Rather than discuss why the avant-garde remains a central point of reference for discussing the politics of art, this article addresses the philosophical and methodological problems involved in making the very conceptual construction of the “avant-garde.” Departing from a reconstruction of two prominent attempts to develop a “materialist aesthetics” in the 1970s, based on the historical experiences of the avant-gardes—Peter Gorsen and Peter Bürger—it turns to recent writings on “art activism” and “socially engaged art.” Examining how exemplary texts of the “social turn” are conditioned by a return to the avant-gardes, the aim here is to retrieve certain materialist coordinates whose necessity for critical thought has become apparent in recent writings. What is striking in many recent attempts to interpret new socially engaged and activist trends as manifestations of a new radical art praxis—or even as embodiments of a new “avant-garde”—is an avoidance of the problem of social mediation and an insufficient attention to historical periodization. This often leads to a hyperbolic and misconstrued notion of artistic agency and praxis, or, even worse, an aestheticized grammar of political struggle and insurrection. Against this backdrop, the article demonstrates that a materialist aesthetics must continue to engage with art’s aporetic relationship to praxis under capitalism. In this context, there is no reason to await a new avant-garde but every reason to look for attempts to actualize its self-negation—a self-negation that now falls to others to fulfill.
Drawing on important incursions of Marxist feminism into art history and theory, this article proposes a more capacious idea of reform as an extension of the historical sites and potential critical ramifications of social reproduction as an art theoretical framework. Social reproduction theory has altered the accepted bifurcation of autonomy and social engagement as two poles of Marxist aesthetics. I offer both a methodological addendum to existing employment of a social reproduction analytic for art, especially as this literature has mainly focused on post-medium practices after the late 1960s. Moreover, I ask what a dialectical concept of reform—as revolutionary and counterrevolutionary simultaneously—does to existing ideations of artistic criticality predicated on autonomy. I endeavor to theorize reform to explain the art of the painter and organizer Betty Blayton in the late 1960s. That Blayton’s art takes the form of color field painting—the idiom of reactionary conservatism in the immediate postwar decades—is unimaginable within most treatments of critical art practice after conceptual art, indeed it is usually the constitutive exclusion. Working through the pertinent literature on social reproduction and artistic autonomy, as well as revisiting canonical texts, I argue that an art theory of reform introduces a distinct form of artistic subjectivity that simultaneously undertakes and references the labor which undergirds art and is its condition of appearance. This artistic labor is distinct from performance or social practice art in its maintenance of the constitutive separation between art and devalorized reform (as reproductive) work. By extension, this split artist subject exceeds—encompasses, if not sidesteps—critique defined by negation. In accepting a relative invisibility stemming from its incomplete negation, such practices risk the slander “reform or reformist.”
The essay is dedicated to understanding aesthetics as a materialist practice committed to disalienation by way of what and who figures as obscene within modern life. It confronts the modern aesthetic subject and its origination in Early Romanticism, with Peter Gorsen’s proposition of a “hermaphroditic eros,” with Kay Gabriel›s “enthusiastic mutuality,” with Michael Löwy’s inquiries into “Romantic Anticapitalism,” and with Frantz Fanon›s insistence on “disalienation.” All to argue that in disalienation aesthetics becomes a work of love without possession.
This article examines Claude Cahun’s 1934 pamphlet, Les Paris sont ouverts, conceived as a report to the literary section of the PCF-led Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR). I address how Cahun’s intervention generates a set of politico-aesthetic arguments for the place of avantgarde poetics in the context of communist literary culture. These arguments are constructed using what I discuss as surrealism’s form of “aggregate Freudo-Marxism.” Cahun sought to advance the surrealist position within the AEAR and promote avant-garde techniques in poetry as politically efficacious. To illuminate her thought, I analyze surrealism’s relationship to Freudo-Marxism and to Socialist Realism of that period. I then explore Tristan Tzara’s influence on Cahun and the similarity between Cahun’s and Herbert Marcuse’s deployments of Freudian concepts. Finally, I ask how we might contemplate the creation of political ethics, integral to the surrealist project of militancy, today. In this way, Cahun’s conception of poetry’s political action can also be extended to practices beyond the page. The purpose of this article is not to explore Cahun’s communist activism per se, but to elucidate her defense of surrealist Freudo-Marxism and its proposed relationship between poetry and politics, as one response to the question of what historically constitutes a Marxist poetics.
