Abstract
The arts have been integral to anarchism since its inception in the nineteenth century. Foundational thinkers including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman wrote persuasively and eloquently about the power of art as a potential tool of social criticism, revolutionary vision, and an essential component of a life free of domination. Some contemporary anarchists pick up on these themes while opening new ones: especially, the relation between art and anarchists’ quest for a life free of alienation, and the role played by some popular forms of art in opening cracks in dominant structures of everyday life where anarchist values and practices can take root. They emphasise the prefigurative capacity of art: its capacity for pointing toward a better world of greater freedom and less domination, and the ways some art forms already model that world. This chapter will, first of all, summarise the arguments of foundational and contemporary anarchists while further developing some of them. Second, for purposes of illustration, it will interpret several popular art forms in terms of anarchist values of autonomy, equality, power, and direct action. Third, the chapter will argue that these art forms prefigure deeper forms of democracy than currently practised in neoliberal democracies.
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Notes
- 1.
Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, “Introduction: Towards Anarchist Art Theories,” in Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland (Eds), Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority (Oakland, CA, 2007), 3–5, 3, 4.
- 2.
Mark Mattern, Anarchism and Art: Democracy in the Cracks and on the Margins (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016), 7.
- 3.
See, for example, Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007); Nina Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012); John G. Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1994; and Mark Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism: The ‘Aestheticism’ of the Action d’art Group,” 1906–1920,” Oxford Art Journal 21.2 (1998)), 22–120.
- 4.
On the distinction between art for art’s sake and art in the service of social revolution, see for example Emma Goldman, The Social Significance of Modern Drama (New York: Applause Theater Book Publishers, 1987 [1914]), 3; and David Graeber, “Anarchism, academia, and the avant-garde,” in Randall Amster, Abraham DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella, II, and Deric Shannon (Eds), Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An introductory anthology of anarchy in the academy (London: Routledge, 2009), 103–112, 109.
- 5.
Mark Mattern, “John Dewey, art and public life,” Journal of Politics 61:1 (February 1999), 54–75; and Mattern, Anarchism and Art. See also Nancy Love and Mark Mattern, “Introduction: Art, Culture, Democracy,” in Love and Mattern (Eds), Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013).
- 6.
Mattern, Anarchism and Art, 8.
- 7.
I tend to agree with the pragmatist and participatory democrat, John Dewey, who called distinctions between high and low art as ‘out of place and stupid’. Dewey, Art As Experience, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, volume 10: 1934, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989 [1934]), 231.
- 8.
As a very partial defence of this position, I only note that it is doubtful that the musicians creating the dance music that Emma Goldman defended (see below, in text) were anarchists, and doubtful that most of her fellow dancers identified as anarchists. For Goldman, that was beside the point. The point was the expressiveness and joy captured in dancing, and how that affective experience enlivened and enriched her life.
- 9.
Emma Goldman, Living My Life, volume I (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931) and volume II (Hempstead, NY: Garden City Publishing Company, 1934); volume I, 56. Her defence of dancing has subsequently been rendered succinctly, if somewhat inaccurately, as ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution’.
- 10.
Timothy Robbins, “Emma Goldman Reading Walt Whitman: Aesthetics, Agitation, and the Anarchist Ideal,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 57:1 (Spring 2015), 80–105, 83.
- 11.
Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 5–6.
- 12.
Ian McEwan, quoted in Dolan, Ibid., title pages.
- 13.
Graeber, ‘Anarchism, academia’, 110–111.
- 14.
Humboldt, quoted in Noam Chomsky, “Introduction,” in Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), vii–xx, xi.
- 15.
Laurence Davis, “Morris, Wilde, and Le Guin on Art, Work, and Utopia,” Utopian Studies 20.2 (2009), 213–248, 213.
- 16.
John P. Clark, “Anarchy and the dialectic of utopia,” in Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna (Eds), Anarchism and utopianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 9–29, 18.
- 17.
A short list would include, for example, Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, most neoimpressionists, most early twentieth-century artists who became Communists, Kazimir Malevich, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Man Ray, Robert Henri, Wassily Kandinsky, Rockwell Kent, Frans Masereel, and Mark Rothko.
- 18.
See Graeber, ‘Anarchism, academia’, 109–110 on this point. See also Julian Eagles, “Marxism, Anarchism, and the Situationists’ Theory of Revolution,” Critical Sociology 43:1 (2017), 13–36 for artists’ attempts within these movements to merge art and life.
- 19.
To listen to Griffin’s song, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPeIrp-aIOY.
- 20.
Witz’s website URL is http://danwitz.com/index.php?article_id=11. His two hummingbird projects are at http://danwitz.com/index.php?article_id=56 and http://danwitz.com/index.php?article_id=88.
- 21.
Herbert Read, ‘To Hell With Culture’, in To Hell With Culture (London: Routledge, 2002 [1941]), 23.
- 22.
Herbert Read, Art and Alienation: the Role of the Artist in Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 26.
- 23.
Catherine M. Nutting, “Art and Organicism: Sensuous Awareness and Subjective Imagination in Herbert Read’s Anarchist Aesthetics,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 45.2 (Fall 2012), 81–94, 91.
- 24.
Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonosky (London: Penguin Books), 1995, 40.
- 25.
Gurianova, Aesthetics of Anarchy, 45.
- 26.
For a discussion of Godwin’s fiction, see Jared McGeough, “Unlimited Questioning: The Literary Anarchism of William Godwin,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination 45.2 (Fall 2012), 1–25.
- 27.
Pierre Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination social (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1865), 43, 84.
- 28.
Peter Kropotkin, “Appeal to the Young,” in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, Roger N. Baldwin, (Ed), (New York: Dover Press, 1970 [1880]), 273.
- 29.
Goldman, Social Significance of Modern Drama, 1–2.
- 30.
Ibid., 3.
- 31.
Patricia Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 20.
- 32.
These paintings are reprinted in Leighten, Ibid., 21, 19, and 43, respectively. The book contains many other examples.
- 33.
Ibid., 177.
- 34.
See, for example Clark, ‘Anarchy and the dialectic’; and Laurence Davis, “Everyone an artist: art, labour, anarchy, and utopia,” in Davis and Kinna, Anarchism and Utopianism, 73–98.
- 35.
Peter Marshall, Preface to Anarchism and utopianism, in Davis and Kinna, Ibid., xii–xvi, xiv.
- 36.
Quoted in Cindy Milstein, “Reappropriate the Imagination!,” in MacPhee and Reuland, (Eds), Realizing the Impossible, 296–307, 305.
- 37.
Patricia Leighten, “Reveil Anarchiste: Salon Painting, Political Satire, Modernist Art,” in MacPhee and Reuland (Eds), Realizing the Impossible, 26–41, p. 27. Leighten singles out Picasso and other Cubists for special consideration. On the role of art in stimulating and expanding imagination, see also MacPhee and Reuland, “Introduction”.
- 38.
I have argued these points at length elsewhere. See Mattern, Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Mattern, “John Dewey, art, and public life”; Mattern, Anarchism and Art; and Love and Mattern, Doing Democracy. On the affective power of art, see for example Jill Gregory, April Lewton, Mark Mattern, Stephanie Schmidt, and Diane Smith, “Body Politics With Feeling: The Power of the Clothesline Project,” New Political Science 24:3 (September, 2002), 433–448. On the capacity of art for building empathy, see Mattern, “Steve Earle and the Politics of Empathy,” in Mark Pedelty and Kristine Weglarz (Eds), Rock Politics: Rock Musicians Who Changed the World (London: Ashgate, 2013), 131–148.
- 39.
MacPhee and Reuland (Eds), Realizing the Impossible. See Mattern, Anarchism and Art, for many examples of direct action in the worlds of DIY punk music, poetry slam, graffiti and street art, and flash mobs.
- 40.
Sociologist Erik Olin Wright called these ruptural, symbiotic, and interstitial strategies respectively. Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London and New York: Verso, 2010). See also John Holloway’s defence of an interstitial strategy in Crack Capitalism (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2010).
- 41.
See, for example, Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Automedia, 1991); andRichard Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 126.
- 42.
See Mattern, Anarchism and Art, 7 for a relatively long list of these prefigurative forms, drawn from various academic and activist anarchist sources.
- 43.
For an extended analysis of the prefigurative work of graffiti and street art, see “Graffiti and Street Art,” Chap. 5 in Mattern, Anarchism and Art, 81–104. Other chapters address case studies on the prefigurative capacity of DIY punk music, poetry slams, and flash mobs.
- 44.
Bookchin’s charge was met with a chorus of criticism. See Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1995). For responses to Bookchin, see for example the debate in Anarchist Studies 4:2 (1996) and 6:1 (1998) among L. Susan Brown, Janet Biehl, and Thomas Martin; and Bob Black, Anarchy after Leftism (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press, 1997). See also Bookchin’s “Whither Anarchism: A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics,” in Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993–1998 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1999). Laura Portwood-Stacer’s Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism (New York: Blooomsbury, 2013) can be read as a defence against Bookchin’s charge.
- 45.
See Mattern, Anarchism and Art, 56–57. For an earlier, largely-undeveloped discussion of DIT, see Evan Landon Wendel, “New Potentials for ‘Independent’ Music: Social Networks, Old and New, and the Ongoing Struggles to Reshape the Music Industry,” Master Thesis (Comparative Media Studies), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2008,” 57. On DIO, see George McKay, DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain (London: Verso, 1998), 27.
- 46.
Hutton, Neo-Impressionism, 90. For more on this tension, see, for example, Christine Flores-Cozza, “Life, Labor, Art: A Discussion with Carlos Koyokuikatl Cortez, in MacPhee and Reuland (Eds), Realizing the Impossible, 8–19.
- 47.
Mattern, Anarchism and Art, 59.
- 48.
On an economy of frugality and sufficiency, see especially Wolfgang Sachs, Planet Dialectics (Zed Books, 1999).
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Mattern, M. (2019). Anarchism and Art. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_33
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