DON’T GO TO THEBES

1.

King Oedipus grew up with scars on his ankles from the shackles he wore when left by his Royal parents to die on a desolate hillside. But he didn’t die, he was brought up in Corinth by adopted parents. Until, hearing the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he travelled to Thebes, where of course he unknowingly murdered his father and married his mother. And when finally he discovered the truth he gouged his own eyes out. As everybody knows, this myth was adapted by the priest king Sigmund Freud as a fundamental concept of psychoanalysis: male desire for the mother, jealousy of the father. But I cant help thinking that Freud was being a bit literal and that he actually missed the whole point of the story. Oedipus didn’t go to Thebes to fuck his mother and kill his father, he went there so that he would not have to do these things. The point of the story is that sometimes the things you do to escape are the very things that keep you captivated. It’s not enough to simply leave one Kingdom for another, you have to figure out where you are going. If Oedipus had stopped on the dusty road and just thought about things a bit he would have realised that the way to escape his destiny was to not kill old kings and not to get married to a widowed Queen. Don’t go to Thebes.

2.

Why should we want to build a new Autonomous Art School (A.S.A.) ? Could it be the return of the revolutionary spirit of ‘68 ? A blow against the monoculture ? Is it nostalgia ? Is it just radical chic ? An Art project ? Do you really want to build one ? And how can it be done ? Obviously the intrinsic requirement of the A.S.A. is that it should be ideologically, structurally and financially autonomous, but autonomy is relative. If the purpose of the school is to reform existing State Art education or to raise issues and promote debate within the State Art academy or to build an institute that will be funded and administrated by the State, then the A.S.A. will clearly not be autonomous of the State and the debate we should be having is about the future of State education. Or perhaps the A.S.A. will be independent of bourgeois capitalism ? But without State funding the A.S.A will have to engage with the capitalist economy at even the most minimal level since public funding is the means developed by the State to construct an education system ‘independent’ from capitalist commerce. State funding or capitalism ? Actually, it’s not as if you can choose between the two, because the State education system is not independent, it is an integrated sector of the bourgeois economy. The Art schools, Universities and Colleges where Art is taught are institutes of state education funded by compulsory taxes levied on all classes employed in the capitalist economy; capitalism funds Art education. There is nowhere autonomous of capitalism. However, there seems to persist within the Art schools and the Art academy a culture which actively opposes the commercial production/consumption utility of capitalism. Is this because the Art schools are the last besieged bastion of creative freedom and radical cultural subversion ? No....it is because as an integrated sector of the bourgeois capitalist economy the function of the Art schools and the academy is to produce the spectacle of liberty ; they transform the desire for creative freedom into a superfluous luxury product. The fundamental problem with the A.S.A is that the project of constructing an autonomous Art is not a radical new, modern or (Post)modern initiative, it is only the latest replaying of the founding strategy of 19th century bourgeois Art. From Maurice Quai and the Barbus in the late 18th century, to the Saint Simonians, the Bohemians, the Avant Garde, Bauhaus, the Surrealists, Beuys, the Co-Ops and Art School occupations of the sixties and the collective experiments and subversions of the nineties, Artists have attempted to found institutes of autonomous Art. The subversive passion and the imaginative force deployed by these rebels has only been surpassed by the incredible resilience of the Art institutions which have enervated, appropriated, plagiarised and merchandised every successive attack against them. The charming ease with which this digestion is accomplished is facilitated by the radical Artist’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Art. Whilst there were many ‘arts’ prior to the 19th century, ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’ first emerged as the ‘autonomous’ culture of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The revolutions which brought the bourgeoisie to power were revolutions against the feudal hierarchy, against the authority of the Church and the nobility. In their rise to power the invoked revolutionary demands for liberty, democracy and equality, but if these demands were taken to there logical conclusion they would inevitably threaten the legitimacy of the emerging bourgeois elite. The bourgeoisie as it acquired power had to develop the means to legitimise their rule in the name of liberty, they had to ascend the social hierarchy whilst claiming to dismantle it. One of the crucial ways they achieved this was by creating an elite Art culture which demonstrated their superiority by the faculty of good taste; they recognised the beauty of Art and in return Art recognised their power. But this bourgeois aesthetic was not the initiation of a radical break with the past, it was a negotiation which allowed the bourgeois to perpetuate the past in the name of modernity. The function of the feudal arts had been to demonstrate the divine rule of the Church and the hereditary rule of the nobility , since the bourgeoisie actually aspired to this feudal hierarchy, so bourgeois Art syncreticised the hierarchical aristocratic and sacred ‘function’ of the arts into the capitalist economy. Following Burger, Bourdieu, Benjamin and Roger Taylor, ‘Art’ can be defined as the institution which demonstrates the bourgeois acquisition of sacred and aristocratic power and fetishises this feudal power as the aura of the unique Art object. The aura as commodity is the desire of the bourgeois for aristocratic and theocratic power and it is also their fear that they will never possess it. As the aura is the fetish of nobility and sanctity so in it’s presence the bourgeois contemplates in awe the traditions of divine and hereditary authority. Democracy and equality are antithetical to Art, the value of aura is it’s scarcity. The feudal arts that the bourgeoisie fetishised were handicrafts. The alienation of the worker from the product of their labour, the fragmentation of the assembly line, standardisation, automation and the other key innovations of bourgeois capitalism could not be adopted in Art without the elimination of the sacred and the noble aura of Art. The bourgeoisie aspired to both sanctity and nobility, and so Art became the fetishized bourgeois ideal of pre-industrial production . Moreover, whilst the market economy developed Art as a commodity, it did not eliminate the bourgeois aspiration to become the noble patron and commissioner of Art. The autonomisation of Art is also then, a process of separation from mass industrial production, to the point where Art is defined by it’s unique authenticity, by it’s manual creation. In its function as the fetish of feudal power, Art must be independent of commerce, independent of mass production and above all independent of the kitsch and venal entertainment of the masses. It is Art for Art sake, free from necessity, superfluous, pure, sacred and majestic. Art for the bourgeoisie is both an autonomous realm of freedom and a means to limit that freedom to an elite ruling class. As Art and the Artist carry the aura of sacred and noble power so they carry the feudal myths of King and messiah. The Artist becomes the wandering mystic, the prophet, the prince in disguise, the martyr, the lost princess, the mad Lord, the genius... Trapped in this myth system the revolt of the Artist is not only tolerated, it is required. The bourgeois public is also captivated, fascinated by their own revolutionary drama, they aspire to the divine, they long for the acceptance of the ancient nobility, they despise the vulgar economic system which gave them power and yet they burn with the Romantic fire of liberty; it is the work of the radical Artist to live this drama and sell it to them.

3.

Supposing we want a new school of creativity, what is it supposed to do ? We can be Anarchists or Cyber-feminists or bleeding heart liberals or Marxists, Situationists, Crustys, Voodoo acolytes ...whatever...to begin with all we really have to agree is that we want the school to be free, democratic and equal, and already we will have a revolutionary educational project. Lets agree some basic precepts of a radical constitution which would make it worth doing :

• Total freedom of expression. • Collective and democratic control. • Equality/non-hierarchical organisation. • Open access to all. • Common ownership of all assets. • Financial self sufficiency.

In practice the school would inevitably fall far short of these aspirations, things would go wrong, there would be disputes and defections, those who put in the most work may even end up feeling discarded or betrayed... but it is nevertheless possible to construct an institute structured on these principles, and it would be liberating and heroic even to attempt it. However an Art school or an ‘autonomous’ school built on these principles would be about as practical as using a crucifix as a defence against bailiffs repossessing your furniture. To learn from history, it is not only clear that the radical autonomous Art and Anti-Art movements of the 20th century were rapidly digested by the Art institutions, it is also depressingly apparent that having vaccinated itself against these potential toxins Art now indulges radical subversion like a tolerant parent reminiscing about their youth on the barricades. Hence the recent flirting with Situationism and the spate of State funded pranks and institutionally sanctioned interventions. If we really want to build a school of creativity based on the principles I have outlined, then there is a form of creativity which historically has not only been independent of the bourgeois State but actually survived an incredible onslaught of State repression, legislation and prohibition. This creativity was excluded from Art so that Art could become the sublime privilege of the bourgeoisie, it has been vilified as common, vulgar and kitsch, it is the culture of slaves, thieves, heretics and whores, it has been theorised as hegemonic seduction and it has been appropriated and patronised by the so called (Post)modern Artists, yet it is the culture of the vast majority of the population and it has triumphed as the defining culture of the 20th century : it is the Popular.

4.

The indomitable Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin identified European mediaeval popular culture as an unofficial culture of carnival which had developed out of thousands of years of ancient folk ritual. Before the development of social class and state structure, comic/ festive ritual was an integral element of the unified culture of the people. As class and state developed so the comic/ festive elements of culture were excluded from the official culture and became the alternative folk culture of carnival. Carnival opposed the official serious culture of the church and feudal court with a culture of feasts, fairs, pageants, clowns, acrobats, jugglers, profanity, trained animals, monsters, freaks, laughter and parody. Sharing the Holy days of the mediaeval year , carnival mimicked and mocked sacred feudal rituals and protocols with comic carnival ritual, it was a second life which existed outside official life, and for it’s duration it was a different way of living, a realm of community, freedom, equality and abundance. The carnival is alternative , opposes the official and serious culture of both the Church and the nobility. It is participatory , there is no border between the audience and the performance. It is ambivalent , it holds a diversity of elements in combination, it mutates and transforms. It is material , it degrades the abstract celebrates the body and the life of the people. It is utopian , it frees the imagination from the orthodox and the conventional and reveals the possibility of change. It is anarchic, there can be no central control over the carnival since it is the diversity of its participants. It is transgressive, it inverts and subverts. And it is unfinished , the carnival is always a process. According to Bahktin , after the Renaissance the carnival was suppressed and domesticated, but the tradition survived in a residual form. On the contrary, I would propose that the Renaissance does not mark the end of the carnival tradition and that it can be traced in Britain through the great fairs of the Renaissance, through the broadsides and chapbooks, the itinerant ballad sellers, the travelling players, pantomime, circus, the penny gaffs, the music halls, cinema, pulp fiction, jazz, amateur cine clubs, rock and roll, punk, car boot sales, Karaoke to drum and bass. The Renaissance is not the end of the carnival but the initiation of a revolutionary and cumulative conflict between the popular tradition and the emergence of the official Art culture of the bourgeoisie. From the Renaissance onwards a complex historical interaction developed between popular culture and the authorised and legitimate culture of the aristocratic state. Whilst the state attempted to control and suppress it, popular culture was actually the dynamic force behind the most significant legitimate cultural innovations of the 17th and 18th century, critically the influence of carnival theatre on Jacobean drama, or the relationship of the chapbook rogue biographies on the development of the novel. Moreover state suppression did not eliminate popular forms since popular culture resisted by constantly mutating and transforming itself. A key instance of this process was the resistance to the prohibition on spoken dramatic dialogue outside of the Royal theatres. The outlaw fairbooth theatres and travelling companies responded by developing popular genres which evaded the law by adopting spectacular visual and musical forms in which spoken dialogue was either minimised or eliminated. This was fundamental to the development of Pantomime in the 18th century, and in the rise of Melodrama and the Music Halls of the 19th century.

However whilst the state suppressed popular culture in the early 18th century, the popular was still effectively integrated into a hierarchical but unified culture. With the consolidation of bourgeois capitalism and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie an absolute separation developed between popular culture and the new autonomous culture of Art. In order to demonstrate the new elite autonomy of Art the bourgeois state embarked upon a comprehensive onslaught of legislation against the vulgar entertainment of the masses. Throughout the 19th century legislation was passed to prohibit hundreds of fairs, street football and other street sports were suppressed, popular blood sports were banned, busking and street entertainment was prohibited. Whilst the streets and town squares were being purged of entertainment a parallel process of legislation and licensing was enacted to eliminate interactive grass roots pub and saloon concerts forcing the working class audience into the larger established music halls where they were gradually ‘sedated’ by licensing laws to ban smoking, drinking and eating and to replace free standing chairs and tables with rows of auditorium seating. As new technologies were developed so the bourgeoisie attempted to ensure their elite control over the hierarchy of culture. At the turn of the century cinema was developed as an integral genre within the popular entertainment circuit of fairbooths and music halls, within a decade the exhilarating potential of this British variety cinema had been crushed by bourgeois moral panic, repressive licensing laws and stringent safety regulations. Likewise radio which initially had the potential to become an open access interactive network of sender/receivers was brought under State monopoly control on the pretext of national security and the mythical scarcity of radio frequencies. From radio to the internet, from the legislation of pub opening hours to the Criminal Justice Act and the prohibition on repetitive beats, the bourgeoisie has waged a losing battle against the unofficial, pirate, bootleg, anonymous popular. And whilst suppressing the popular they have disparately struggled to preserve their own fetish Art with increasing amounts of public funding, a strategy which has culminated in the National Lottery; a means by which the most disparate and underprivileged can directly finance the Art culture which was developed to exclude them. As an insurance policy in case the funding runs thin British Art since the 1980’s has been ruthlessly simulating popular culture (Postmodernism) in the forlorn hope of legitimising its unpopularity.

5.

The purpose of a radical new school of creativity should be to democratise culture, to make the means of cultural production, distribution and exhibition freely and equally available to all. There can be no democratic Art education since its purpose is to limit Art production to an elite caste of professionals whilst maintaining the hierarchical dominance of Art over all other forms of cultural production. There can be no ‘autonomous’ school of creativity without an economy or an audience. The economy of Art is trapped in a feudal fetish of patronage, unique manual production and genius that makes collective practice and financial self sufficiency impossible. On the other hand the illegitimate and anarchic tradition of popular culture has subverted the the ascendance of the dominant bourgeois culture and reached a vast audience of the excluded and the disenfranchised in spite of massive ideological and institutional repression. The only workable radical new school of creativity for the 21st century would be a School of Revolutionary Pop Culture. At the S.R.P.C. the students would no longer have to study Kings, Bishops and the failed experiments of (Post)Modernism, but could dedicate themselves to the development of hybrid techniques and projects designed to bring about the liberation of everyday life: folk cinema, protest dance, d.i.y. video, creative plagiarism, digital dub psychobilly, autonomous lotteries, car boot bartering, non sexist pornography, computer viruses, pagan Xmas carols, anonymity, experimental gambling, sex furniture, drug design, amateur television etc. The S.R.P.C. would not be autonomous but subversively engaged. To become financially self sufficient the School would have to sell products or charge its audience an entry fee, but projects based on the fantasy of autonomy from capitalism can only endlessly repeat the ancient dependence on patronage and State funding. There are many other cities full of bright lights and beautiful people, don’t go to Thebes.

Duncan Reekie is a film/video maker and performer, a founder member of the EXPLODING CINEMA collective, a key activist in the No Wave of English Underground Cinema and co-ordinator of the international underground feature film MALDOROR. He is currently doing a Research PhD in ‘Underground Cinema’ at Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall. For more information check out : www.explodingcinema.org http://bak.spc.org.maldoror

E mail him at duncanreekie@yahoo.co.uk