherent utility of an article and the determination of that utility'.

Inevitably, we have to ask ourselves whether the objects designed by the Constructivists were functional in any way because, though they may look fascinating, they sure look odd? Would it be feasible to mass produce them? Those cups, saucers and various pots produced by Tatlin and Malevich have always struck us as utterly useless and contrary to the intentions of Tatlin and Malevich,, have now acquired a real rarity value and any value they now possess depends precisely on that rarity . They fall in line with an objet d'art and as Riccardi said in the 18th century: 'this value depends solely on the faculties, the tastes and the caprice of those desirous of possessing such objects'.

Let's face it, every museum curator would regard it as sacrilege to eat off one of these Constructivist plates or to make tea in one of Malevich's tea pots but that is exactly what we should do in order to restore to these objects their true worth-less-ness. Sheltered in their dust free glass cases from life they have taken their place alongside the Wedgwood China and examples of early cut glass. Could the paradox between intention and outcome be more complete?

The 'useful' objects of Tatlin and Malevich and the other would-be, technological Constructivists do also reveal a basic error in conception which a utilitarian Bauhaus later was to regard as the basis of technological design. Even later, Reyner Banham was to remark that the modern movement began to lose sight of that aspect of technology defined by Buckminster Fuller as the, 'un-halting trend of constantly accelerating change' and instead of using appropriate forms began to use symbolic forms ( like Malevich's universal application of his own 'suprematist' geometry) which no longer suited the requirements of modern technology.

The ideas of the Constructivists are no longer viable on other levels. It's ludicrous to consider that you can simply go from a two dimensional, aesthetically resolved ( or resolving) plane, out into real life. What are you supposed to do: make coloured ripple houses a la Bridget Riley? In fact the reality is that a large amount of much present day design has been somewhat influenced by the experimental artistic traditions of the early 20th century.

Despite what's been said earlier defending their purist intention, the experiments of El Lissitsky and individuals like Ladovski have been reprocessed through the Bauhaus and finally, institutionalised in our art school system. The form has been taken like an empty shell whilst the essential spirit has been ignored which, in its turn, has created the machine aesthetic and through following standardisation, some of the most barbaric urban schemes ever built. In a 'model' city in Mourent in SW France, higher administrative grades occupy detached houses, intermediate grades semi-detached houses and the lower grades, large blocks of flats, whilst single workers are housed in vertical blocks and married workers in horizontal blocks. This, to some degree, will be the pattern of the majority of our future homes. Neither, will the recent technological trend in what's left of architecture alleviate it. Needless to say, Architecture is Dead too. Nonetheless, Archigram's Plug-in city and the pre-fabrication which preceded it, will still be imposed upon us. Again, we'll have no say in this. Again, only men barren of life will have the right to decide our environment for us. Let's face it: have you ever been to an architects party which has ever got off the ground. Standardisation in so-called communist or capitalist countries has suppressed free creativity. In fact, free creativity is now regarded as a pathological condition by the status quo. What architect for instance, would think of the possibilities of fire within a city? Yet Belgian Provo as a form of amusement set fire to city fountains and with the aid of kerosene at night, lit up street gutters. These people should be the pyromaniac environmental creators of the future. Those architects, like the Japanese Zero group, who invite people to freely 'create' within a given space are lost from the very beginning. Accepting, as they do, their elitist architectural role, they must logically exclude the real solution which is a revolutionary overthrow where everybody can participate.

In the past, individual attempts have been made to freely construct an environment away from the aura of art and architecture. In the 20th century, the postman Cheval is probably the best known. Cheval didn't consider 'the fairy palace' he built with painstaking patience over decades as art simply because he didn't know what art was in any 'correct' sense. It was as if you like, the gradual materialisation of a phantasy - a palace which he created stone by stone after his postal shift was finished, day in and day out - and rather unlike those environmental creators such as the German Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters, whose Merzbaus were a conscious extension of a disintegrating though exhilarating art framework. Free creativity will never exist until all concepts of art disappear intermittently intermingling within a mostly joyous revolutionary life.

There were steps made in this direction during the revolutionary events in Russia. Some Constructivism did begin to involve the free construction of everyday life and as such, transcended the creator as unique individual. However, Constructivism itself can only be located within a more general creativity which occurred without any fancy title. Many spontaneous incidents recall the Paris commune like when some communards uprooted trees turning them upside down with their roots in the air just for the fun of it. In Russia nearly 40 years later, some insurrectionaries rejecting possibly a certain bourgeois conception of nature, painted the trees red and sprinkled coloured powder on neat lawns, taking what Breton was to describe later about something else entirely, 'a brilliant revenge on things'.

These incidents moreover cannot be separated and categorised like that ( as art or not) because they are inseparable from a general creative urge affecting one and all. Russian children, for instance attained a considerable independence at the age of five or six enjoying an autonomy unheard of in other countries. They even began to re-organise and run their own schools.

It could moreover be said that love was rediscovered afresh which the Surrealists believed would happen after a social revolution. An early comment in the new Pravda newspaper said of young Russians: 'They have certain principles in affairs of love, all these principles are governed by the belief that the nearer you approach extremes and, as it were, animal primitiveness, the more communistic you are. Every member of a labour faculty whose aim is to raise the intelligence of the working class, every student, man or girl, considers it as axiomatic that in affairs of love they should impose the least possible restraint on themselves.'

But this was a real highpoint and elsewhere similar opportunities did not present themselves like that. Reaction quickly set in and the history of artistic subversion rapidly lost much of its cutting edge. By creating beauty outside the course of history, Surrealist art impeded the only worthwhile activity, the transformation of history itself into lived creativity. The Dadaists complete disrespect for all categories hardly got to the point where it superceded them altogether. Surrealism which at one point tried to take it a stage further, quickly fell back into outmoded forms of expression and on the whole, within the darkening mood of the times, ended up as more traditional than Dada. It was to prove crippling and Surrealism today is remembered primarily as a literary movement and even Breton was to say; 'poetry compensates for all our sufferings'. It finally was to make amends for everything when all hope of revolution within their own lifetime was lost, when their was noting but disillusion with a baneful French Communist Party who couldn't take Surrealism seriously refusing to consider anything beyond a narrow economism together with party tactics.

For us now though, what lies beyond the disintegration of all artistic form? Well nothing that is officially regarded as creative. There can be no Neo-Dadaists or Neo-Surrealists having anything now of value to say. Even those well-intentioned people who wish to return to the original Dada and Surrealist state of mind are misguided because in many ways the motivating force which once inspired such movements, has already been carried over into life itself, displaying itself in ways as diverse as profound emotional upsets, vandalism, movements like Dutch Provo and destructive demonstrations etc.

All Dada can do is remind us not of past officially designated art but of that creativity which releases itself during times of play or through that form of revolutionary activity existing within a kind of free play with material goods or perhaps, certain activities undertaken by thieves and so-called, criminals. Even this type of response has now acquired something of a reified veneer through the form of the Happening which, in attempting to supercede Dada, has failed miserably. The Happeners have merely made an art form out of Dadaist provocation and as such, tend to fulfill Marshall McCluhan's dictum; 'that all the world will become a work of art'. In short, the limitations of art applied to a world that more and more demands limitations. Caught in any case by an artistic milieu, Happenings tend to take place around traditional bourgeois centres of culture and thus nothing more than pathetic castrated acts imprisoned in forms which should have been superceded. Ludicrous contradiction (arise. Happener, Mark Boyle, is able to sell (for a high price) some slabs of part of a pavement in Shepherd's Bush, London, whilst a friend of ours is fined for hanging a corporation litter basket on his wall. In Newcastle-Upon-Tyne recently, youths poured tar over new homes and daubed red paint on doors, whilst in New York, Alan Kaprow covered a car with jam and Jim Hanson shoved a piano off a roof. One event is called vandalism the other, art. In these derrangements of commodities there is little difference between them but in terms of hierarchical description, there's a great deal. One potentially points to a free creativity made by all, the other to a substitute creativity engineered by a new elite. Raoul Vaneigem accurately noted that vandalism was the true successor of Dada, not only because vandalism has lost the artistic aura which had surrounded Dada but, like the best of Dada, provocation remains the only truly creative act within a detestable society. The best of Dada and Surrealism merely re-emphasised something that has always existed and is there when life is passionately desired - like in the Detroit riot. There, the best of Dada and vandalism can be understood on an immediate and complete level by everybody, Happening, as anti-art art, can only be understood by only those who still persist in calling themselves artists.

But what about the Dada vandals? These acts were carried out by those Dadaists who were totally committed to their way of life either dying in odd circumstances or disappearing. Huelsenbeck, Tzara and Hausmann left an escape hatch open back into this intolerable society and as such, we criticise them. No such reproach can be extended to someone like Arthur Cravan that inheritor of the Wild West in France, an adventurer who informs everybody he is going to rob a bank then calmly goes ahead and does it. Walter Serner desired total disintegration. One evening, Serner, like some half-crazed therapist, stimulated an innate aggression among an audience and used it to his own advantage. Immaculately dressed, he walked onto a stage with a headless tailor's dummy. He then brought out a bouquet of flowers which he gave to the headless dummy to smell and which was then laid down at its feet. Serner then sat on a chair with his back to the audience further insulting them by reading out a text called; 'Final Dissolution'. The audience replied to his insults. Finally Serner said: 'Napoleon was a fucking strong oaf after all' and a full scale riot broke out as young men clutching pieces of balustrade chased Serner out of the building.

In provoking this incident, Serner ( who probably wouldn't have described himself as a revolutionary like that ) was more effective than the usual narrow minded revolutionary proud of his self-appointed role. Attack the pillars of society, attack the foundation of our so-called civilisation and so-called civilised people will react with an animal ferocity in order to preserve that very civilisation, culture and status quo.

But when a vast social crises is precipitated like in the Paris Commune of 1871, that same social libido can very quickly reverse itself sabotaging a totality of societal alienations. When the fall of the Commune was imminent, some French insurgents advanced on Notre Dame with the intention of burning it to the ground. They were prevented from doing so by a platoon of artists with rifles at the ready.

In 1909, the Italian Futurist said: 'Kill the moonlight, drain the canals of Venice. Four years later in 1913, he commented: 'We who insist that a masterpiece must be burned with the corpse of its author'. In 1921, the Surrealist, Louis Aragon said blowing up a church was better than writing any poem. So perhaps there had been some welcome progress in the meantime. Those artists in the 19th century more readily identified with their role , fifty years later and role disintegration meant they were more open to splendid acts of destruction.

Intuitively perhaps by then, these early 20th century avante gardists felt that those distinctions separating one class from another were loosening and that it was necessary to help this process further on its way by destroying the vestiges of former ages which encouraged these outdated distinctions? Whatever, but for certain artists and intellectuals everywhere generally began to see the futility of their chosen careers and in response to the mood of the times, began to distance themselves from their elitist roles in preparation for the masses taking over the stage of history.

In a way this was reflected in tactics not too disimilar to what any worker would get up to if provoked. Soffici made some pretty obtuse criticisms of the Futurists. By way of reply, the Futurists boarded a train from Milan to Florence, sort out Soffici and gave him a boot up the arse. Is it really that different from those workers today slagged off by obtuse union bureaucrats who then reply with some man-handling?

According to Breton the simplest Surrealist act would be to go out into the street, revolver in hand and fire at random into the crowd. This has come down to us as the modt violently incendiary statement Surrealism ever made and the one most frequently used by Surrealist critics to discredit it. Some have seen in this ' to use psychiatric terminolgy ' an undifferentiated homicidal impulse, whilst one of the leading Surrealist apologists, Ferdinand Alquie believes a literal interpretation of this to be idiotic. If this is so then Breton was an idiot. I for one am unable to doubt its sincerity because Breton then goes on to say: 'A man who has not had, at least once, the longing to be finished in this fashion with the petty system of corruption and cretinisation now rampant has his place reserved for him in that crowd, belly at pistol point'.

Not surprisingly, it relates to a statement by the doyen of French anarchist assassins, Emile Henry who in 1894 exploded a bomb in a caf' killing, as one newspaper claimed, 'peaceful, anonymous citizens gathered in a caf' to have a beer before going to bed'. In court, when reproached by the judge for having caused the murder of innocents, Henry replied: 'there are no innocent bourgeois'. Refusal becomes a principle and the nihilistic spirit is extending to all areas of life. If it is to have any results, nothing less than complete unrelenting opposition will do. Everything else will be assimilated by the established order. As Rimbaud once put it: 'I am a thousand times the richer, let us be as miserly as the sea'.

Breton, in fact, attempted to attach revolutionary theory to this immense feeling of frustration though the need to acquire revolutionary theory characterised Berlin Dada as much as it did Surrealism. Some of their experiences still contain valuable lessons.

Towards the end of its active life, Berlin Dada moved towards an uneasy alliance with the radical leftist group, Spartacus headed by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnecht. In response, the Dadaist, Wieland Herzfelde brought out a paper in which he attacked escapist literature fed to the working class as a miserable form of solace. He believed Dada could help transform communism into a principal of living consciousness.

A little later, Surrealism, on broadly the same lines, tried to impart to communism a greater revolutionary breadth. Far more articulate than Berlin Dada and theoretically richer, it attempted to weld together contradictory, though by no means, mutually exclusive elements as characterised especially in the works of Freud, Marx and Rimbaud. This must still hold our interest. Anybody today who can only conceive of the social revolution as simply a political/ economic affair -'and unfortunately the majority of the left still do ' are simple retards. Like us, Breton found the left inexcusably narrow and the major factor in hampering any spontaneous cooperation. On the other hand Communist Party hacks were possibly right in not liking the way Surrealist objets D'arts were been purchased by the capitalists. Breton believed we had to discover new ways of fighting for a revolution beyond a purely political exigency and not surprisingly this inclination is gaining ever wider support.

Briefly some of these relevant ideas can be summarised as follows:

1. The necessity of re-focusing revolutionists attention from political means to its social goal which will exclude all political expediency and the need to lie in order to temporarily dupe the masses for their supposed own good. Most people today in any case realise double-talk is the language of politicians, left or right. Breton almost alone in his day held onto a simple truth:how can one claim to liberate man when one begins with a lie?

2. Connected with the latter; administering idiocies which merely exploit the prejudices of a limited common sense - e.g. socialism brings material prosperity etc.
3. To acknowledge the fact that the traditional Marxian idea of the industrial proletariat being the first to rise against the oppressors lacks conviction. We must also discard the idea that the, 'maturing of the conditions for socialism consists in an increase or an intensification of the objective contradictions of capitalism'. Contradictions cannot be endlessly growing and it is difficult to imagine a more profound crises than that which gripped the USA and Europe in the 1930s and yet there wasn't a revolution. What would a future more profound crisis consist of? A return to cannabalism? The revolution is just as likely to be created by a few unregenerates eating beans ' which Pythagoras believed was the primary cause of all revolutions ' than in a maturing of the objective contradictions of capitalism.
4. If you make a social revolution do it for fun. In this society the possibility of a wholly new type of game underpinning a new social fabric can only be hinted at. A game like has never existed utterly distinct from the wretched embodiment of those present day excuses for enjoyment which merely reflect social conventions or where the game can only be conceived of in the form of entertainment whether it be quizz shows or cricket. The game perhaps as life itself possibly encompassing some of the dazzling inventions we now find when children are at play. The Surrealists attempted to invent new games but which in retrospect are too burdened down with contrivance They hoped through them and using time honoured methods of chance encounter a la Lautremont's sewing machine etc that the authentic nature of inner realities would finally be revealed. Recently, McCluhan has made the point that 'ancient and non-literate societies naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or of the outer cosmic drama. The Olympic games ( for example) were direct enactments of the Agon, or struggle of the sun-god.' McCluhan then goes on to suggest that Aristotle's idea of drama as mimetic reactment and relief (catharsis) from the besetting pressures of daily life applies perfectly to all kinds of games. Doesn't this though reflect little more than the shadow of theatrical art limiting the scope of a more rounded concept of play? In a new society without fixed form and static institutions surely the notion of the game distinctly compartmentalised and separate from work and other aspects of liesure time will necessarily disappear? In some ways we will come again to resemble some primitive societies where liesure, work and the game were inseparable. The widespread interest in anthropology today is due to the realisation that our patterns of a new consciousness pick up somewhat on primitive consciousness but the hope for the future doesn't lie in detailed anthropological studies (Eliade, Levi Strauss etc) but in the re-creation of primitive modes of experiences. It must however also be qualitatively different as neither do we desire a contemporary shaman or witch doctor to replace the guru-like specialist and businessman. Whether shaman or businessman, all must be swept aside.
5. We need also to destroy as far as possible our internal contradictions. It's of prime importance to attempt to live as much as possible and on all fronts, the revolutionary life within the collapsing framework of the old. A life which implies hatred of the nucleur family as well as bourgeois values of honour, work, 'being reasonable' etc. It was the failure of the Surrealists and Dadaists individually to evolve a more total revolutionary consciousness on all levels (both theoretically and in daily life ) that was to result in a host of impossible contradictions which ultimately was to lead to their downfall. Thus, Aragon one of the pivotal Surrealist experimenters joined the Communist Party when the brutal oppression of the Stalinist regime was well underway. His refusal to see the obvious was as erroneous as his return to the role of literateur.

Today, the Berlin Commune sees in Dada an historical precedent. For Black Mask, as for us, Berlin Dada is the relevant part of Dada. It can still help us in illuminating our contemporary problems simply because in its total rejection of all systems it helped un-mask (!) those bourgeois myths masquerading as justice, honour, love and responsibility.

If life continues to be artificially categorised without a grasp of the totality then the new revolution is doomed. The old type of communists, the Dadaists and the Surrealists were basically ignorant of each others intentions. The few comments made by Lenin on culture were banal. Trotsky was better but was unable to grasp just how completely western culture was disintegrating. Failure to grasp such an essential fact led to a stunted take on all other aspects of life.

A new consciousness in the last year or so has arisen in the west. In its embryonic stage, it hopefully prefigures the end of the power of the specialist. As the end of art has moved towards the transformation of life itself, politics and science must also be swept up within the same process of transformation'..'ART IS DEAD. The new man protests' (Tzara)

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(A moulding text says October 22nd 1967 though must be later as wasn't some of the pop music mentioned here somewhat later than the Fall of 1967?)

(The bulk of this article - from the place marked *** onwards - was written as a series of footnotes to "A Critique of the Study of English Literature" - published in full in Red Texts No 2 (price 3/6d from RSSF, 2 Canonbury Mansions, Canonbury Place, Islington) the first section is a condensing to about third of this article to the points and concepts used in the main discussion following ***).

Tradition. Tracing a tradition. An obsessive need to order our experiences, a process which drains our experience. The assumption that there is a living tradition in English really started in the 20s with the effective destroyer of English poetry in this century -T. S. Eliot whose influence on criticism has also been enormous. His attempt to relate literature to any actuality was conceived of in terms of the corniest of corny conservative fantasies - the re-establishment of an elite. Though he was at great pains to point out how 'living' this tradition was, he used it in his own poetry (and all critics lick his arse because he was a 'practitioner, thus displaying their own poverty) as a huge monumental entity which he placed opposite another entity - the present whose vulgarity and poverty he revelled in. He uses a whole mass of anthropological and literary monumentality and crushed his patronising and very 'personal' view of the present. Tradition used this way narrows literature down to mere history. Worse it is one based on the implicit assumption that the present is a vacuum or a drained intellectual concept. Thus inevitably tradition becomes academic monumentality. But as the present is not living for academics, then neither can the tradition be, for it is not going anywhere. It can be treated as an entity ' it's safer that way.

The future of literature. Literature of our time is being written off, but for the wrong reasons, academic reasons. Leavis, for example, says it is due to the poverty of language. To say this involves a huge failure of connection. Language does not exist in a vacuum. Leavis makes a token academic gesture at making it social by saying that the strength of English is essentially rural. From him it is pretty rare nostalgia. It is also untrue. The writing coming from American cities is making its own language the slang of our own cities is not always corny. The poverty of language must be related to the poverty of experience. And of experienced reality. This is especially true for the student, if he is taught to denigrate sensual experience how on earth can he use sensual language? If he is led to see theoretical abstraction as being of prime importance, then his language will be abstractly theoretical. What is especially marked in modern English writing is the lack of any content and its poverty. There is no reality to write of except a non-existent upper class, the criminal that we all long to be, or a 'terrifying personal vision.' The sterility of which is revealed by its inevitable tone of corny pessimism. The 'personal vision' indicates the atomisation of society. The 'terrifying' is a playing out of our alienation to each other in an alienated way. Nothing is creative, only expressive, expressive of your own alienation.

Doing it, or writing it, because you have to is the only justification. It is the urgency that matters; whenever it is in somebody, it comes over clearly and is exciting. Only by combating the timeless poverty of life under contemporary capitalism can anything worthwhile emerge. After studying English nothing is seen as urgent. The past and its eternal values act as lullabies for them and as sleeping pills for you.

Very rarely is the question asked ''Why did the guy write this?" It is not considered an academic question precisely because it would take the subject some way out of the vacuum. Instead we get studies of patronage, and, increasingly, the idea that the guy was writing for money. What is confirmed in this is the very bourgeois idea that art is something different, cut off from life, the sponging artist being a classification in the bourgeois system and one to be tolerated. Also it contains another bourgeois idea that art is just entertainment (more sophisticatedly, for the benefit of the educated, being entertained by a product which is 'thought-provoking' i.e. being titillated by someone else's precious and private insights and perceptions). The academics though maintain a double standard towards this. Shakespeare was entertaining for the Elizabethans, but now it's a very serious matter'

Another symptom of the sophisticated academic drainage-system is the row of critics and academics bending over backwards saying 'this is great because it is not didactic'. Didacticism being synonymous with an over-earnest sense of purpose. Thus the excrement poured on Lawrence who has something important and genuine to say - the obscenity of the body's total subjugation to the mind and the ego - the usual accusation being that he is humourless. By this is meant a very narcissistic humour, the modern cult of self-parody. It's uncool to say anything revolutionary and serious because that is a threat and you are attacked for it, thus the huge defensive mechanismof self-parody, is the escape route of every modern writer'.

The point is that having a sense of purpose is attacked, because in an age of banality, anything purposeful is dangerous. Every 20th century writer is described as a scintillating critic of modern life, but has anything changed? The bourgeoisie even absorb scintillating attacks on its morality. The emphasis being on the scintillation. It can stay in the vacuum. This is even more horribly true of modern pop music and its repeated attacks on bourgeois culture, Vietnam War etc. Rolling Stones perform Street Fighting Man in Hyde Park and all but 30 of the 500, 000 listen to it in total passivity. At least 10 years ago, Jailhouse Rock got the kids ripping up the cinema. ...

After doing an English course and by some miracle we became writers, we too would never admit to a sense of purpose. That would be very uncool. A sense of purpose would be revolutionary. The modern rationalisations being 'I'm doing it because Ienjoy doing it, why shouldn't I?' (no urgency there! ) Or, 'Of course I don't know how it will affect the audience, that wouldn't be artistic'. 'The work should stand foritself. People take what they can from it' etc. The sense of futility is encouraged at every step. If,  'doing it because you want to do it' is to be anything more than a futile gesture, then a hell of a lot more people should be doing, everybody. At the moment it's just a rationalisation for a huge ego trip and mass passivity.

The monumentality of past art is the most crushing of all. And its not just buildings propped up when they no longer have any function. If they don't have a function then they can be an entity of pure beauty, meaningless and therefore safe. With literature the whole thing is more insidious. There are eternal values etc. Also the symptom of a total lack of faith in the future (modern architects living in restored 16th Century houses) and of in what the artist himself is doing, is yet more revealing of total poverty.

Nobody has asked the question of whether all art in the future will be nothing but a compensation. When the worker comes home from the production line, he is so physically exhausted that the television is about all he can take. The academics and critics are, needless to say, very patronising about television. But aren't all the products of art now just rather more sophisticated, compensations. The Marx Bros are rightly being heralded as geniuses but isn't their work a compensation for the anarchy in ourselves that we are not permitted? The artist of course being expected to be a bohemian, his eccentricity tolerated and encouraged and marketed, all our own suppressed creativity being lived for us by him.

The real artist doesn't give answers but asks the right questions; Chekhov said it, They're all saying it. Nobody is asking for a blueprint but only the illusion that people are, allows the academic to assert the virtue of his purposelessness. A whole series of irrelevant questions (none of which have an answer of course, visions of futility) is always at hand to prevent the student from acting. And the vision of futility they present us with makes us feel everything is, futile, all equally futile.

The most insidious way in which they drain all excitement and exuberance from us, is by making us excited over some rarefied question, and restricting us to this. This is done especially by means of antitheses which no longer matter and which make us believe that we can do nothing in the future. The artistic and the didactic, they force divisions which do not exist and atomise our minds a little more. It also brings in thewhole bag of sacrifice, you can have one or the other. I want everything.

The Possibilities:

In a society in which we are constantly being fobbed off with (cheapness, with the imitation and the inauthentic (through which the working class can see as well. The fear that we soften the proletariat if we allow the possibility of them having an acute aesthetic sensitivity is based on a whole lot of rarefied illusions, and is very patronising. Why do kids smash up their lousy council houses and youth clubs which only have ping pong?) the way in which a study of writing can help us distinguish between what is authentic and what isn't, suggests the revolutionary function it can have.

Authenticity of thought and authenticity of experience: unearned wisdom, thought which has never been thought out for oneself and is based on no experience but juggles with abstractions, is totally inauthentic. We must learn to see the relationship between the experience and the language: it is direct in good writers. If we can become sensitive to the genuiness of the writing and the lived experience behind it, we can also be sensitive to our own experiences. We can only make this connection if we can smash the academic vacuum: in practical terms - within the present system of education - if work becomes communal. 1f the  apparently exclusive packets of ideas are rejected.  In a communal atmosphere the ease of relating what we read - or receive from any art form - to our own experience will be far greater. It is no use complaining of the isolation of the subject if you as students remain isolated. Its rejection of vulgarity and cheapness will also only be of value if the discovery of this is related directly to everyone's experience, otherwise it really will be only snobbery. It will also be this if we don't realise the connection of this poverty to the capitalist mode of production, to its destructive effect on people, and if there is a shared belief that people don't want cheapness, that they can see through it.

The revolutionary dynamic provided by literature itself can exist only if our reading is not passive (myopic criticism is very soporific). This dynamic (which is the contrast which should become a tension between the possible and the actual) is of any richness of experience which may come over from literature and the poverty and banality of our own lives. If works which do this are read passively then their richness will only be a compensation, if not then they can be DYNAMITE. Similarly with pop music or even the Marx Bros or 'Zazie Dans Le Metro' if our attitude is non-passive then the anarchy and aggression in these ceases to be a compensation for the aggression in us we are scared to release, ceases to be the voyeurism when the action looked at is us, and forces this tension between the possible and the actual, and is dynamite.

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I suggested that the value of art depends almost entirely on the attitude/response of the audience, essentially whether it is one of passivity or not. This is I think, rather simplistic, though I have experienced this really strong duality, watching Marx Bros films, usually suggesting the anarchism in myself, which usually creates that dynamic tension when I realise how dull it makes my own life appear, suggesting almost forcing a new play lifestyle. But just occasionally I feel it is absorbing all that playful. anarchic potential within myself, that it is the alienation of me contemplating my POTENTIAL free self, of laughing, applauding, so I don't have to do it myself, and a feeling of annoyance that this has all been done in a studio; that its all as safe and constructed as a moped. ...and then I remember how reactionary Groucho is.

So far all attempts to get away from the art that really makes the 'audience' just a receiver, a consumer, have been fearfully superficial. The big thing in the theatre at any rate has been 'audience PARTICIPATION'; it didn't take. De Gaulle's obviously expedient use of  'participation' (changing it from meaning 'taking an active creative part in the decisions which affect your life' to 'taking the load of running things as they are and we decree now, off our shoulders for us:' run your own alienation! ) to put a lot of young French guys off it; they had already seen that its application in theatre and the very consumable 'happenings' was phoney. The blandness with which avant-garde theatre people use the phrase now is all the more horrific, because they have seen no connection between their own ridicule of the word when used by De Gaulle and their own use of it. It is not just the hack politicos who are stuck in the false politics-art division; it is the theatre avant-garde as well. When the Living Theatre allow audience .participation (into what? Acting?) it is something that must take place within a hall, it never gets outside the narcissistic mood of being in a theatre. Also its capacity for retaking control of the whole show within an insistence that the show must go on, reveals an emptiness in ones own response, one I feel has been manipulated.

In a sense all art is manipulative, and so far we have only got to a crude distinction between what manipulates you into passivity, the Free Pop Concerts (the DJs beaming as to how much we are all enjoying ourselves, when they're really saying how we shall enjoy ourselves) and that which manipulates you to be responsive. Further we may be pursuing an absurd and futile position to think that everything that manipulates you is necessarily bad. If we see ourselves as a pure entity - as in fact the society which is alienated from us sees us and we see it, i.e. as an entity - then of course things which affect us may seem to be 'manipulative', but so in fact would all human relationships, which cause changes within ourselves. It's a question perhaps of whether  after having been 'manipulated' a person has had more choices opened up to him land stimulated within him, or has had some removed from his sight or made impossible for him?

Most of us don't get too hung up over this quality of human relationships IN GENERAL - we do usually with institutionalised things. Things which have a formal and immobile relationship between themselves and the people who relate to them. This is true of Art and Politics where we are very conscious of being manipulated, essentially because the relationship is one-sided and because of the distance between it and us. That is to say, when we feel we are being consciously manipulated. If none of the audience laughed during a theatre comedy, the actors would probably start forgetting their lines, stuttering into silence. There is in fact a two-way relationship but it is a sick one. The actors depend on the audience responding, but responding in a predictable way. This problem cannot be overcome simply by making the actor less of a tool i.e. by having plays created by the actors themselves, or by having them improvised plays. Or at least so far this has appeared WITHIN THE TERMS OF THE THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE ITSELF, something of a gesture.

The authority that the actor has in his role as actor, and the sustaining of the unreality which the role is: the only hopeful thing here is the creation of immediate relation ships within the audience itself. But even here the role of the 'actors' is ambiguous, if they are catalysts the process is still rather one way: do the "actors' themselves have the capacity for change? The most acute example of 'liberating' theatre is C. A. S. T. going around from university to university ending their shows by smashing some property. That is complete substitution. The Who similarly with their guitars. The audience expects it, wants it to happen itself, but is frightened to do it. Whereas C. A. S. T. have the artists prerogative to do it. This is the most acute case of the classic 'alienation' which art can afford. We contemplate other people destroying the environment we want to destroy. We have to import them to do it for us. 'Wow, that was a really good talk you gave the other day man, about everyone starting to do it for themselves. ..er, you wouldn't like to come and give us a talk at our college too?

The expectation that works both ways is bad essentially because of its rigidity, the audience expecting and expected to respond in a certain way, and expecting the actors to respond to that response in a certain way. ..By the Living Theatre, it is presumably a response of self-liberation but it is still expected, needed. And on the other hand, there is the audience on the West End level expecting to be entertained ' 'I paid for it' - or have their thoughts provoked, and on the avant-garde scene expecting theirproperty to be smashed or their bourgeoiseness to be assaulted. There is also something wrong with the perverted altruism of these actors who go around liberating people, there is no expectation of getting anything out of an audience.

Expectation can be a positive if it is more a question of confirming some experience the audience has had. This suggests essentially working on a local level where the relationship between actor and audience extends beyond the fact of performance, is close, and where the roles are interchangeable. This was relatively easy in a university, it should also be relatively easy on the scale of local areas, in Notting Hill (for example with the more or less collective experience of police repression, housing shortage etc).

This raises the problem of what exactly any art form can do. The confirmation of experience sounds perhaps banal. In some cases it really means to make people aware of what exactly is happening. But in many cases this is done in places where people know what's going on, and the ordering of this awareness is not only of no use to them it is also frustrating if no answers at all are suggested (e.g. the proposed street theatre piece in Cambridge about how the university controls the town we didn't do it ultimately because there was nothing very definite that we could suggest for ways for the people of Cambridge themselves to remedy the situation) But the confirmation of experience seems worthwhile if it is done in a way that reveals the contradictions and undermines the oppressive structures and the internalised repressive structures.

This clearly relates to very specifically didactic art forms, but then as I argued earlier it seems almost absurd to say that art isn't didactic. Even the anti-art and the art of arbitrary destruction, the glorifying of the pure present in all its absurdities and contradictions of the Surrealists and Dadaists was didactic and purposive by not doing the expected, by doing meaningless things they expected people's unthought attitudes and habitual ways of seeing things to be shaken without them having any resort to 'understanding' which could order this new experience. In a sense this is all that art is about though there is an equally strong conscious or unconscious purpose of unifying the contradictions, of ordering the experience, of 'manipulation' moving beyond the habitual, but in terms of some new individual unification. Also in general the equal absorption of new experience into forms, even if they are becoming increasingly individualistic forms, tend to be absorptions into generally defined social norms. The assumption of common social value in relation to a wide audience is totally absurd today and is something very different from the confirmation of experience. The huge critical acclaim by nearly everyone when 'Little Malcolm' first appeared, including the usual assortment of the left, is amazing. Though ostensibly it was anti-Fascist, it did in fact undermine the whole revolutionary position with the banality of the idea that revolutionaries were revolutionaries because they are really impotent, and ending with a totally banal - and yes, self-parodying - re-affirmation of every social norm. Witness the monotonous return to status-quo social values by the angry young men of the thirties and fifties, which means being militantly conservative in some case or smug in others. This was latent in all their work with its inward narcissistic aggression all contained within the stage. The total voyeurism of watching Jimmy Porter working out all our aggressions with the illusion that he is working out the problems of living with someone. Being seduced by this, so that we didn't even notice that Porter was weak, that Osborne had undermined the character from the start, and that the aggression was contained within the stage (one angry young man, championed by the media who love to find a 'personality' and strip him of context and influence  but no anger aroused among the many) - an expression of this weakness, allows the ultimate restatement of accepted values masquerading as eternal values to be applied in any social situation.

But the problems for the 'revolutionary' artist are far greater, because of his own awareness (assuming his revolutionary position to have been worked out by himself) of the social situation coming into conflict with his dedication and desire for artistic expression. Not only is 2Oth century art, its genuine art, revealing of the complete breakdown of any common social reality, with its stress on idiosyncrasy, its personal visions all predictably concluding with a statement of conventional-wisdom pessimism (but without these artists being themselves conscious of this inevitability resulting from their self-imposed isolation and nomadic lives) but also in the morbid interest of critics in the failures, resulting in the criterion: that only the failures are great, because they were the ones who tried. In fact this glorification of the interestingfailure is paramount, so that we never get around to questioning why they must inevitably be failures. (Raymond Williams on Lawrence in Modern Tragedy is one of the few efforts).

The reasons for it only become obvious to the artist who is aware of what he is trying to do, and aware of the social situation that condemns his art that makes it into a consumer product trapped in the present social situation simply because that is the only reality available to him. Unable to transcend it, unless he takes the suicidal course of mysticism i.e. allowing the social reality to be still more drained - and draining his own reality - i.e. a social reality.

There is obviously great hope in the movement towards communally created art. This again lends itself very much to the theatre. And to the cinema, where already co- operation is necessary for the making of film, it is of the essence of film-making. The advantage of this is clearly that the experience of making is not privatised; that this in itself is communal and social, this especially relevant when a lot of art is about the role of the artist himself. In cinema it is obviously not so easy; the required communality has many features which make it similar to any other kind of production which requires a perverted communality. As Cardan points out, a, factory is potentially a communal place, but one which has been perverted not because it is necessary to the production itself but because it is necessary to alienated production to which authentic communality is a great threat. This is also true of the cinema. This is especially true at a time when the director is becoming increasingly the dictator. A film is judged now as a totality; which is an advance, but is very much the totality of one man's vision, the actors are judged on the criterion of how well they have played the roles strictly delineated by the director in the totality of his vision, the firmness of the totality depending largely on how direct the relation between director and-the camera crew is, though again the camera work is largely dictated by the director, whatever his personal involvement in it. Most film actors don't have to act being alienated, say in an Antonioni film, they are anyway'.. this clearly relates to a more fundamental feature, the one so obviously shared with factory production. The division of labour. This is so much more easily rationalisable in the cinema with its greater technical demands. To be a cameraman requires technical skill and knowledge. This factor common to all other forms of production is clearly critical. Nearly all art forms require technical skill and talent which not everybody has. At least they don't have it in the established art forms. This is very noticeable in the tenseness of the  narcissistic university situation. There is the almost hysterical need to create, to be creative, and to be seen to be creative. But the need is usually imposed from outside. This is why so many people get fucked-up over the creative thing. I knew a guy who set himself a schedule of writing a poem a day, during his first year at university in order to feel that he was being creative. The hip cretins in university drama set out to intimidate the freshmen with their creativeness. It's a very competitive world.

Faced then with the poverty of university life (I am not setting this out to be more so than any other kind of a life) the need to create becomes more and more hysterical - the only alternative to all-out consumption is frenzied creativity in petrified forms. Creativity itself becomes something consumable. Maybe it's just a student malaise but there's a lot of people saying to themselves 'I'd better do something, I'm alive after all', and off they go to the latest audition.

This is all the more shameful because art - doing things, even in established forms, - can be therapeutic, therapeutic rather than sleep-inducing. There are many times when I have to play the saxophone and flute, when I have to dance, and I feel better for doing it. I have to do these things but not because I have to be creative. It is all the more shameful because some hip revolutionaries wave the word 'talent' around as a threat, but it remains as a totally purposeless talent. Theatre groups, or to move ahead a little, street theatre groups, do their thing out of some sense of obligation to someone without even knowing why they are doing it, without knowing what they expect it to do or who they are doing it for.

Even for the sincere, the situation is tragic, for the avant-garde and the political artistic avant-garde pathetic. They still insist on maintaining their identity dependent on the sterile art forms which they emerge from. They grope around (the group grope being halfway to personal liberation) looking for the talented, the creative, scorning the party elite of the hack left, they invent a new hack vanguard, sprinting around the globe, letting off sparks of personal liberation like a neurotic catherine wheel. Content with the smoky little fires they create, marking up new communes and new groups, setting up fantastic communication networks between them merely in order, to give some illusion of totality. Going as far as to latch onto some harmless paragraph in an existentialist work, one that is been pencilled with approval by some humanist or other, chewing up these few dog-eared pages and emerging with ontological proof that the individual doing something liberating is making the revolution. - IT IS - but not when it's in a studio or in the Californian outback. Not when they immediately sterilise what they're doing, refine it, and stick it in an updated petrified form.

What is most pathetic is that these roving predators, or parasites, if your Charitable ness stops at 'Shelter', have none of the qualities of either an elite or a vanguard. They respond too much. Their essentially reformist nature, their total insecurity, resulting from their future to do anything, makes them grab hold of any scene however pathetic (they go down as far as soirees though there is the redeeming possibility of their motive being the food and drink) They do not have the self-confidence to wait until something important happens, they are always too afraid that they might miss the most spectacular and successful scene going. They don't have the self-confidence to make their own scene .They are only recognisable  by the question they ask 50 times a day ''Where's that guy at?  - there's always the possibility, the certainty, that the guy is at somewhere rather better than where they are. Self-confidence, belief in what you're doing, only results if you are in fact doing something. Not doing it just for its own sake, i.e. proving that you are in fact alive. The trouble with the futuristic artist is that he immediately sucks doing into his own particular brand of mediation, thus doing, creating, has become defined on the left as writing articles, and if the left is confident enough to be patronising, which it rarely manages, distributing articles. In the creative left, it is reduced to political theatre or film. Identifying themselves as specialists in one form of communication only, they lose sight of what that form can and cannot do, and respond automaton-like to every stimulus and situation with their trademarked skill. In the days of CND it used to be 'call a mass demonstration' and organise a march, now it's distribute a leaflet that is the reflex response. No wonder no-one's interested when you're so predictable.

This categorising of creating is a reflection of what is happening in bourgeois culture, in which one is either commercial or genuinely creative. It has 'high' and 'low' culture. There is something distinctly obscene about this division, the result of a self- fulfilling arbitrary categorising by bourgeois sociology. The market research ends up determining the market, and obscenely creates a 'class culture'. Obscene because it is externally created. Arrogantly imposing an identification with vulgarity. Worse still are those on the left who identify with this myth. The assumption made by bourgeois sociologists and bourgeois radicals alike is that the working class hasn't the sensitivity to see through all this cheapness that is thrust at them. But, one of the few things that suggests that revolution is possible is the consistent rejection of the cheap and vulgar, by many young workers, often by sabotage, when the communal lie imposed by the market researchers of cheapness being what the working class wants (i.e. a totally perverted 'class consciousness' which in fact prevents class consciousness) implies 'take this inferiority and shoddiness - it is your right, be proud of it'. It is just a rather more sophisticated lie than that of 'there is no class war anymore'. Instead of which the market research boys try and substitute class differentiation. The 1ousy council estates are smashed up by the genuine aesthetes, the guys who live in them. Unfortunately, it is only the more obviously patronising cheapness which is almost exclusively attacked. The market researchers are always one step ahead of their sidekicks, the social workers and the welfare. But the signs are there. Especially in the Glasgow gangs who'll smash ping pong culture as soon as look at it. So the ad men, the sociologists and the whole second line army of the monopoly capitalists, is sweating its guts out to renew the lie of cheapness is what they want. The argument that this is true because Centre 42 failed is laughable, precisely because Centre 42 was cheap, combining the cheapness of the social workers and the entertainment industry, taking Shakespeare to the masses, which meant reading out all the bits, usually from Henry IV which had the words 'piss' or 'whore', again being nauseatingly patronising, predicting a response, playing for it. The guy who dreamt up this monstrosity has now dragged his perversions to the trendy middle-class: Kustow's, ICA has the same sociology behind it, but is now applied to the other class. The so-called avant-garde has taken art back into the museums. Physically destroying the ICA is a work of art to be born in mind.

The other perversions are easily recognizable, they are all rehashes of T. S. Eliot, - one of the greatest perverters of all time - (how many radicals have still got Four Quartets on their shelves?) That it is: they complain about the vulgarity of their present, which some minds manage to connect to Capitalism, to see that it may have something to do with it, and yet at the same time revel in the vulgarity - they give it its own phoney aesthetics ('how sweetly sordid! Give me my ghetto suit, James') and thus preserve it, give it some rationale. These triple-faced vultures have in some other department of their minds a picture of a theoretical, completely ahistorical non- vulgarity. Those most to be most sympathised with are those who may have read slightly Eliotish, very moral and weak books like Henry Miller's 'Air-Conditioned Nightmare'. Modern life is mechanical, vulgar, mass-produced, pity me. Period.

They then progress a little and completely reproduce the false antithesis of the bourgeois, by making life totally, unpalatable. There are those who turn ascetic and, turn on to roots and berries, those who make their art as un-alluring as a berry and root diet, in order to be un-commercial. The fact that this also means nobody looks at their shining example remains oblivious, to them, again believing that their taking a stand on their individual conscience will change this mass vulgarity. There is a strain of mind that is so simplistic and lazy that it says 'revolutionary society will be diametrically opposed to this one, so you can't play any games because there is competition in games, all of them'. Their conception of a cooperative society is as unappetising as plastic angel-and-harp heavens. Again they are being ahistorical. How can anything change this society but changes in this society? We are living in it, it isn't a theoretical abstraction'' none of these people have got past the phoney sociology of the bourgeois.

I am suggesting then the very severe limitations on any attempt at personal liberation now. How can there be liberation in an unliberated world? The hippies desert the world, the creators and artists become totally cynical about political struggle, and in doing so allow the evil and unimaginative to exercise more and more power. In deserting the world of social reality, they impoverish the world and themselves.

But this is not an admission of despair or of the impotence of the individual. To be aware of one's situation in the world and to act, to live according to that awareness is a personal necessity. To become physically liberated, to be unafraid of our physicality is a personal necessity, 1 mean its necessary for our psychic health. Art must, in some degree, be therapeutic in this way. But in a world in which most are afraid of their physicality, this therapy is difficult if not impossible, when there exist no social and common means of this liberation. It can indeed be frightening after the perversion and repression on every level. We ourselves at this moment in history cannot be predictive, can provide no prototype for the post-revolutionary society, we cannot know how it'll be, though we can fight against what is evidently harmful now, the repression and subsequent perversion of our sexuality to for example. What we can do is to break down the barriers between those non-authoritarian revolutionaries in whose hands the future of the world lies. In removing the fear and defences among us, we become stronger in actual society for at the moment we are inevitably vulnerable - our sensitivity (which we shouldn't be bashful about) makes life difficult. And if we have no dignity, no confidence among ourselves, then our relation to the world will inevitably be defensive, and our appearance absurd and pathetic.

I am conscious of falling into that masochistic over self-critical tone that is unique to the left. All that must be said is that the creators must know what they are doing and why they are doing it and what they expect it to do, if they wish it to be revolutionary. Also there will be far less frustration and waste when they realise the simple impossibility of living the life of post-revolution, though I stress again that if our politics is not lived then it is useless. It is essentially this very frustration which causes the masochism you are aware of after another mass demonstration.

What clearly is more important is a comprehensive attack on bourgeois culture. Revolutionary art and entertainment will most clearly grow up in CONFLICT with their bourgeois counterparts. I mean a very direct attack on it, the breaking up of all the shows which are presented, especially the avant-garde versions, which are the more pernicious in that they actually absorb rebellion. The function of much non-avant-garde stuff is to be laughed at, and then we can all believe progress has been made: maybe it has but it is a totally irrelevant progression.

There is as I've said before the pathos of all those students, social workers, clergymen, moralists, hippies who are in a state of permanent indignation about bingo culture, while being comfortably aware of their own cultural interests. But who are they? Who in fact is being duped? In fact the more incomprehensible a film or book is, the more they like it. There is some very curious perversion here, but one which I am tempted to say is symbolic. By yet another wonder of imaginative rationalisation, AN ARTISTIC MERIT IS MADE OUT OF OUR STATE OF BEING MYSTIFIED. It is even more subtle than the more direct return to mysticism that the market research boys tentatively got going.

There has always been a strong sense of masochism in the consumption of high art, getting exhausted and bored in art galleries, fidgety in the Covent Gallery during The Ring but being totally unable to move or stretch, not even understanding what the story is about. In the consciously elitist cinemas, foreign films only, gloomy, incomprehensible in Swedish.

The pleasure in mystification put in art form, expressing in a grandiose way the banal mystification that we suffer every day is something quite different.

It is probably worth pointing out that the culture program is probably going to be successful. Education after an initial bout of technology for under-exploited countries likely to become the greatest consumer good of all, unless it is smashed. And of course the bookshops will be in on the racket as well. Penguins know what they're about. There will be more and more Classics, modern ones, as we return to a state of savagery, duped by trinkets with an aura of magic. The magic names of Eliot. Kafka. Dostoevsky are already irresistible. Their appeal resting so1ely on the illusion that you can find truth, some moralist's 'eternal truth' in isolation, via somebody else's  suffering. The suffering of a Dostoevsky or a Kafka is the spectacular suffering, a suffering that is posthumously given a sense of purpose by the art they produced; again the unromantic suffering of our everyday lives, the constant sacrificing for some illusory future, is absorbed and uplifted in a completely phoney way by these modern classics.

These are the illusions then that must be destroyed. We must get out of situations which admit arguments within terms of art criticism only and ask why these things are being written painted etc. It is difficult with the dead of course. With the living the tactic of direct personal confrontation could well be employed. The artist's anonymity is simply defensive, the flash journal interviews invariably sycophantic. The mystification about his purpose as being a prerogative of artists would be a flimsy defence in a situation of public conflict: an interruption perhaps of some pointless play leading onto a confrontation with the author and actors. To tread on the toes of bourgeois art you just have to be articulate, nothing more. How can the artist's self-mystification stand up to that?

This totally estranged high art has its complementary in consciously low art. Another good selling line is the consciously vulgar, artistically vulgar, what is, or was called 'camp' - it is not a solution only an alternative range of consumer goods. Laurel & Hardy, bad gangster films etc.

Everything then gets perverted. Almost all art forms mirror a capitalism that hardly believes in itself anymore. Each change of trend indicates the poverty of the last trend and thus of the next one and now they change faster than the rows on a fruit machine. Art becomes increasingly complex under the rationalisation of its being necessary in a complex world, but this doesn't hide the real cause of there being nothing to say. It becomes more complex because it is so unselective, no one thing being any more important than any other. The new equality of total poverty. Streams of consciousness because we no longer have any control over our consciousness, being assaulted all the time by the trivial unnecessary and irrelevant.

The, emergence of 'camp' is symptomatic of many of the essential features of modern capitalism. The whole thing is immediately visible in Notting Hill. It is the first thing that strikes. There is squalor and there is beauty that of the people there themselves. But the squalor is the more fundamental reality. In the same streets there are thousands of antique and curio shops. Selling stuff that is on the whole junk. (See King Mob on the tendency of capitalism to ultimately produce pure junk) In Notting Hill what they are doing is to make the seediness of the place a saleable commodity just as under the permissive morality  created because it is necessary to the greater and greater, demands of producers with their need of consumers, perversion and degeneracy became consumable commodities. Notting Hill is the Dickensian London of our time. So Portobello Rd. market becomes a commercial centre for the sale of junk, This actually is indicative of a weakness in modern capitalism. The strain in becoming more way-out gets stronger and stronger. And the escape from uniformity more and more difficult. However much the sociologists and market research boys try to hide the truth of uniform poverty of experience with cries of 'change your environment', the uniformity of trendy houses being filled with junk becomes obvious even to the people who live in them. Trying to make our homes unconventional instead of our lives by suggesting that if the fabric of the place we live in is unconventional, some breakaway from mass-production then our lives are. And at the same time they make material seediness into a beauty because they are more sophisticated than the 'socially-minded' builders of council houses making the seediness of our lives into something aesthetic.

Of course this second perhaps more grand motive of modern capitalism will fail as wi1l its primary effort to increase consumption infinitely. Ultimately this uniformity of the poverty of our lives will become apparent. Again I am arguing that the individual desire to be different, to escape this 'mass-producedness' is futile, when the social reality of uniformity and of poverty is overwhelmingly actual, unless it is a social confrontation with the social structures that produce uniformity. The 'individuality that results from the 'personal liberation' trail is in fact only the sum of them social alienations voluntarily undergone,  you only find your true individuality in social relationships, and in struggle.

As for the cineaste, soft spoken emigre of the human race, nourishing his credentials with the latest Godard, he speaks for himself. Look around you. This much credulity lacks credibility. His behaviour is that of abstraction, it is behaviour par excellence: an hierarchical gauntness: a muscular armour, programming his gestures and facial expression; eyes fierce from those hours of twilight staring. The portrait of an intellectual, exacerbated to grotesqueness by those patient cinematic hours of physical and mental absence. His rhetoric of defence defies, and tries to deny, analysis, it depends on such dubious concepts as 'the image', and is dissimulated under a haze of memorably articulate fragments, which neither form a 'whole', nor derive from any coherent attitude; and whose totality and delivery are informed only by the fear of being found out. Beneath the accents of fluency there is nothing , a man who is not conscious of the situation he is in, an unconscious man.

The cineaste can't read, he is a master of the illustrated synopsis, and has missed out on the resistance of words and thinking. He buys books. Similarly he believes he can absorb 'culture' through a kind of spiritual osmosis: by being 'their' at the beginning of a 'great-film'. Thus he accumulates his scholarship, from film to film. The bizarre courage with which he endures the sheer boredom of films, he draws from his conviction that its all part of the process. He is the victim of the superstition which sells cars: the personal assimilation of 'quality' through formal association.

Insofar as there are any physical PLEASURES IN COMPULSIVE FILM going, they are those of the circular, immolatory behaviour of the neurotic who tears his hair, peels his skin, and forgets the world in his own fascination.

Equal to the film in its power of conditioning its spectator, is the pop song. It also depends on the factors of captivity and total submission for its efficacy. Pop music induces an abstract orgasm by reducing the listener to itself, the 'fan' becomes the music, its strength and movement become his illusion often suddenly he is in control, the prime mover of his mechanised and impersonal environment, he occupies his environment, a riot is occurring. But all this is the shadow of genuine sense, it is a true occupation of the environment. Pop music capitalises on a growing but unformulated awareness among young people, that a riot is the only possible beginning for any personal-social-political movement, the only way to reduce the insanity and violence of the environment, which more and more is simply an apparatus of control, to ashes. The riot generates the anti-body of the state: social form. Pop music takes this intuition, exploits it, and defuses it.

If you don't fuck each other THEY will fuck you.

'When our relationship to words is corrupted, so is our relationship to things' (Heidigger).

Look at these people: the shiny seed of the monster, the parent and taxpayer; the MARKET for Cahiers du Cinema, John Lennon's affairs, Sunday Times 'enquiries', New Society, John Osborne's farts, The Satre/ Camus controversy, International Times, the David Frost show, film festivals, the top ten, a whole social reality, a 'world', the cover girl for the corpses of Vietnam and Mexico, which is where these people really are, CUSTOMERS of the N.F.T., the arts lab, the jazzed-up bureaucracy of the underground, a community of thighs, suckers for the for the CULTURAL MFI. Visconti, the Beatles, Jim Haynes, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, The Royal Academy, the I.C.A.

Yoko Ono- ..FALL GUYS for the professors - of the 'Histories' of art, literature or cinema, con-tricks of recent invention, whose purpose is the full employment of their progenitors.

, Eliminate the big shots and learn to manage our affairs.

Certainly not the students who have neither the intelligence nor the stamina to cope with real life situations.

Nor the Communist Party which in England is as about as powerful as the Boy Scouts movement.

Nor the Tariq Ali league or any of the other proprietors of revolutionary promises. They are more interested in being revolutionaries than in making the revolution.

The workers can count only on themselves.

Trotskyists, Maoists and other ideologists have failed entirely to come to grips with the contemporary reality of working class existence. This is hardly surprising as the distance they maintained from the working classes is greater than that of the middle class. Industrial work is still the fundamental experience of the working classes and as such is still the basis of revolutionary organisation. But the nature of work has changed radically over the past 30 years, and at the same time the areas of exploitation outside the factory have come to dominate life, just as much as those inside the factory.

It is left to the working classes to develop new forms of combat, such as football hooliganism, appropriate to modern conditions, while the ideologists lead the lives of Victorian liberal professors, and bicker over the words of dead men. Just as in the security of a family fantasy the members of the family will attack each other with vituperative and impotent ecstasy, the ideologists play games which are real only in the context of one single ideology: the impossibility of revolution.

Less magazines, comrades, more fires!

The Friends of Durutti.

Libcom note: This version combines the PDF (see foot of the page) previously available on Libcom with the text version from the Revolt Against Plenty website.

..... In Ireland the walls of repression are high and splattered with the blood of thousands of Irishmen and women. But they are old,and the wear and tear of the plaster is is to be seen everywhere. The cracks which for centuries have been covered over by the ivy of statesmen and religious leaders are beginning to appear. People who have been denied imagination are beginning to tire of all that destoys imagination. In some places the wall has already been rent; the foundation stone bears the scratch. It is our task to make this wall crumble and scatter in a thousand pieces as a thousand individual wills are grasped in a union with regenerated society. Our thunder must only contain the poetry of an orgy of self-release......

EX-CATHEDRA

'The truly free man is king and lord of creatures. All things belong to him. All things which God created are common; whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp'.

(POPE PAUL V1)

The Beginning of the End
Irish society is founded on all the failed revolutions of the past. From the first murmurings against the plantations right up to the present the might of tyranny has succeeded against the will of the people; or where the masters were ousted, tyranny merely changed hands. The revolutions of 1798, 1803, 1867, 1916, never succeeded in ridding themselves of the ideologies of nationalism and religion. The critique was always partial, and where this critique dominated the struggle, the struggle itself was falsified. It was never that people taking up arms and attempting to rid themselves of their masters was false; but that the motivations and ideologies which their masters imposed on them falsified the end-product.

Slave mentality continues in Ireland; only today this slavery is being carried out in the name of freedom, progress and the Republic. Capitalist economy manages to change illusions at an accelerating pace, a pace so fast and so il1usory that it manages to dissolve the very illusion of change. We find ourselves coming out from it, alone, unchanged, frozen behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks and behind the high wall of Masses and Rosaries offered up for our suffering.

Everyday pre-industrial society is meeting consumer society and at the appointed meeting place one monotony is exchanged for another.

People who used to die of poverty will begin to die of boredom; Keogh Square will be exchanged for the Ballymun Housing Estate. Today the unity between those still dying of poverty and those dying of boredom is the spectre which must destroy the immediate construction of reality.

THE DEATH OF RELIGION

Release man from the chains of myth. Religion was able to conceal man from himself; its Heaven welled him up in a pyramidal world with God at the Summit and the kings, princes, lords and bosses just below. The Jesuit father Charles grasped the real power of Christianity. 'Since Christ's Coming we are delivered, not from the pain of suffering, but from the pain of suffering uselessly'. The problem of hierarchical power has always been, not to suppress itself, but to give itself reasons so that it did not oppress uselessly! By marrying man to suffering, whether on the basis of Divine Grace or Natural Law, Christianity, that unhealthy therapy, pulled off its masterstroke. From Prince to manager, from Priest to university specialist, from father confessor to social worker, it is always the principle of useful suffering and willing sacrifice that forms the most solid base for hierarchical power. Everywhere today, in the official speeches, the Evening Press, the television, the disgusting image of that crucified man, the stupid halo of the suffering martyr, is grasped and used to justify that power. The crucified man on the cross, that sacrifice of all sacrifices, is the prototype of all the sacrifices that are made daily; the sacrifice of the worker to his boss, the sacrifice of the sexual desire to a repressive morality, the sacrifice of 'the difficult road of life' to a mythical future in Heaven.

At the bottom level the slave can identify himself with his master, the worker with his boss, to whom he delivers his life force. But who is the master to identify with? Since the master qua myth, sacrifices himself on the spiritual level, he must seek in the coherence of his myth something to which he can submit. This is why the class of masters have created a God before which he kneels down spiritually in order to identify with it. God, the greatest myth, authenticates the mythical sacrifice of the slave to the private power of the Mass. (The workers who are released from work on holy days by the masters in order to attend Mass is the system whereby the battery of sacrifice is recharged and the power of the masters affirmed). The master is seen to sacrifice his authority and his power as a servant to the excluded; he is ready to pay for the common good of the people. The master, if he is to remain a master must appear as a kind master.

The Reformation in Europe shifted the relationship to God by seeing it through the relationship to the devil. The psychological premise of Protestantism, as Norman 0. Brown justly remarked, is the conviction of sin. Now not only suffering must be accepted, but guilt must be the result if one does not suffer. This superb con effected the whole rise of the spirit of Capitalism; to welcome one's suffering as a punishment for the omnipresent and uncontrollable evil in the world, is to give up everything to one's master.

PROTESTANTISM VERSUS CATHOLICISM in Ireland was never anything more than the power amassed by a rising bourgeoisie against the Irish people. In 1652, Henry Jones, bishop of Clogher, supported Cromwell's slaughter of the Irish peasantry by calling it a religious war. While the henchmen of Cromwell drove the people from their lands and took their possessions, he dryly remarked 'the catholic murderers had to punished for their sins' meaning that their sacrifices had not been enough to allay God's anger or drive away the Devil.

A spirit of revolt has always existed within Christianity, though this spirit never reached into Ireland. What more could we say today than the 'Brethren of the Free Spirit' said in the 13th century; 'One can be so united with God that whatever one may do, one cannot sin' they said as they stripped off their clothes and danced to the death of their repressions, living unlawfully and justifying theft. From the Amaurians, the Taborites and the Anabaptists we can find a tradition within christianity for our present project. When the anarchist Pauvels planted a bomb in the Madelaine Church on the I5th March 1894 it was this great heretical tradition, which he, poorly though worthily, followed.

But there are no heretics now. The theological language which so many commendable uprisings expressed themselves was a mark of an epoch, the only language of the time. Henceforward one must translate; and the translator is self evident.

To our Maynooth comrades, to our Sunday morning Mass going revolutionaries, to our comrades in the priesthood all over Ireland we can only say that if we are to make a revolution worthy of the power of our imaginations then it must go further than the slow bicycle peddling to Belfield, the weekly recharge of sanctifying Grace and willing sacrifice, the banal ritual of a dead myth. Give sex a try this year and who knows some of the rust may have cleared away in time to enjoy it. Holy Communion, like junk, is difficult to break once one gets the habit.

THE 1916 REVELATION

'..contained some of the poetry of a people who had been beaten down by the heel of exploitation and who felt the passion and intensity of their newly promised freedom. Only to have it wrested from them as their new masters came into being, reinventing in the name of the revolution, all the old poverty and exploitation. They believed they were dying for their country; but they were dying for capital and their new masters. Irish history, and the people who made it, have always faltered on this tradition; one isolation, one monotony, one lie was being changed for another. The illusion of Gratten's parliament in 1793 was that it allowed the Catholics the freedom to vote for their protestant masters. The politics of Unionism was no more than the illusory bond between master and slave.

CONNELLY'S GREATEST MISTAKE was to side with the enemy and hope that the conscience of the masters would be such that freedom would be given away. Today this freedom is being sold in the supermarkets, the shops, on the television; the 'kindness' of the masters has proved to be total. And today, the totality of living being brutally denied can only create the totality of freedom being brutally affirmed.

Connelly, as Larkin, never understood the importance of everyday life and like Lenin, was blind to the total decomposition of forms that Nihilism had announced. When the workers in Cleeve's factory in Limerick in May 1920 declared a soviet, when the miners in Arigna, Leitrim, followed suite, when the workers in Bruree, Limerick took control of the mills, they had grasped a critique of their own everyday lives that was well in advance of their 'Leaders' or their Unions. The result showed their leaders once and for all to be on the side of power.

The history of Nationalism came to an end in 1916 when it became apparent that fighting for one's country was an abstract struggle in which the leaders of the struggle were the only one's to benefit. The IRA in the meantime, still felt the alienation and continued the struggle. But their critique lived in the nightmare of a destroyed myth; it failed to see the totality. When the government recently revealed that they had not ruled out force against the North last August, had the 'interests of the people' necessitated it, they had moved into the position of potential matricide. But it could not have killed the hand that fed it. The IRA, not serving the same interests as the government, could have only rooted out the oppressor had its critique gone further. We have moved out of the old days of colonialism.

Today no-one fights for their country. For what could be the possible use of fighting for a sham when that sham will be left to exploit you at the end of the struggle. What more can we do than echo, in the words of De Sade, Republicans, one more effort in order to be revolutionaries; whilst at the same time learning much from the tactics of our rebellious brothers-in-arms.

Everywhere to day, the Spectacle, the illusion of living, oppresses the attempt to break forth from the chains of myth. Everywhere, life and its thumping pulse is slowed down to a deadly pace. Death enters the living by the back-door of the illusion of living. From the Father Murphys on Vinegar Hill to the father Caseys on Charity Hill, from the Wolfe Tones to the decaying body of De Valera, from the pubs to the television sets, there is only to be found the pale representation of living.

And this representation has all the dynamism of an illusion. Save the Grand Canal. Save Hume Street. Save Sandymount Strand is the fragmentary belief in the good in our society and is at the same time, the last desperate effort to save fragmentary power. There is the flirtation with non-conformism, the protests, which are integral parts of prevailing power. Politicians reach out to artists just as much as artists reach out to politicians and in that unity the pulse of our society is seen to be restored.

The farce of the three day Seminar last year is the spectacle which allows the oppressed to redirect their own alienation. Ireland must not seem to lag behind and so the authorities direct a little gasp of student power.

IN THE HALF LIGHT THAT SOME HAVE CALLED LIVING

''.amidst the the total repression by religion, the illusion of freedom. consumer goods, poverty and boredom, everyone wants to breathe again and no-one can breathe. And most do not die because they are dead already. Today the only choice that exists is Suicide or Revolution. It is now or never.

IN A DUBLIN BAR Where everyone is bored a drunken man breaks his glass and smashes his bottle against the wall. Nobody gets excited. The disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out. But everyone there could have done the same thing; he alone made the thought concrete, crossing the first radioactive belt of isolation. He remains alone however, like the hooligan who burns a church or kills a policeman; at one with himself but condemned to exile.

For the nihilist, as for the young man, the distinction between living and surviving is taken seriously. If living is impossible, why survive? And in that void everything breaks up. The Nihilist, however cannot go on living as he is; he has been thrown out of too many bars. He must either throw a coin and decide on a good cause and become its devoted slave; like the dispassionate civil servant (poor Flann O Brien), like the dumb slave. For Art's sake, for the sake of the country, for God, for bread, or perhaps for the 'best of all possible causes' the proletariat. Individualism, Alcoholism, Republicanism , Trotskyism, Communism, Connellyism, Hinduism. Christianity, Catholicism, Voyeurism, Maoism, the whole variety of ideologies which offer a hundred ways of being on the side of power. He must always remain the social worker, tidying up the loose ends, but never for a moment suspecting the source of the discontent.

The active nihilist on the other hand is not content simply to watch things fall apart. He intends to speed up the process. Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary; passive nihilism is counter revolutionary. Most people oscillate between the two. But circumstances inevitably end by drawing a line and people suddenly find themselves once and for all on one side or other of the barricades.

The most potentially revolutionary phenomena in recent years has been the most savage outbreaks of juvenile delinquency. From the days of the 'ANIMALS' , the gang of thugs who terrorised and killed bookmakers in the 1940s to the teddy boys of the 50s right up to the present wave of hooliganism in our schools, a critique of alienation and decay is grasped and acted upon. In this waste land, co-habited by the suicide and solitary killer, there is a transition, a shifting ill-defined sphere, a period of wavering between extremes; one leading to subservience and submission, the other leading to permanent revolt.

The Lugs Brannigans, the police, the moralists, the psychiatrists, the sociologists, represent the absolute rejection by society of the individual and this can only correspond to the individuals absolute rejection of society. And the natural reaction to the chaos ruling the world is sabotage.

Sabotage is merely the crisis which is always impending manifesting itself in the open. There is definitely a crisis today. When the Pope blesses the United Nations and attacks the sociologists, when there is a flying apart of all values, the eunuchs of fragmentary power the psychologists, the moralists, the sociologists, the literary critics, the trade union bureaucrats, the politicians, attempt to grapple with the question of living only to push it still further out into a representation. The essential meaning is pushed aside and the totality of living is lost to the heirs of fragmentation.The anaemic Gods will be called in; The Popes, the Telhard De Chardins, the work-study officers, the leaders of the trade unions: the Conner Cruise O Briens, the Dail representatives, all the way down to the archbishops and the Denis Donaghues of UCD. The Body will be divided into forty pieces and lots shall be cast from the parts. Poverty and boredom shall be analysed and re-analysed and still nothing will reallychange. The workers will return from yet another strike, victoriously, and face a rising cost of living and a wider range of consumer goods. The sociologists will publish his article and wash his hands of the whole nasty business thinking that it had nothing to do with his own everyday life anyway.

Only the rusty pieces of silver shall be exchanged in the half light.

THE DEATH OF ART

For the last century and a half, the most striking contribution to art and life has been the fruit of free experiment with the possibilities of a bankrupt civilisation. The erotic reason of De Sade; Kierkegaard's sarcasm; Nietzsche's lashing irony; Mallarme's deadpan; Carroll's fantasy; Wilde's wit; Joyce's dream world. Dada's negativism -these are the forces that have reached out to confront people with some of the dankness of decaying values. And with it the desire for a reversal of perspective, a need to discover the alternative forms of life.

Consciousness of decay reached its most explosive expression in Dada. Dada did really contain the seeds by which nihilism could have been surpassed. But it was just left it there to rot, along with the rest. The Dadaists savage programme of total subversion exploded in a world of decay. Certain features of Romanticism had already proved, without waking the slightest interest on the part of Marx or Engels that art - the pulse of society and culture - is the first index of decay and disintegration of values. A century later while Lenin thought the whole issue beside the point, the Dadaist could see through the artistic abscess as a symptom of a cancer whose poison was spread throughout society as a whole.

('ARTS FINAL MASTERPIECE WILL BE ITS OWN DESTRUCTION' - Soffici.)

('The New Artist does not paint or write but creates directly, the New Artist protests' -Tzara.)

The Dadaists, working to cure themselves and their civilisation of its discontent 'working in the last analysis far more coherently than Freud himself built the first laboratory to revitalise everyday life. The Dada group was a funnel sucking in all the trivia and pure rubbish cluttering up the world. Reappearing at the other end everything was transformed.

One day that period from 1910 to 1920 will reveal its incomparable richness. For the first time a bridge between life and art was projected. There is very little of any importance, apart from the adventure of Surrealism, between that avante garde and the present project

'It is ridiculous and a sign of idiocy exceeding the legal limit to say that Dada (whose actual achievements and immense success cannot be denied) is only 'of negative value'. Today you can hardly fool first graders with the old saw about positive and negative. The gentlemen who demand the constructive are the most suspicious types of a caste that has long been bankrupt. It has become sufficiently apparent in time that law order and the constructive understanding for an organic development are only symbols. curtains and pretexts for fat behinds and treachery. If the Dadaist movement is nihilism, then nihilism is a part of life'' Richard Huelsenbeck 'En Avant Dada' I920

In its history Ireland has produced an incomparable number of exiles. Oscar Wilde whose 'Soul of man under Socialism' went way ahead of anything else in its time in its treatment of the creativity that lies in every man looking for a way of releasing it, gave only a partial critique. He remained committed to the spectator's art without realising, in his own words, that this remedy was part of the disease. He remained aloof over the spectator. Like Yeats, whose heart, sick with desire, awaited the Second Coming, when 'things fall apart, the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world'. Yet both did little to achieve that poetry in the world of everyday living.

Joyce, we are told never remarked on a public event. After that bible of individual creativity (Ulysses) all that could happen was that the Leopold Blooms of this world united to get rid of their poor survival and to introduce into the lived reality the richness and variety of their interior monologues. Joyce never joined with the Viennese workers nor with the Austrians. His total subjectivity amounted to total abandonment.

When the characters in Flann O Brien's novel unite to destroy the novelist and the novel within the novel they still face the real novelist: Flann O Brien! Their freedom is decided within the closed system of that novel. The task today is to unite to destroy our masters in the real world. There are no more artists because today everybody's an artist. The coming work of art is the construction of the passionate life, The poetry of everyday life couldn't care less about poetry. Mallarme's desire to abolish the poem can only take place when the poem is realised. The creation itself matters less than the process that engenders the work, the act of creating. It is the state of creativity, not the gallery, which makes the artist.

Indeed today the gallery, like all works of art has given way to the might of consumer society. The price tags, the museums, the attributes of a dead culture, only go to make our task the more vital. Today, in the universities, in schools, in the art collages, students are introduced into the arts of the dead generations and everywhere the poetry which flourishes in their hearts is denied them. They peek at the corpse of art and literature, which is laid out and cleaned up for them by the informing critics who slip backwards and forwards between text and audience stealing the decaying organs and exhibiting them.

When the art students raided the museums last year their critique of museum culture as well as a tactic for getting attention was correct. Bakunin before them, in 1848, when the barricades looked weak rushed into the museum and propped a few old masters against the failing structure. Its strength was increased a thousand fold.

Today to transcend Dada we must take up arms. Brutally repressed, the poetry of everyday life can consecrate riots, espouse revolts. As for the other poetry, the shit of Kennelly or Kinsella, the garbage of Murphy or Montague, we can only pass over to the garbage cans. Their Bohemianism is pathetic; they still cling desperately to their degraded versions of individual revolt. You must destroy the Poet, the Literary Critic, the Sociologist, the Painter, the lorry driver within you in order that you can make poetry. Real poetry is in the event or situation which one creates.

Dublin: 1968