Culture and Revolution

(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?)