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Anarchism & Arts Richard Kostelanetz: Anarchist Art Art with anarchist themes and anarchist forms is not the same as art containing anarchist slogans. The latter includes certain poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Jackson Mac Low, or even Jenny Holzer, who write phrases than can be understood, or interpreted, as anarchist but are formally no different from newspaper headlines, which are not art — just newspaper headlines. Emma Goldman’s Living My Life (1930), is no collection of slogans, but nor does it convey anarchist themes; it is the story of individual accomplishment over severe adversities. Instead, let us consider art that is distinctly anarchist in plot, anarchist in image, and anarchist in form. An example of the first is Henry Miller’s multi-volumed novel, which portrays self-liberation from society and the discovery of an instinctual self that cannot be socialised by outside forces, whether they be institutions, bureaucracies, employers, or marriage. I read Miller while in college and completed an honours thesis on his work in 1962, just as his best books were becoming commonly available here; his book certainly affected my continued resistance to all those socialising antagonists. A less familiar example of anarchist plot appears in Clayton Patterson’s great videotape about the Tomkins Square Riot of 1988. Using an extremely portable video camera, held on his hip, and the natural lighting of a hot summer New York night, Patterson portrays the police attempt to disrupt a people’s protest against the closing of a Lower East Side park that had become the last refuge of the homeless. As more and more cops come, Patterson’s camera portrays them looking anxiously at one another, visually revealing the truth that officials later made public — that the policemen did not know what they were supposed to do. After many taunting screams and some violent exchanges, all intimately portrayed, a tall man in civilian clothes arrives, surveys the scene, and with a flick of his head instructs the police to retreat back into the buses that take them home. The film ends with the people retaking the park as the sun comes up. Another unfamiliar example of anarchist plot is Lee Baxandall’s play Potsy (1963), which tells of the local power monopoly’s attempt to electrify an outhouse over its owner’s objections. In collusion with the state, which has authorised that all man-made constructions be electrically serviced, Consolidated Incorporated intimidates a reluctant customer. In response, Baxandall’s protagonist Potsy lays his body on the pot, so to speak: Pay yet some attention, workmen. Loka! Piszok Baika loka! Brudy! Mykja mykja! Skin. Cacones cacones. A zulla szennyl Szenny! Saasta bagla gailca, vaika. Len, plehna. Len lort ion ion Ion ion! Kunya suka zumliol Suka! (The gestures grow more anguished.) Szar ulosteet! Oosee oosee oosee cacoties! Sprosnosc mcconio. Mykjaa each cauch, ossee oosee. Caakaaaaaaaaaaaah! Track smuts. Aolachl Inneir, teyl fegradh schijt, men. Gaou, salachar. (etc.) Though Baxandall thought himself a Marxist at the time, even compiling a bibliography of Marxist aesthetics (and later editing the mostly Marxist Radical Perspectives in the Arts, 1972), it seemed to me clear at the time that the thrust of Potsy was anarchist, saying that society has no right to invade a human being’s throne. So I was scarcely surprised that Baxandall went on to write guides to nude beaches, another kind of outhouse that authoritarians and their ally the state want to shut down. An example of art with an anarchist image is the Living Theater’s Paradise Now (1968). It is structured as a series of challenges to the audience, in which the performers scream slogans that are not ends in themselves but provocations designed to make the audience respond. “I’m not allowed to travel without a passport”. “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana”. When they scream, “I’m not allowed to take my clothes oft”, some spectators respond by undressing and others not, creating an image in which some are liberated and others not. A second anarchist image so vivid in my head has audience members leaping off the stage into the crossed arms of several men. Both nudity and leaping into the air are images of liberation, which is what the paradise of Paradise Now is all about. (The leaping image resembles a famous Yves Klein photograph of himself, but without the context that, for the Living Theater, makes leaping political.) It is indicative that when the Internal Revenue Service closed the Living Theater in the fall of 1963, they were rehearsing a production of Baxandall’s Potsy! The master of anarchist form was John Cage, who from early in his career made sound pieces without climaxes, without definite beginnings and ends, without boundaries. Another characteristic is that they were perforated by individuals functioning as equals. Looking back over his entire work, to the beginning of his career in the 1930s, you’ll find him never employing a conductor who makes interpretative decisions. (His conductors, instead, merely keep time, not even beat.) Nor does Cage allow solo performers to stand out from the background group. His pieces are customarily characterised as chaotic, but in their chaos is their politics. On the floor of HPSCHD, performed in a humongous basketball arena, were seven amplified harpsichordists each with different scores. Two had different collages of harpsichord music from Mozart to the present; three had differently fixed versions of Mozart’s “Introduction to the Composition of Waltzes by Means of Dice”. One more harpsichordist played “computer print-out for twelve-tone gamut”, while the last keyboard operator had nothing more specific than blanket instruction to play any Mozart he wished. Around the arena Cage distributed fifty-two tape machines, each playing tapes of computer-composed sound in fifty-two different scales (ranging from five tones to an octave to fifty-six tones). With so many disparate sound sources the result could only be microtonal din. If you listen to the recording made of this piece, that is what you hear. For the original performance Cage added a profusion of images from both slides and film. What is portrayed in this and in other Cage pieces is individuals working together and apart, each acting on his or her own authority, in concert with others, all without a conductor. In these respects, HPSGHD and other Cagean pieces become models of an anarchist society. He was always anarchist. ‘When Cage was first invited to write music to accompany a text, back in the early 1940s, the writer he first approached was Henry Miller. Since Miller’s obscenity proved problematic, Cage chose another writer whose politics were likewise anarchist, Kenneth Patchen; and when setting writers’ texts, Cage frequently favoured the poetry of E. E. Cummings, whose politics were, to my mind, mostly anarchist as well. Consider not only The Enormous Room (1922), which is easily available, but the prose masterpiece that has long been out of print, Eimi (1933), which is a critical report of his 1931 trip to Russia. In the recently published collection of letters between Cage and Pierre Boulez in the late 1940s is Cage’s charming proposal for “a society called Capitalists Inc (so that we will not be accused of being Communists). Everyone who joins has to show that he has destroyed not less than 100 disks of music or one sound recording device; also everyone who joins automatically becomes President”. Making every member a king, Capitalists Inc would, of course, be another anarchist community. Not unlike other anarchist art, Cage’s work is essentially comedic; for whereas tragedy portrays what should not happen, comedy is about possibilities, not only in life but art. If you say, as I do, that nothing is more politically profound than anarchic comedy, then you could expand the canon of anarchist art to include the art of the Marx Brothers, Spike Milligan, and even Bugs Bunny. If a work of art is to be truly anarchist, its means corresponding to its ends, it must be anarchist in its plot, anarchist in its images, or anarchist in its form.