Andrew Warburton is a writer and editor in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a member of Labour International (the international section of the British Labour Party) and Momentum.
Andrew Warburton continues his series on arts policy by interviewing Dr. Ben Walmsley, professor of audience engagement at Leeds University.
With six years of Tory austerity behind us, Brexit on the horizon and the left-wing reorientation of the Labour Party ongoing, Culture Matters is starting a debate about the possible arts and cultural policies of a future socialist government. As part of this initiative, we will be interviewing representatives of organizations on the left – political parties, trade unions, arts organisations etc. We want to gather their views on art and culture, their analysis of the way things are at the moment, and what the way forward might look like.
Andrew Warburton starts us off with an introduction to the topic and a brief description of the state of play at the moment.
Andrew Warburton reviews Cubanacan, the first new Cuban opera in almost 50 years.
The most recent development occurred in March this year when a recording of the opera was screened to invited guests at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco. DVDs of that recording have now been sent out to various promotional and production companies around the United States with the hope that the opera will one day be staged. I was lucky enough to receive one of those DVDs and will review the opera here.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, Cubanacan is actually a Cuban/American collaboration. The libretto was written by an American, Charles Koppelman, and is based on John Loomis’ book Revolution of Forms: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools.The book tells the story of the construction in 1958 of Cuba’s National Schools of Art, a breathtaking maze of red-brick domed buildings—apparently inspired by the female body—where many of the country’s greatest artists and musicians have been trained. While some of the buildings now house the Institutio Superior de Arte, others have been left unfinished, a result of the U.S. embargo and shortages of cement and glass. Today, the schools are a mixture of terra-cotta structures and gothic disrepair.
The libretto aside, the music is distinctively Cuban, mixing a romantic style with Cuban rhythms, including rumba and conga. The music was composed by Cuban cultural icon Roberto Valera, and all the original cast members, including the incredible lead tenor Byran Lopez, and the gifted soprano Laura Ulloa, are Cuban. Adding to the fascination of the opera is the fact that it received its premiere in front of the very arches of the National Schools of Art, which lend a sense of immediacy to the performances.
After an introduction in which the Santeria deity Eleggua sets the scene, the opera opens with Fidel Castro (performed here by Roger Quintana) and Che Guevara (Jose Rafael Verdera) playing golf at a Havana country club. The scene is taken from real life: Alberto Korda, the man responsible for the iconic photograph of Che Guevara, “Guerrillero Heroico,” once photographed the two revolutionaries jokingly “playing a round.” As Michael Cooper in The New York Times pointed out, the opera uses the golf course as “a loaded symbol of pre-revolution wealth and excess,” and indeed, Castro quickly announces he’ll build public schools of art on the course. The uplifting chorus that follows, in which Fidel and Che sing together, accompanied by a choir representing the Cuban people, serves as a celebration of the dreaming power of the arts. The soon-to-be-built art schools are extolled as an example of art’s ability to create new forms of life, much like the Cuban revolution itself.
Alberto Korda, Fidel Golfing 1959. Photo courtesy of The Guardian
At the forefront of this celebration is the architect who will design the schools: Riccardo Porro, played with intense emotion by Bryan Lopez. Even before Porro emerges on the stage, he’s likened to the ultimate “architect”—Fidel—who envisioned the schools in the first place. In a beautiful solo, Selma Diaz (played by Laura Ulloa) emphasizes Castro and Porro’s likeness—the former the architect of a new society and the latter the architect of a new generation of Cuban artists: “He’s strong like you, Fidel, and daring,” she sings. “He’s the son of a Spaniard, like you.”
As the story unfolds, these “daring” figures—the architect, the revolutionary and the artist—become interchangeable, each sharing a “dream of modern, daring forms.” As “dreamers,” they give expression to the Cuban spirit: Castro, the revolutionary who shapes a new society; Porro, the architect who creates a space in which collective action can emerge; and the artist, the one who will manifest the Cuban people’s dreams. The shared nature of these roles is evident from the outset, as Che Guevara sings: “We need an architect to realize our dreams, to make miracles with new beautiful forms.” The egalitarianism of these “dreams” is never questioned: their dreams are “for Cuba” and for “our culture.”
The opera offsets any worry about the naivety of its emphasis on “dreams” by embracing the complexity of Cuba’s history. While its message remains idealistic, this idealism recognizes the limits imposed by reality. The opera goes out of its way to acknowledge the existence of shortages, of disappointment and of the failure of any dream to manifest itself fully in reality. This culminates in a tense exchange between Porro and Castro in which both men speak over each other. The architect begs for materials to finish his designs while Castro worries about how to satisfy his people’s basic needs. The latter finally steps back from his earlier idealism with the terse expression, “Money isn’t just for art.”
The fact that Porro’s idealism is frustrated in the end—he never does finish his art schools—leaves no doubt that the confrontation between dreams and reality is central to the opera’s vision. Dreams may be crucial to the Cuban revolution, but the forms they take will always remain, to some extent, incomplete. Even this knowledge does not exhaust the opera’s scope. The story goes further, suggesting that disappointment is just a moment in the revolutionary process. Although Porro sees his failure to finish the art schools as a catastrophe that requires him to leave Cuba because he “cannot create,” the Cuban people—represented by a chorus of singers—see things rather differently. For them, the failure to manifest their dreams does not spell the end of desire. In fact, lack of completion is an integral part of the process of “dreaming,” as we shall see.
To understand this idea, we should turn our attention to the opera’s portrayal of Cuba’s Santeria deities. Represented by Eleggua, the spirit of roads and travel (performed here by Marcos Lima), and Oshun, the spirit of beauty and art (performed by Yilam Sartorio), the deities are ambiguous figures who exist outside and above every situation and character. Their sometimes cryptic statements suggest that, while they approve of the Cuban revolution (particularly Oshun, who sees it as a chance to overthrow Battista and allow for the flourishing of art), their approval is not without complexity. As the keeper of the crossroads and the “master of fate,” Eleggua stands in a more powerful position even than Fidel and Che. This means it was his decision to “open the door” to Fidel so that the latter could reshape Cuban society. On the other hand, he continually reminds the opera’s characters that some things “are forbidden.” At first, this seems to cast him as an adversary to Cuba’s “dream,” and he appears to be responsible for Porro’s failure to complete the schools. “I like to make problems just to create chaos,” he sings.
By the end of the opera, however, his true colours emerge. We realize that the form his prohibitions take has always been crucial to Cuba’s collective ability to “dream.” His apparent “obstructiveness” was never intended to prevent revolutionary change but was simply a way to remind the people that fixation on the full manifestation of a dream is always, in some sense, a betrayal of that dream. Although he allows Cuba to travel a certain distance toward the realization of its dreams, he forbids it from going any further, and in this way, he emphasizes desire over completion, movement and process over dogma. He emerges, smiling, at the end of the opera as the people reassure Porro that the work on the schools has not been in vain, even if they remain unfinished.
It is left to Selma to prove that revolutionary faith exists above and beyond any fixed or final form that the projects of revolution may take. She emphasizes that the dream of revolution is a dream “with no ending”: “The City of Arts is born here even if it’s unfinished. Art was born from bricks and cement. A symphony from dreams. You have triumphed, Riccardo. Much was achieved. An unfinished dream with no ending.”
In this way, the opera takes the audience on a ritualistic journey from the first affirmation of a dream to the disappointment of that dream’s encounter with reality to the realization that failure need not spell the end of desire. When people work as a collective, the failure of a personal project need not be devastating, because others will always dream of continuing the work you’ve been unable to finish. By sinking into despair at his and Cuba’s failings, Porro reveals he doesn’t fully understand the collective nature of dreams. He goes into exile, leaving the Cuban people to dream of finishing the schools themselves.
Cubanacan Opera: Excerpts from Charles Koppelman on Vimeo.
Andrew Warburton reviews the Spring issue of the Marxist journal Crisis and Critique, which focuses on art, music and culture in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
A troubling question that may arise for some readers approaching this topic for the first time is why the journal’s editors would publish an issue with such a provocative title. One might expect conservative or liberal-minded critics to react to the question with a straightforward condemnation of Stalin. The explanation the editors, Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza, give is that reductive interpretations of Stalinist culture - for instance, approaching that culture as “pathological,” “unintelligible,” or “irrational” - fail to adequately explain its driving force. By offering an immanent explanation of the “political rationality” of Stalinism, they hope to arrive at a clearer understanding of a culture that includes, among its contradictory effects, an apparently irrational campaign of terror and an enormous increase in Russia’s productive forces.
This approach can be seen, in many ways, as an extension of Boris Groys’ own analysis of Stalinism. Similar to Ruda and Hamza, Groys describes his approach as an “immanent” one and contrasts it with historical work that explains Stalinism through a “detailed chronology of historical facts.” For Groys, the latter approach results in misunderstandings of communist culture’s “inherent logic” and gives rise to an “outside observer’s fascination with the ceremonies of the centralized Soviet bureaucratic apparatus.” According to Ruda and Hamza, this fascination also encourages a limited representation of Stalinism as pathological or irrational and prevents an understanding of its internal dynamic. In contrast to this approach, the authors mentioned here begin with the assumption that all the features of Stalinist culture - even its excesses - must be available to analysis.
For anyone not familiar with Groys’ thesis, Alexei Penzin’s essay in this collection - Stalin Beyond Stalin: A Paradoxical Hypothesis of Communism - offers a precise summary and critique of both The Total Art of Stalinism and another book by Groys focusing specifically on communism: The Communist Postscript. In fact, as Penzin shows, Groys’ thesis on communist art is deceptively simple: rather than portraying Stalinism as a betrayal of the revolution and of modernist forms of art, as many critics and historians tend to do, Groys considers “socialist realism” to be their consummation.
His reasoning for this is that whereas the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s wanted to use art to remake society completely from scratch (i.e., it wanted art to become a productive force that would break with every aesthetic and social formation that went before), Stalin and the socialist realist “regime of art” turned this dream into a reality by remaking society as a “totalized” aesthetic form. As Groys points out:
Under Stalin the dream of the avant grade was in fact fulfilled and the life of society was organized in monolithic artistic forms, though of course not those that the avant-garde itself had favored.
It is difficult, in the light of this thesis, to think of socialist realism as a simply “reactionary” form of art, because it contains within it - in a more radically politicized form - all the lessons of the Russian avant-garde. Whatever one’s thoughts on Stalinism, many of the authors in the present issue of Crisis and Critique cannot help but respond to Groys’ insistence on its artistic and ideological power.
Tatlin’s Tower (1919) by Vladimir Tatlin, avant-garde constructivist design.
Although this issue of Crisis and Critique concerns itself primarily with politics, one essay, in particular, responds to the call for an immanent exploration of Stalinist art and culture in a way that aligns with Groys’ project. The essay - Who is Stalin? What is he?” by Lars T. Lih - pays particular attention to the mythical dimensions of two cantatas by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Hail to Stalin and Song of the Forests.
Rather than explaining the Stalinist features of these compositions as reactionary impositions on the composers’ otherwise “authentic” careers, Lih chooses - like Groys - to analyse the Stalinist integrity of these artworks by “taking Stalin into account.” This means placing the librettos in the context of Russian literary history and understanding Stalin, both the “mythical figure” and the “actual individual,” as the latest representative in a succession of Russian leaders, including Peter the Great and Boris Godunov. Song of the Forests, for instance, portrays Stalin in the act of mobilising the people for a great “reforestation project.” According to Lih, this representation contrasts Stalin deliberately with Pushkin’s character of Peter the Great in a poem of the same name. Whereas Pushkin’s Peter was an imperialist whose “great project is to remove a forest associated with darkness and primitiveness,” Stalin emerges as an anti-imperialist builder of peace whose “main motive in the cantata [is] ‘happiness for the narrod [i.e., the people].’”
Prokofiev’s Hail to Stalin, on the other hand, uses the “folklore-like expressions of the Soviet people” to portray Stalin in different states of mythic transcendence drawn, apparently, from ancient traditions. In the line “the sun now shines differently to us on earth… it is with Stalin in the Kremlin,” Lih sees Stalin as “a sort of vegetation god who guarantees fertility and growth.” Amid all this, the leader is portrayed, for Lih, as a “sacred” figure who demonstrates the ability to access a “sacred truth” and mediate between this truth and the life of his people; he does this, however, through a Marxist understanding of the laws of history, not through any divine communication.
Prokofiev’s Zdravitsa.
The implication of Lih’s readings supports Groys’ thesis that Stalinist culture offers its consumers access to a mythology that transcends economic necessity and touches the transhistorical. As Lih points out, the Stalin one finds in these works is
an entryway into myth - a symbol whose meanings can only be grasped through knowledge of the Stalin of history, but whose ramifications far transcend him.
In Stalin’s lifetime, critics and philosophers already understood that the overcoming of the contradictions of capitalism would inevitably lead to a radically different approach to the distinction between aesthetics and economics. In 1938, the Soviet Marxist Mikhail Lifshitz explained that the capitalist mode of production had brought the “inimical relationship… between the poetical play of fantasy and the prose of life” to its fullest possible tension. By alienating workers from their labour, capitalism emphasized the sharp distinction between work and play to an intolerable degree.
With this in mind, Lih’s insights into the mythic dimension of Stalinism are clarified: Stalinist art works derive their power from portraying the Soviet Union’s socialized mode of production - in this case, the reforestation project of Shostakovich’s Song of the Forests - as transporting workers out of the “prosaic” level of existence and thereby resolving the contradiction between a reality reduced to economics and the desire for mythic existence. The consumer of the Stalinist artwork aesthetically attains such an existence: his life is no longer limited to economic exchange and his aesthetic senses are liberated from the compartmentalized world of “play.”
As Lifshitz points out:
Communist society removes… the abstract contradiction between ‘work and pleasure’… Together with the abolition of classes and the gradual disappearance of the contradiction between physical and spiritual labour, comes that all-sided development of the whole individual which the greatest social thinkers hitherto could only dream about.
Stakhanovite from the OGPU plant (1931-1939) by Vitaly Tikhov.
Many of the authors in the present issue of Crisis and Critique demonstrate an acute awareness of the power of ideology, which is really another word for “myth.” This awareness, of course, places great importance on art, literature, and aesthetics as bearers of ideology. However, the authors also seem ambivalent about the role of ideology in communist politics, an ambivalence that’s heightened, of course, by the awareness that so many communist experiments have degenerated into ideologically repressive regimes (Stalin being the quintessential example). The fact that many of the writers seem to believe that the existence of democratic, working-class organizations will never produce meaningful changes without some larger political - and ideological - oversight only heightens the sense of ambivalence.
Jean-Claude Milner, for example, in his article “The Prince and the Revolutionary,” points out that Lenin’s gravest “political mistake” was that he believed too much in Marxist economics and failed to understand the importance of a political imaginary. Believing he possessed full knowledge of Russia’s economic situation and that an “affirmative doctrine of economic management” would be enough to build socialism in the country, he failed to grasp the sheer level of ideological manipulation required. It was therefore left to Stalin to create a political mythology capable of transforming society through fiat. One only has to return to our earlier discussion of Groys and Lih to understand the aesthetic character of this mythology.
Other writers in the collection dismiss Stalinism as not introducing anything original to the Marxist-Leninist tradition. The writer and Trotskyist activist Paul Le Blanc learns songs from Maoists in India but finds that the aspiration these comrades express - “we demand our share of wealth earned by our sweat!” - bears no essential relationship to the “Stalinist reference points” they use. The essence of the Maoists’ songs, for Le Blanc, is “far more consistent with core beliefs… found in such revolutionaries as Marx, Lenin, and Krupskaya.” In other words, in contrast to Lih, Milner, and Groys, Stalinism is reduced to a husk containing a properly revolutionary core, and any original aesthetics produced under Stalin could only be in the service of reaction.
Le Blanc’s dismissal of Stalin finds support from Louis Proyect in his review of Crisis and Critique’s new issue on the blog The Unrepentant Marxist. Proyect describes some of the authors in “Stalin: What Does the Name Stand For?” as “crypto-Stalinists,” saying they’re “more interested in what Stalin said than than what he did.” He goes on to argue that “abandoning the rigid dichotomies of crypto-Stalinism is a major task facing the left.” However, the role played by language and aesthetics in Groys and in the writings of the so-called crypto-Stalinists in Crisis and Critique suggests that a fundamental disagreement exists between Proyect’s Marxism and the postmodern dialectics of the former writers. Their interest in “what Stalin said” and in official Soviet ideology arises from an emphasis on the role of language and aesthetics in the shaping of history.
Hence, for Groys, socialist realism may resolve the problem of art’s subordination to market forces and might even allow art to accede to its true power as art. But that doesn’t make Stalinism palatable. Equally, the unpalatability of Stalinism does not mean that philosophers should simply stop questioning what art would look like if it were freed from market forces. With the Soviet Union being our only model of a society in which the market was completely abolished, this question is inevitably going to come up against Stalinism. By dismissing those who attempt to understand Stalinism and who see it, theoretically, as an “answer” to a philosophical dilemma, Proyect surely fails to understand the dilemma itself.
Stalin: What Does the Name Stand For? is a varied and profound collection, which adds to our understanding of Stalinist culture. The willingness to approach Stalinism from the “inside” is daring, and yet, it mustn’t be avoided simply out of fear of irrationality or “evil.” Without an understanding of the rationality that motivates seemingly irrational events, communist projects of the future will be impoverished.
