Abstract
Between Vorticism, the post-WW2 Independent Group and the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibit of 1968, elements of a working-class internationalism emerge that define both the circumstances of a revolutionary art and its methodology, founded upon a confrontation with the aesthetico-political ideology of work as alienated surplus-production. In positioning art-work as “general commodity” (Bataille) against the commodification of the “artwork” as artefact of an impoverished aesthetic labour, the avant-garde subverts the tragic view of history presented by Peter Burger in the supposed failure of the avant-garde to resist appropriation to the “culture industry.” In contrast, the radical tendencies represented by such artists as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Eduardo Paolozzi and Gustav Metzger and persisting in the work of Laura Oldfield Ford, for example, can be regarded as a discourse of irrecuperability, born of the “impoverishment” of aesthetico-political totalisation as it succumbs to the excessive labour required to sustain the illusion of itself. And just as this failure of totalisation is always to some extent an aestheticisation, so too it ultimately constitutes the work of the avant-garde.
Highlights
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The radical tendencies represented by such artists as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Eduardo Paolozzi and Gustav Metzger and persisting in the work of Laura Oldfield Ford, for example, can be regarded as a discourse of irrecuperability, born of the “impoverishment” of aestheticopolitical totalisation as it succumbs to the excessive labour required to sustain the illusion of itself
The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect
Summary
Between Vorticism, the post-WW2 Independent Group and the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibit of 1968, elements of a working-class internationalism emerge that define both the circumstances of a revolutionary art and its methodology, founded upon a confrontation with the aesthetico-political ideology of work as alienated surplus-production. Metzger’s mid-1960s collaboration with poet Bob Cobbing, for the DIAS (Destruction in Art) Symposium at Better Books on Charring Cross Road – like the exchanges between Gaudier and Ezra Pound that fuelled Blast, and the Independent Group’s ICA lectures and the work around the 1956 ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery – is likewise indicative of a socially-grounded practice, but one that repudiates the facile equivalence of aesthetic autonomy with individualism That such practice is grounded in the re-use of ephemera and the production of categorically ambivalent artefacts, or non-artefacts (performances, interventions, auto-destructions), amplifies an intransigence towards art work as productive of commodification. As economy-without-reserve, Metzger’s auto-destructive art work echoes Gaudier’s concept of the vortex as ‘INTENSITY OF LIFE BURSTING THE PLANE’: a negation, by way of the ‘transformation of technology into public art,’ of the fetish economy of cultural ‘ruins’ (Wilson, 2008: 184)
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