Janco’s masks for the Cabaret Voltaire
Gregori Pujadas
This essay aims to focus on the influence and the synthesis of Anarchism developed by three avant-garde artists to explore whether their approach to Anarchism was a ritual or a reality in their work. Firstly I will describe the avant-garde in relation to anarchy and use the example of Marcel Duchamp’s Wanted $2,000 Reward, to analyze the playful approach of anarchy in how it aligns with criminal activity and then outline Duchamp’s influence in this respect. Secondly I will explain how the term ‘art and life’, implanted by the Dadaists, became ‘art or life’ with the work of Chris Burden, tackling issues and situations where the state of the human body was surrounded by an anarchy of danger and absence. Thirdly I will interpret how artistic inspiration infiltrates the representation of crime with the work of Santiago Sierra, where art is also anarchic as a transgression of the established cultural, economic and social order. The analysis of the representations of anarchy in the artists’ works offers an understanding of it as a form of ‘social terror’—a ritualised anarchism that operates as a phenomenon and activity in a social and political context.
First International Dada Fair at Galerie Otto Burchard, Berlin, 1920.
The notion of the avant-garde as an anarchist practice.
Art and crime have a relationship as close and ancient as the first babbles of the Dada movement in the Cabaret Voltaire. In the period after the First World War, art was in a process of change. In some cases, to speak of the appearance of the vanguards is to speak of a sequence of transgressions outside the framework of legality. This ‘vanguard’ concept is in a close relationship with the political vocabulary, as well as activism, in terms of the will to break with and to revolutionise artistic practice. It is a confrontation with the established order and the criteria assumed by the high economic and intellectual classes. The Dadaists, the Futurists or the Surrealists point to the economy of transgression: artistic movements that enunciated subversion before the art that was produced. This behavior of the avant-garde aimed to develop anarchist and revolutionary roles within the intellectual reception of their manifestoes. They had lost confidence in their ‘culture’ to the extent that they thought everything had to be demolished so that they could begin with a clean slate. The Cabaret Voltaire began by shocking the bourgeois by demolishing their idea of art—but this was to also attack common sense and public opinion, educational institutions, the ‘good taste’ of museums attack the whole prevailing order (Lippard, 2007: 36). The art works that were created during the avant-garde era also worked as weapons to break the barrier between art and life. Ostensibly far from capitalism and its elitist classes the goal of artistic creation was to cause an impact and change in society, this idea combined two key concepts of the time: Anarchism and Communism. A form of Anarcho-individualism won over new recruits from the neo-symbolist, Futurist and Cubist movement (Antliff, 1998: 102). The number of twentieth century artists with an anarchist ideology, who later became Communists, was surprising: this list even included names like Malevich and Picasso. These were radical artists exploring new ways of life and the art of the early twentieth century is an example of the similarity between art and terrorist activity as twin activities capable of breaking the monopoly of thought; capable of making a fissure in the general tendencies of societies; capable of destabilizing the established order and are practically impossible to control—effectively a social terror (Rielo, 2014: 35).
Marcel Duchamp—The playful approach to crime
Due to the First World War, Duchamp moved to the United States, and this move also marks his interest and experiments with different ‘readymades’. He developed the term in 1915 to describe his modified or altered objects, where the relationship between the objects and their meaning was consciously diminished. By using objects unrelated to each other, new relationships and meanings could be created and this playful approach to his proposals gave him a reputation as the great player of modern art. Duchamp’s work was a rejection of behavior as an artist, with an exaltation of absurdity and chance. He attacked social classes and the notion of the artist as a genius. He opened the discourse of new ethics within modernity, where he carried out an exaltation of subjectivity. In 1923 Duchamp made the work Wanted $2,000 Reward, a collage constructed by himself where he reflects on the role of the artist, a character who questions his own identity. Wanted is a readymade based on a police poster that Duchamp found in a showcase of a restaurant in New York. He added two blurry photos of himself; front and profile together with a description of the fugitive, where it said he was also known as Rrose Sélavy, the female alter ego that he used so much during his works. This work reflects the artist’s image like a delinquent, a sought-after artist, but above all one who does not find himself. Duchamp initiates a rather subtle delinquency with Reward. With the creation of the character Rrose Sélavy the gender change is appreciated as a construction to understand his corporeal death.
Marcel Duchamp. Wanted, $ 2.000 Reward. Readymade rectified.
Can we consider the work of Duchamp nihilist? The central idea of Duchamp was the conception of the artistic creation as a result of an exercise of will, within a purely spontaneous act and without taking into account the previous formation or talent. They are ideas closely related to nihilism to which the Dadaists were sympathetic as a result of the impact generated by the First World War and that put the entire international culture in crisis. The Dadaists distrusted order and reason, and established the idea of irrational nihilism, thus becoming a limited artistic movement. On the other hand, Duchamp sustains his artistic activity as a critique of criticism. Can art be made with a critique of the same work of art? Duchamp demonstrated that yes, art can be the means to interrogate the foundations of culture. It was the Nietzschean ‘overcoming of nihilistic noon’, as well as the most prophetic and literary concept, one of the ‘eternal return’ of the identical and the ‘superman’. These ideas were closest to the nucleus of Duchampian thought (Menéndez, 2001: 126). The superman of Nietzsche imposes himself to the crisis of contemporaneity, but for this the will to power has to be established. In this way the superman emerges as an individual who accepts the epoch that he is living in and understands the existence as a process of overcoming. From here, the art, in this case of Duchamp, was the aesthetic justification of existence—the art was united with the life. From this arises the great importance of Duchamp and the impact he had on future artistic practices. This interest in Duchamp’s work began to assert itself towards the middle of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties. This influence extended to the representation of the dematerialization of art with the use of non-traditional materials, giving rise to Conceptual art, Performance Art or Body Art—considering the body as a place and a means of artistic expansion, as a new material and support.
Chris Burden—The materialization of the ‘crime fiction’
Chris Burden, You’ll never see my face in Kansas City, 1971
If I turn now to the artists of the 1970s, they were concerned with art based on action, as well as body art, rather than objects created for an elite market. Chris Burden, an American artist wanted to respond to a specific historical context with a performance that altered the state of the product of artistic activity within the market. This was a response to the Vietnam War and we can understand it as a protest amongst an abundance of high intensity artistic responses to the war. People had to endure psychological and emotional injuries that were installed in the sense and guilt of who we were as a society. Burden put to the limit the anarchy of his body as response and attitude behind the immoral acts of society: he used the body to an excess. We can consider that within the artistic practice there is an evolution of a modified nihilism, where the “negativity” is assumed as a means of expression of the language of the artist, and that it does not abandon the cultural questions of meaning and value.
Chris Burden, Five Day Locker Piece, 1971
Chris Burden, Shoot ,1971
In Five Day Locker Piece, Burden responds to these issues of war, where he was locked for 5 days in a box office with 22 litres of water bottled on top of his top locker and an empty bottle of 22 litres located in the lower locker. The Vietnam War is represented as a metaphorical space and, at the same time, the survival of the human body, since it put his health at risk. His objective is to originate knowledge, that is to say, its artistic practice is not ritual, since it creates in the spectator a decisive conscience in terms of body politics next to the pain limit of the social reality. In his work the will to power of which Nietzsche speaks is reflected upon, since it implies a process of overcoming where the positive-negative interaction is reflected in how the meaning of life is inseparable from the meaning of death. These actions involved a criminal activity or a real physical danger to him or to the people who witnessed the action. Such a perspective shows that human existence is never fixed and settled, but rather a continuing confrontation with change, limits and negative forces (Hatab, 1987:103).
With his performances, he proposed a liberation through the limits of collective horror, with the individualization of the body as a weapon of social action. Shoot, 1971, is one of his best-known and most controversial performances, where he shoots himself in an arm with a real gun. This action was a critique about the American culture about firearms, the War in Vietnam and the acceptance and normalization of the violence implanted since then in particularly American society. While Guy Debord denounced the perversion of television, Burden in TV Hijack 1972 carried out a real kidnapping on a television set where he placed a knife in the presenter’s throat threatening her with death if they cut the transmission. The borders explored by Chris Burden shared the transformation of the idea of “art and life” that the Dadaists implanted, to be “art or life”. The representation of the crimes was installed within the artistic practice, where the body with scars was a record of the work itself. Violence became a daily spectacle, thus originating a future approach to the action of art in society and in terms of body politics.
Santiago Sierra—The question of human rights
If I turn now to the contemporary artist Santiago Sierra, his actions have been nourished by the derivations of Duchamp’s concept of readymades, but not the meaning or purpose of the performances of the 70s, where the artist was a transformer and a social activist. The performance of Sierra, where people become ‘performative readymades’, visualized the idea of work as something humiliating, in a sense that makes us reflect on the perverse nature of work and its relationship with moral values in today’s society. In performances, where performers are subcontracted to perform the artistic proposal, they aim to attack the work itself, just as it has been conceived in capitalist societies. Sierra opposes the imaginaries that dignify the worker as a virtue of improvement for society, acts that speak of a social system that is perverse. Sierra does not adopt the position of a political activist and he rejects the role of artist as a social worker. It reverses the dynamics of the capitalist system, thus Sierra is the ‘entrepreneur’ in his artistic actions, where he negotiates with the workers and sets the work guidelines, showing a hierarchy and his position of power. It highlights the role of artist in the art market. It is not that of a simple worker, instead it one of an entrepreneur within globalized capitalism. It transgresses the reality of social order with an anarchic approach. In Spain, in 2000, he tattooed a continuous line on the backs of a group of prostitutes addicted to heroin; line of 160 cm being thus a remunerated action for the price of an injection. This work has a precedent in Havana 1999; a line of 250 cm where he hired six young, unemployed men and also tattooed a line that joined them. Sierra plays with the concept of the border between life and art, since his ‘workers’ are marked for the rest of their lives by their intervention with the tattoo. With these actions, he simply refers us to the precarious working conditions and the exploitation that is characteristic of capitalism. It is said that political freedom is essentially a negative concept, freedom from restriction, manipulation or control (Hatab, 1987: 105).
Santiago Sierra, Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2003
Santiago Sierra, line of 160 cm., 2000
In 2003 he was chosen to represent the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, his action was to cover the word ‘Spain’ with black plastic and tape, and prevented access to the Pavilion by building a brick wall in front of the main door. To access the Pavilion, you could only enter through the back door where two guards asked all visitors to present their Spanish passport in order to gain access inside—an action that refers to those lands of cities and closed countries that define exclusion and social separation. Sierra’s actions do not seek originality, but are connected and involved with reality, where it puts in question the concepts of obeying and ruling within society. Sierra is thus a ‘subject of knowledge’, where he is granted an authority of freedom. In fact he passes the blame to social order. It presents human rights as a term of what a human being is not. Art for him should not change society: it is the political system that has to change, towards the creation of an individual freedom. Therefore, ‘rights’ refer to the ways in which a society recognizes the limits of how a human person can be defined (Hatab, 1987: 106). Sierra believes that not having hope is very useful, and says: a person who has no hope and is not afraid is very dangerous to the system (Sierra, 2012).
Conclusion
The impact of anarchism caused by the vanguards mentioned above, as we can see, still persists today as an artist’s thought and role in the society. Duchamp was not only an anarchist, he was an influential element and representative of the change in artistic practice from the mid-fifties until today. He created the idea that art is used to interrogate the foundations of culture, and his influence is undoubted today. With his playful character in artistic practice, the notion of art as a social action became the perfect union of ‘art and life’, both for its aesthetic justification of existence and for its dematerialization of art. A Duchampian art became anarchic in the body of artists in the 70s. Chris Burden, during his period of the Body Art, demonstrated that his artistic actions were not pure rituals, it was art with social demands, facing issues of social reality with a negative approach and denunciation. The actions of Sierra provoked denunciation on the part of the critic. This anarchic anti-system vision puts in question the laws of the social order, thus putting in question his own art since he becomes “the system” through his actions. Sierra touches the reality of social order with his fingers, he is an artist turned into a social power. Artists act with anarchy as mediators of reality. Today, the anarchist practice within art has reached such a point that it has become a relation between negativity and meaning, where it is shown that there is no preservation of our individuality and freedom as citizens in the current global society.
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