Nick Wright remembers Kim James' materialist approach to art

What strikes me most about Kim James' place in the discourses around art, creativity and consciousness is his unrelenting philosophical materialism.

Of course this is not simply a question of seeing mind and consciousness as part of the material and social world – themes referenced in the approach to problem solving and social organisation that he (and Carole) developed in the latter part of his life – but is rather more deeply rooted in his earlier practice.

Torso

Sculpture is that most material of artistic practices. This lies partly in the physical nature of the activity in which an idea has to acquire a material form through a particularly physical labour process. but more so in its defining social practice in which a sculptor has to both find and define an audience and find a way of communicating with that audience.  But because sculpture is public art, there has to exist, or be created, a common language, a social consciousness that can make meaning and sense of the activity and its product.

Engels, Marx, and the creative process

Marxism brings to the discussion about the language of creativity a special concern with the labour process. Frederick Engels (who Kim thought among the most ‘contemporary’ of the great marxists)  made labour the link between the  human hand and the brain. He wrote:

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.

Since Engels wrote this, science has given us further insights into the evolution of human beings, their links of continuity and departures from our ancestors.

Perhaps insufficient attention has been paid to evolutionary theory in developing a marxist theory of culture. We are accustomed to an explanation of human development that takes into account the growth spurt associated with unlocking of greater nutrition from the natural world of plants and animals that the use of tools brought about. We have accommodated the idea that tool use and the development of language hastened the evolution of human beings and of human society.

What remains substantially untheorised are the processes that make the connections between the sphere of social labour and the creative impulse – necessarily located in the individual consciousness –  and which drives men and women to make art. The function of collective labour as the foundation of culture – itself the social expression of the creative relationship between hand and brain in the development of personality – must lie at the centre of a marxist theory of creativity.

Marx wrote:

It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need.

It is here we see how the capitalist phase in the development of human society only partially provides the material basis of full creativity – for wherever the labour of men and women are alienated from the product of their labour they remain – to that extent –  unfree.

Dynamo Maker

Kim James’s abandonment of sculpture seems bound up with three issues.

Firstly, the limits reached in his own practice. The work is particularly rich in its references to the meshing of English sensibilities and continental style. Working in a postwar world Kim's work – with its conscious modernism, its exaltation of the material (seen here in this church), of the metal and finish and its hat tip to Vorticism, echoes themes half-abandoned in the interwar years. But Kim's unrelenting realism, not least in his own self-critical stance in regard to his own work, inevitably raised the question of where he was to to go.

In his work there is a refusal to accept the irreconcilability of the modernist impulse with the theoretical certainties of realism. In this his work really does provide a resolution of the dialectical clash that brought the Communist Party artists’ group to a halt in the mid 50s.

Secondly, the developing crisis in art education. There are more than a few art school veterans of the sixties and seventies here. After all these years I cannot claim any specially representative status for those times but I am prepared to speculate that a spirit as rebellious and critical as Kim's would not have fitted very well into the increasingly market-managed model of art education as it has subsequently developed.

Thirdly, a sense that aesthetics, indeed cultural practice as a whole – making art – provides only a necessarily partial, incomplete encounter with reality. And that science – the realms of rational discourse – are a necessary complement and gateway to a fuller understanding of the world.

Hanging on the end wall of Carole and Kim's house is a painting gifted by Peter de Francia – arguably the most distinguished realist painter of our times and our land. Jeff Sawtell, himself a key student leader at the RCA in those years, reminds us that the hidden hand of conformity, bureaucracy and convention tried to sack Peter de Francia as professor of painting, but were defeated by students and staff united in rebellion and resistance. This was neither the least nor the last of the conflicts, which in the world of art and culture express the profound class contradictions which continue to shake our world and underpins its present crisis.

Kim and the CPGB artists' group

The period in which Kim James matured as an artist was marked by a particularly intense debate around the social meaning of art. Kim became an active figure in the cultural politics of the Communist Party in the complex period following the end of the Second World War, when the great promise opened up by the Labour election triumph gave way to Britain's abject subordination to US global domination and imperialist war. Also, the Cold War began to reshape British cultural life according to the priorities ordered by the transatlantic alliance, and the retreat into abstraction and formalism.

Machine Mender

By that time Kim had made up his mind. He had joined the Young Communist League in 1942 and the party in 1949. His life connects that heroic generation that confronted and defeated fascism and renewed the construction of socialism as lived practice.

It was very interesting to work with Kim on the archive materials that recorded the existence of the Communist Party artists’ group, its minutes and memoranda, and turned the pages of its magazine Realism. He was a member of the Party's cultural committee in the fifties, active across the intellectual and geographical frontiers of Europe and something of a cosmopolitan.

By this I do not mean to imply anything that suggests superficiality or dilettantism. Gifted in languages and at ease in this world, Kim acquired a range of political responsibilities, some of which even today continue to be covered by the cloak of clandestinity. He combined an unshakeable loyalty to  communist principles, to the Soviet Union – or rather to socialism as it existed in the real world – and to the disciplines, collective and individual, of revolutionary practice with an open-minded approach to questions of style, content and form.

He combined this with a clear-eyed understanding of human frailty, the inadequacies and the conceits of the creative intelligentsia – both those within the progressive camp and those without and, of course, a measure of common sense and realism about the compromises and concessions that are inevitable in any grand project.

In this we can see the rock on which his unflinching radicalism was grounded.

The Fist

Nick Wright discusses, art, anti-semitism, and anti-Corbynism.

Labour is weathering a co-ordinated campaign which combines criticism of Corbyn's policies and persona with an intensified drive to brand any criticism of the murderous policies pursued by Israel's rulers with anti-semitism.

I was once branded an antisemite. It was the during the Thatcher/Major years and I was editing the newspaper of the trade union for executive civil servants. Our cartoonist, the brilliant, award winning Frank Boyle, drew a series of strips which called out the Tories for their dogma-driven privatisation policies. One depicted the Cabinet as bloodthirsty pirates of a distinctly unsavoury disposition — the chief among them a swarthy, hook-nosed, carbuncled cutlass-wielding figure in a striped vest, battered pirate hat.

A flood of letters arrived, a good proportion using strikingly similar phrases, rather obviously co-ordinated and some clearly unfamiliar with the actual cartoon and more generally concerned at the left-wing character of the union's policies. To my surprise I was accused of publishing anti-semitic images. In discussion with one or two of the more reasonable of my correspondents we were able to agree that the conflation of stereotypical Cornish pirates with the anti-semitic depiction of Jews was too far fetched to be taken as evidence of intent. But it was a useful illustration of how an image can possess an ideological power that transcends both literal meaning and the intent of its creator, the context of its creation and thus have an impact on an audience already sensitised by their own ideological position and their life experiences.

This was a useful experience in my next job working at the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.

It is in the light of this experience and after several decades of anti racist and anti fascist activity that I approach the question of the now-destroyed East End mural that is the pivot on which the latest assault on Jeremy Corbyn turns.

Less I am accused of gratuitously circulated anti-semitic images I can claim that in four years at art school; two years specialist art teacher training and three years of post graduate research as an art historian that I encountered many medieval, Renaissance and modern art and design objects imbued with anti-semitic notions. These artefacts possessed a wide currency in the times in which they were created but nevertheless remain the object of critical scrutiny. We must bring the same approach to the examination of the mural depicted here. Called Freedom for Humanity it was painted by the Los Angeles-based graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman, also known also as Mear One.

We can describe the formal features of the mural thus: Against an apocalyptic background that includes rather ambiguously crafted elements of industrial production and power generation sit six elderly business-suited men playing what appears to be Monopoly. The surface on which they are playing rests on the backs of crouching, naked, possibly androgynous figures and includes a pile of currency notes and tokens that signify industrial production, oil extraction, property ownership and, perhaps, in the case of a miniature Statue of Liberty, political values.

To the left foreground a man is carrying a poster placard that proclaims 'The New World Order is the enemy of humanity' while his left arm is raised to a clenched fist. To the right a melancholy mother holds her baby.

Rising above the central group is a pyramid and all-seeing eye, sometimes taken to signify Freemasonry and more universally recognised as an element in the design of US dollar bills.

It is conventional to catalogue the formal features of a work and the processes used. We can see that the artist works in a contemporary medium using commercially available saturated spray colours. We know from basic research and observation that the artist is proficient in this medium and a high degree of preparatory work and a measure of expert draughtsmanship and technical expertise is evident. This conclusion is supported by a film, available on social media, which shows the process underway.

So, having described the content how do we analyse its meaning?

We can of course, go with our immediate, subjective impressions. This clearly is what many people have done. Judging by the social media discussion some have even ventured an opinion without actually looking closely at the work. But to understand more fully we need to ask what is the painting about.

One way is to take its title. Freedom for humanity has a clear and transparent political meaning In a game of chance and skill six white men dispose of power and wealth while the oppressed and the propertyless support the structures which permit this disparity of means.

But this is not enough. Context is all important. As it is public art we already know something about the audience, we know it was made in 2012 and destroyed by the local authority. We know who made it. We know from the BBC report at the time that the artist said his artwork was not targeting Jews.

We need to locate the mural in relation to other work, including that of the artist himself, the local and global politics of its production and display and we need to understand how the public discourse around the work was originally constructed and how it has been reconstructed in the present moment.

This takes us to the contested meaning of the painting and the significance of the central group. The Times on 24 March this year reported that Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to apologise after initially defending his apparent support for “a mural depicting Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor.”

The day before The Guardian had said the that mural pictured several “apparently Jewish bankers” playing a game of Monopoly. The Guardian was on the same wavelength as the Daily Telegraph which reported that Jeremy Corbyn had questioned a London council’s decision to destroy an antisemitic mural “which depicted a group of Jewish bankers counting money on the backs of ethnic minorities.”

A more careful, or perhaps better informed Jewish Chronicle was better informed about the identities of the six. It said the 'controversial' artwork depicted a group of businessmen and bankers sitting around a Monopoly-style board and counting money. 

At the time, in 2012, there was relatively limited coverage of the mural's destruction. Reportedly, on Facebook, the backbench MP Jeremy Corbyn had suggested that the artist was in good company. “Rockefeller destroyed Diego Rivera mural because it includes a picture of Lenin” he said. A Labour spokesman at that point claimed Corbyn was standing up for free speech.

It is unclear whether Corbyn – who is fluent in Spanish and very well-informed about Latin American history, politics and culture — was mobilising his pre-existing cultural knowledge or if he knew something of the mural's content. However, the connection here artistic freedom and Rockefeller, who is one of the (non Jewish) figures depicted in the East End mural.

In 1933 the Mexican communist painter Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint frescos on the lobby of the Rockefeller building in New York. He titled them The Frontier of Ethical Evolution and The Frontier of Material Development, representing capitalism and socialism. When the patron, Nelson Rockefeller, pressed Rivera to remove images of Lenin and a Soviet May Day scene Rivera refused and the mural was painted over. Rivera recreated the artwork in Mexico as Man, Controller of the Universe.

There is little critical comparison between Rivera's work and the contemporary mural. Working in plaster and more translucent media Rivera deployed a rich and subtle colour palette, complex imagery, a vast cast of characters and drew upon a rich heritage of political understanding which articulated popular and revolutionary currents of thought.

The technical differences in production are clear enough. Both are public art, both have an avowedly political content, both are didactic. However in scope and sophistication the works could not be more dissimilar.

Given the highly politicised context of the present controversy this gives us a handle on the kind of criteria we must apply in evaluating Ockerman's work

Two immediate issues arise. Firstly, are the bankers and business men all or predominately Jewish? Secondly, in the light of the answer to this question is the depiction of the characters anti-semitic?

To quote Ockerman: “I came to paint a mural that depicted the elite banker cartel known as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, the ruling class elite few, the Wizards of Oz. They would be playing a board game of monopoly on the backs of the working class. The symbol of the Free Mason Pyramid rises behind this group and behind that is a polluted world of coal burning and nuclear reactors. I was creating this piece to inspire critical thought and spark conversation.”

We have to take him at his word. The problem is that the iconography draws on a very restricted set of references and these references are, in themselves, problematic. Set aside the passivity and subordination with which the oppressed are depicted. Look instead at the central figures who are depicted as distinctive types, painted with a clear reference, if distorted, to real historical protagonists.

Even if only two of these six bourgeois, Warburg and Rothschild, are Jewish we still need to make a judgement about the character and currency of their depiction. The draughtsmanship clearly exaggerates the distinctive features of all six men. The problem is that exaggerated depictions of Jews are created, disseminated and understood in a historically defined context that includes a powerful, even dominant, discourse that draws upon the long traditions of antisemitism embedded in the dominant ideology and expressed, over the centuries, in the dominant visual culture, including both traditional art forms, religion, politics, popular culture and mass media.

That these traditions are currently more diffused than hitherto and that today, for example, Islamaphobic narratives are more virulent and produce more dramatically dangerous consequences than does contemporary anti semitism is no justification for a lack of vigilance.

In truth, the subterranean narratives around notions of the Illuminati, Freemasonry and bourgeois conspiracies cannot, in much popular imagination, be disentangled from deeply suspect discourses in which alien, Semitic and covert elites are the controlling forces in our lives.

Such notions run exactly counter to the kind of materialist analysis that take the real and existing features of contemporary class society and seek to reveal their workings. State monopoly capitalism operates at vastly more profound levels and bourgeois hegemony is maintained by vastly greater systems of ideological domination than are illuminated by Ockerman's mural or accessible through his restricted political imagination.

Inevitably, this mural was going to understood in the context of existing traditions. If Jeremy Corbyn had not risen to his present stature this mural would have been long forgotten.

The truth is that neither its formal construction nor its artistry, neither its political language nor its iconography is articulated with sufficient levels of complexity and sophistication. It simply collapses, without sufficient theoretical or ideological underpinnings, into an inversion of its creator's avowed purpose.

This is bad art and worse politics.

When, five years later the long-forgotten facts around this painting's destruction are weaponised in a new coup against Labour's popular realignment, we can only marvel that the theoretical poverty of these latter-day art critics is matched by their political hypocrisy.

I am reluctant to criticise Jeremy Corbyn who is the most transparently honest and principled leader of the Labour Party in decades. It is true that his 2012 defence of artistic freedom might have been expressed with more circumspection and today a more robust defence might counter some of his more unprincipled opponents. But the unceasing assault on him is so obviously manufactured that I suspect its effect has a limit and that itself has more traction with a metropolitan and political elite than with broader masses of people.

It is possible to discover in the mountains of social media data instances of clear anti semitic intent. More common are maladroit formulations, poorly constructed arguments, ignorant and lazy conflations of terms that are logically distinct along with arguments that reflect various levels of conscious and unconscious bias. The diligent will find examples of trolling that have their origins in the crude public language in some sectors as well as provocations of even more dubious origin.

We can be sure that one agency or another is searching for any clumsy formulation or ill advised comment that can be weaponised against Labour. That no such diligence is directed at the Tory party or the media that serves bourgeois interest is clear enough indication that this is a project with a clear purpose.

The many hundreds of thousands of Labour folk know this. Many millions more sense the artifice entailed in this campaign. It is instructive that in working class Britain, which by and large is not deeply involved in this controversy, popular sentiment senses that Corbyn is the target. How else to account for the reports that crowds at boxing contests and football matches are breaking out in chants of Jeremy Corbyn's name.

Already the spurt in Labour (and Momentum) membership is taken by more intransigent zionist opinion a proof itself of a wide currency of anti semitism. Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn's Seder night feast with a group of irreverent young Jews in his constituency itself is weaponised. Associating with the wrong kind of Jews is also anti semitic it seems.

The association of Blairite MPs with the campaign being waged by the Board of Deputies (and the more obviously Conservative-linked Jewish Leadership Council) will do them no favours with Labour supporters who know from their own experience just how limited is the purchase of anti semitic ideas in the party and the broader labour movement. Interestingly, the non zionist Jewish Voice for Labour is experiencing a new wave of support.

We cannot disentangle the alarm that the Zionist establishment feels at the success of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement from this current offensive. Corbyn is the target because he maintains his principled solidarity with the Palestinian cause and remains opposed to the imperial war plans that pivot on Israel's strategy towards it's neighbouring states.

The real danger is that in conflating, for narrowly sectarian political purpose, what is a fairly widely diffused currency of anti semitic ideas with the more poisonous political anti-semitism that exists as a conscious ideology this campaign runs a real danger of reinforcing the latter.

It is not enough to point out that the most reactionary trends in Zionism act on the basis that the existence of anti semitism is the principal validation of their political project. Anti-semitism needs to be confronted at every level — not as a privileged category of political action — but as part of a conscious movement to assert the universality of human values.

Calling out the crude conflation of Zionism with Jewish identity is the basic building block of any project to combat antisemitism. That this necessarily entails a principled criticism of its mirror image in the most virulently reactionary trends in present-day Zionism is a powerful demonstration of dialectical truth.

'A model of clear thinking and informed comment' - Nick Wright reviews the Imagine Moscow exhibition at the Design Museum.

“The position is this: the ecstatic period of the revolution is over. Now it's the working day — but art is holiday. And we want art back, the new art of architecture,” artist and designer El Lissitzky declared in 1925. This intelligently conceived exhibition revisits that spirit of daring innovation and unbounded optimism which accompanied the accession to state power of Russia’s working class, ushered in by the 1917 Russian revolution.

Buried deep in the Design Museum basement, a series of fluid spaces locate each of the designs for six utopian and uncompleted projects in an architectural, social, political and aesthetic context by assemblies of drawings, plans, documents and illustrations of the post-revolution period. In conception, Ivan Leonidov’s 1927 Lenin Institute is simultaneously rooted in the technologies of the time and moulded by extravagantly utopian and untested technique. A pre-internet storehouse of knowledge and a radio station, it was to be served by a metropolitan aero-tram system. Its synthesis of architectural and political ambition hint that the global revolution might have progressed differently if the Comintern had had at its disposal both social media and television.

El Lissitzky’s Iron Cloud (1923-1925) reworks, from the early years of the revolution, the model of integrated housing, transport, services and work with a new skyscraper technology which prefigures contemporary big-city style, while Boris Iofan’s winning entry for the Palace of Soviets competition conveys something of the optimism of the time. Designed to be the tallest building in the world, topped by a 100-metre statue of Lenin, it was to sit on the site of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The project started in 1931, just as Stalin warned that the USSR had a decade to prepare for Western invasion. But, by 1941, political realism allowed its uncompleted structures to be recycled to fortify the city against the nazi invaders. Later, the foundations became a swimming pool and now Russia’s new bourgeoisie worship in a replica of the cathedral built on the site.

Lenin's statue in the Palace of the Soviets

The utopian spirit of these Soviet pioneers is predicated on a sense that transformed social relations produce a new human being. But, as the world revolution faltered, the bourgeoisie weaponised its fascist auxiliaries and, as the problems of building a socialist society demanded answers, new ways of transforming social actions presented themselves. The very magnitude of the problems necessitated prodigious efforts to mobilise the human and material resources of the socialist state. Thus there were over 100 entries for the competition to design a Commissariat of Heavy Industry, with Yakov Chernikhov’s 1933 Architectural Fairytale echoing Lenin’s telling phrase: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” while Konstantin Melnikov’s two 40-story buildings, connected by a futuristic external escalator, were to be decorated with sculptures representing the successes of the first and second Five Year Plans.

The idea of communal living was rooted in the appropriation of the spacious dwellings of the bourgeoisie. Those utopian and revolutionary ideals were shaped to advance the liberation of women through their entry into social production more fully and to render domestic labour less oppressive. Communal kitchens, leisure facilities, laundries, nurseries and restaurants were conceived as state-sponsored instruments designed to enhance women’s education and intellectual development. Nikolay Ladovsky’s Communal House transmutes this into utopian form through a spiral structure echoing the dialectical thrust of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. The focus on healthy living for the whole person finds direct expression in Health Factory, Nikolay Sokolov’s plan for a seaside complex designed to restore workers’ productive well-being through structured vacations, recreation, sport and medicine.

Nikolay Ladovsky’s Communal House

The one project which did reach completion in 1930 is Alexey Shchusev’s Lenin Mausoleum, in which the Soviet leader's body lies in a sarcophagus designed by Konstantin Melnikov. Distinctive though the modernist building is, the materialist world view might be better served if successive Soviet leaders had done what Lenin asked and buried him alongside his mother. The contextual material to the exhibition is excellently presented, with useful accounts of debates in which architects and planners, artists and ideologues, futurists and functionaries argued out their competing priorities.

While there are examples of cold war and unreflective petit-bourgeois prejudice in the exhibition and the excellent accompanying book, in comparison to other stuff with which we are assailed this anniversary year, Imagine Moscow is a model of clear thinking and informed comment.

Runs until June 4, box office: designmuseum.org. This review was first published on morningstaronline.co.uk

Nick Wright reviews the current exhibition of banners produced by Hammersmith Communist Party in the 1930s, to help the Spanish Republic.

Legend has it that while Picasso was living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, a visiting German officer asked him, upon seeing a photo of the painting Guernica in his apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did.”

As the veterans of the International Brigades breathe their last, a new generation is recovering the significance of their heroism and of the Spanish tragedy.

Defence of the Spanish Republic was the defining issue of the late Thirties. Britain’s ruling elite favoured accommodation with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy while the democratic Spanish Republic counted on the support of the Soviet Union and enormous international popular movement of solidarity.

In every country this took the the traditional form of  political action and demonstration. In Britain there were protests against the  government’s so-called ‘non-intervention’ policy which turned a blind eye to Hitler and Mussolini's shameless supply of military aid and mercenaries to Franco’s fascists.

While thousands from every part of the world rallied to the call of the Communist International to form an International Brigade to confront with arms the fascist threat, the solidarity movement everywhere took practical shape.

Banners for Spain, Fighting the Spanish Civil War in London shows in public, for the first time in decades, banners produced by the Hammersmith Communist Party to aid Spain.

These date from 1937-8 and raised awareness of the plight of the Spanish people along with funds and material aid. Some commemorate the International Brigades - two Brigaders from the area died at the battle of Brunete, Labour Party member William H. Langmead and communist Arthur Ernest Richard ‘Dickie’ Bird.

Conservation funding from the Textile Society and the General Federation of Trade Unions means they are able to be displayed and now form part of the Spanish Collection - the largest archive on the British volunteers and aid Spain movement in the country - and donated by the International Brigade Association to the Marx Memorial Library.

All but two of the banners are unattributed but Lawrence Bradshaw (1899-1974) - whose sculpture marks the grave of Karl Marx - was active in Hammersmith and made Hammersmith Communist Party Sends Greetings to Comrades Fighting in Spain which lists the men and women who fell .

Arms and Justice For Spain depicts a  worker, a miner with lamp and engineer with spanner shaking hands with a combatant. The slogan ‘No Pasaran’ ‘They Shall Not Pass’ was the universal cry from the defenders of Madrid, and at the Battle of Cable Street.

The banners provide a fascinating insight into the politics of the period and to the uncompromisingly partisan nature of the campaign. Aesthetically, they are a window into the cultural politics of the time and show the wide range of styles deployed by artists of the period, whose commitment to a partisan content infused their work with great creativity.

This is exemplified in the striking banner Hammersmith Ambulance for Spain, with the references to the bombing of Guernica, Madrid and Barcelona. This is signed J.O.T.  Julian Otto Trevelyan (1920-1988) was an artist and poet resident in Hammersmith from 1935 until his death who was also a member of the Artists International Association.

In retrospect, the defining work of the period was Picasso’s Guernica. As Morning Star art critic Christine Lindey says: 'Its topical subject and innovatory style provoked strong reactions during its wide exposure first in the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937, followed by touring exhibitions in London, Leeds, Oxford and Manchester in 1938-9 to raise funds for Spanish Relief.'

Questions of style and content enlivened debates among artists. The artists who created these banners worked fast, with little money and with limited materials.  We can see a variety of influences at work. This is not surprising given that surrealists and socialist realists clashed over what style was revolutionary and how content could be best expressed, and avant-garde opinion and popular taste widely diverged.

Banners for Spain: Fighting the Spanish Civil War in London is at Islington Museum. 245 St John Street, London EC1V 4NB, to Saturday 8 July 2017. Free.

https://www.islington.gov.uk/libraries-arts-and-heritage/heritage/islington-museum/exhibitions

Christine Lindey’s forthcoming Manifesto Press illustrated book:  Art for all, British Socially Committed Art c. 1939 – c. 1962 is due out this autumn.

'A model of clear thinking and informed comment' - Nick Wright reviews the Imagine Moscow exhibition at the Design Museum.

“The position is this: the ecstatic period of the revolution is over. Now it's the working day — but art is holiday. And we want art back, the new art of architecture,” artist and designer El Lissitzky declared in 1925. This intelligently conceived exhibition revisits that spirit of daring innovation and unbounded optimism which accompanied the accession to state power of Russia’s working class, ushered in by the 1917 Russian revolution.

Buried deep in the Design Museum basement, a series of fluid spaces locate each of the designs for six utopian and uncompleted projects in an architectural, social, political and aesthetic context by assemblies of drawings, plans, documents and illustrations of the post-revolution period. In conception, Ivan Leonidov’s 1927 Lenin Institute is simultaneously rooted in the technologies of the time and moulded by extravagantly utopian and untested technique. A pre-internet storehouse of knowledge and a radio station, it was to be served by a metropolitan aero-tram system. Its synthesis of architectural and political ambition hint that the global revolution might have progressed differently if the Comintern had had at its disposal both social media and television.

El Lissitzky’s Iron Cloud (1923-1925) reworks, from the early years of the revolution, the model of integrated housing, transport, services and work with a new skyscraper technology which prefigures contemporary big-city style, while Boris Iofan’s winning entry for the Palace of Soviets competition conveys something of the optimism of the time. Designed to be the tallest building in the world, topped by a 100-metre statue of Lenin, it was to sit on the site of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The project started in 1931, just as Stalin warned that the USSR had a decade to prepare for Western invasion. But, by 1941, political realism allowed its uncompleted structures to be recycled to fortify the city against the nazi invaders. Later, the foundations became a swimming pool and now Russia’s new bourgeoisie worship in a replica of the cathedral built on the site.

Lenin's statue in the Palace of the Soviets

The utopian spirit of these Soviet pioneers is predicated on a sense that transformed social relations produce a new human being. But, as the world revolution faltered, the bourgeoisie weaponised its fascist auxiliaries and, as the problems of building a socialist society demanded answers, new ways of transforming social actions presented themselves. The very magnitude of the problems necessitated prodigious efforts to mobilise the human and material resources of the socialist state. Thus there were over 100 entries for the competition to design a Commissariat of Heavy Industry, with Yakov Chernikhov’s 1933 Architectural Fairytale echoing Lenin’s telling phrase: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” while Konstantin Melnikov’s two 40-story buildings, connected by a futuristic external escalator, were to be decorated with sculptures representing the successes of the first and second Five Year Plans.

The idea of communal living was rooted in the appropriation of the spacious dwellings of the bourgeoisie. Those utopian and revolutionary ideals were shaped to advance the liberation of women through their entry into social production more fully and to render domestic labour less oppressive. Communal kitchens, leisure facilities, laundries, nurseries and restaurants were conceived as state-sponsored instruments designed to enhance women’s education and intellectual development. Nikolay Ladovsky’s Communal House transmutes this into utopian form through a spiral structure echoing the dialectical thrust of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. The focus on healthy living for the whole person finds direct expression in Health Factory, Nikolay Sokolov’s plan for a seaside complex designed to restore workers’ productive well-being through structured vacations, recreation, sport and medicine.

Nikolay Ladovsky’s Communal House

The one project which did reach completion in 1930 is Alexey Shchusev’s Lenin Mausoleum, in which the Soviet leader's body lies in a sarcophagus designed by Konstantin Melnikov. Distinctive though the modernist building is, the materialist world view might be better served if successive Soviet leaders had done what Lenin asked and buried him alongside his mother. The contextual material to the exhibition is excellently presented, with useful accounts of debates in which architects and planners, artists and ideologues, futurists and functionaries argued out their competing priorities.

While there are examples of cold war and unreflective petit-bourgeois prejudice in the exhibition and the excellent accompanying book, in comparison to other stuff with which we are assailed this anniversary year, Imagine Moscow is a model of clear thinking and informed comment.

Runs until June 4, box office: designmuseum.org. This review was first published on morningstaronline.co.uk

Nick Wright reviews Neoliberal Culture, edited by Jeremy Gilbert, a challenging collection of essays which exposes the ideological and cultural project behind neoliberalism.

Capitalist realism is a useful concept. It allows an investigation of the ways in which the dominant ideas in contemporary capitalist society possess the power to order the actions and thoughts of working people, even as life and work compels a rejection of those ideas. In exploring this terrain, Neoliberal Culture assembles essays that trace connections between neoliberalism as specific set of ideological and social practices and discrete areas of social life — literary texts and technology, ideologies of consumption and food journalism and pornography and the projection of modes of sexual activity expressive of neoliberal culture. Valuable stuff, and other sections takes us some way towards a fuller critique of contemporary capitalism.

Editor Jeremy Gilbert interrogates Mark Fisher, author of the influential text Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? to map out the ground on which an Anglophone array of cultural theorists consider the relationship between the distinctive features of contemporary capitalism and the cultural practices that characterise it. “The hegemonic field which capitalist realism secures and intensifies is one in which politics has been ‘disappeared’,” Fisher argues. “What capitalist realism consolidates is the idea that we are in the era of the post-political, that the big ideological conflicts are over, and the issues that remain largely concern who is to administer the new consensus.”

The highly provisional nature of such insights is illustrated by the speed at which the politics of capitalist crisis has moved. His suggestion — that the notion of the post-political isn’t just an ideological ruse and that membership of political parties really is declining — is a conclusion subverted by the rapid rise of the new political formations that have emerged in contexts as far apart as the Sanders/Trump polarity in the US, Podemos and its alliance with United Left in Spain and, in Britain, the massive irruption of new forces into Labour politics.

Nevertheless, the problems he identifies must concern the working-class movement and Fisher draws on the experience of Blairism as the paradigmatic example of a “formerly left-wing party surrendering to capitalist realism.” This, he argues, isn’t a wholehearted embrace of neoliberal ideology but rather the acceptance that this is the way of the world, that there is no alternative.

We can argue with some of the terms in which this argument is pitched. Class collaboration, rather than representing a latter-day capitulation to capitalist realism, is itself in the political DNA of social democracy and is, historically, what has distinguished its theoretical apparatus and political practice from an explicitly socialist approach. Indeed, it is precisely social democracy’s failure to challenge the neoliberal narrative — exemplified by Labour’s failure to contest the trope that Britain’s present crisis is due to profligate public spending rather than the salvage of the banking system — that underpins the pervasiveness of the neoliberal mindset.

Cultural studies, as an academic discipline, has gained a reputation for harbouring the notion that the connection between transformations in the economic base of society have nothing but a highly attenuated relationship with developments in the cultural superstructure. In a departure from this tradition, the virtue of this book lies in its scope and in the well-grounded nature of its studies. Paul Gilroy’s examination of the ways in which the aspirational discourses of black entrepreneurship work to capture the imagination is characteristically rich in concrete examples which refer back to religious traditions, transatlantic experiences, musical genres and notions of masculinity.

Paul Patton finds both convergences and ruptures in Foucault’s “critique” of neoliberalism and the liberal and social-democratic theories of US philosopher John Rawls. What emerges is the utility of notions, to preserve monopoly capitalism’s ideological project, of individualised competition in a market economy as the default mechanism for managing and regulating human society.

In a piece given extra relevance by the discourses around Hillary Clinton’s candidature for US president, Angela McRobbie examines the strategies employed by neoliberalism to accommodate the aspirations of contemporary feminism. Another contribution by Jo Littler looks at the ways in which notions of meritocracy serve to obscure economic and social inequalities, while Neal Curtis examines how government, as well as knowledge-producing systems like universities and the media, failed to relate the 2008 market failure of finance capital to the system’s sustaining ideologies.

The value of this collection lies in the attention it pays to concrete manifestations of neoliberalism. The weakness, which cannot solely be placed at the door of cultural studies as a discipline, lies in the inadequacy of critiques of actually existing state monopoly capitalism which do not posit a compelling alternative. Political economy is weakened if it does not enrich our understanding of the cultural and ideological superstructure. The discipline of cultural studies is impoverished if it proceeds without an adequate analysis of the economic formation.

Neoliberal Culture is published by Lawrence and Wishart, £18. This review is also published in the Morning Star.

Nick Wright reviews South Africa: The Artof a Nation

Filmgoers of a certain age will remember the 1964 film Zulu, which shows a group of British soldiers holding out against the massed warrior formations of the Zulu nation. A relatively minor 1879 episode in this country’s bloody colonial history, it originally gained its salience in the public mind because its exaggerated heroics served to deflect attention from the earlier devastating defeat inflicted upon the imperial army at Isandhlwana. But each audience reads cultural products in distinct ways.

More than a century later, 20 years after the film was released and in the aftermath of the fighting at Broadwater Farm which saw the Metropolitan Police fought to a standstill, I watched as the youth of Tottenham — packed into the public gallery of Haringey town hall — answered the racist rhetoric of Tory councillors with an intimidating rendition of a Zulu battle chant which they can have only learned through an oppositional reading of that film. It is against the colonialist narrative that in this exhibition John Muafangejo’s imposing linocut The Battle of Rorke’s Drift, created under apartheid in 1981, depicts the Zulu soldiers as powerful, imposing and decisive and, through this opposition, gains its power.

The apartheid rulers of South Africa were acutely conscious that the narrative they constructed around their contested presence in the country — that this was a land without a people — would be unsustainable if cultural artefacts revealed that other people has lived there for millennia. Thus the recovery and exhibition of artefacts that illuminate the presence of South Africa’s first and subsequent inhabitants raises complex problems for anthropology and art history. We define “artworks” as art because they embody symbolic power, evoke emotions, command inquiry as to their origin and invite attribution.

The Zaamenkonst Panel, discovered in 1912, was later interpreted in rather prosaic terms within a narrowly representational art historical tradition. But because the creators of these works, unlike those of more contemporary art, are unknown, problems of attribution and cultural identity inevitably arise. Today, when the deployment of related disciplines — ethnography, linguistic theory and archaeology — is brought into play, these artworks may now be understood as possessing, for their creators, great spiritual power. It is now believed that hunter-gatherer rock paintings, rather than “art for art’s sake” are related to the “trance dancing” and “great healing” still practiced in the Kalahari.

When given greater force by the new post-apartheid political situation, such artworks acquire a fresh ideological significance. Thus, images from that pre-1900 Linton Panel, attributed to “San Bushman” though its creator(s) are unknown, have been incorporated into the South African state’s coat of arms signifying, in the official narrative, the common humanity and heritage of South Africans.

South Africa House in Trafalgar Square is decorated by a series of panels by landscape painter Jacob Hendrik Pierneef (1986-1957) and the extent to which these, and the paintings and prints which under apartheid gained awide currency, were consciously created to sustain the Afrikaner version of terra nullus — no-one’s land — is contested. But the regime saw in his idealised and homogenised landscapes, empty of human beings, a version of their own legend in which this land was legitimately theirs.

This exhibition, and the exemplary book which accompanies it, raise interesting questions about the ways in which we understand cultural products.Is art a category that includes any form of symbolic expression or can it be understood only in terms in which art is appropriated in today’s market economy? The Daily Telegraph, predictably perhaps, discusses the exhibition in term of the prices the artefacts fetch and bemoans the fact that “there is nothing by the darling of the South African art auctions, Irma Stern, or by Marlene Dumas, one of the most expensive living female artists.” But art created in opposition to the apartheid system, encompassing both work created within contemporary painting and graphic genres as well as that mobilising indigenous techniques and motifs, resonates across cultural boundaries.

Gerard Sekoto’s 1946 painting Song of the Pick was circulated in postcard versions as an expression of resistance, while Gavin Jantjes’s 1974 assembly: A South African Colouring Book draws on a graphic design context grounded in magazine design, collage and photography. And a 1983 photograph by David Goldblatt, 9:00PM Going Home: Marabastad-Waterval Bus, with the explanatory caption: “For most of the people in this bus the cycle will start again tomorrow at between 2:00 and 3:00AM,” is a striking depiction of the human cost of apartheid policies.

Yet, however much that system imposed all kinds of breaches and fissures on people’s practical and spiritual lives, the cultural traditions of the populations who make up the nation continually found new expression.
In bringing together a vast array of images and artefacts drawn from South Africa’s pre-history, history and its contemporary situation this exhibition — free to those under 16 — is unashamedly political and ideological in its intentions and that is undoubtedly to be welcomed.

Runs until February 26, box office: britishmuseum.org. This review was originaly published in the Morning Star.