In every real experiment there is a moment of zero predictability.  Asger Jorn

Imagine the space filled with the odour of fish, not in a state of rottenness, more like that of the sky-laden, clattering square in Joaquim de Beukelaer's painting of old Antwerp's fishmarket (c.1570), a world of glances, miracles and memory, of truly sexual collisions, conjured-up over a vendor's barrow, fish heads, choppers and pouches of money[1] .Such an aroma carries on into contemporary tales of oestrogen, sea pollution, even of hermaphrodites smiling at the fleet death on the Humber from their road junction coffee houses. Into this space float diffused essences, say of almonds and rosemary, reminiscent of late 19th century anarchist Paris, of far-away Mesopotamian gardens, and of chic techno  restaurants from our own time of corporate telematics.

And so we enter Hull's Theatre d'Art  2000   to catch an unfolding drama on the death of the artschool, and I would say of art itself, by a late-flourishing, growing band of anti-authoritarian aesthetes. These last gasp Symbolists, angered and disappointed by the paradoxes of their cultural and political life as students, appear radicalised by their de-politicisation (un-voiced by bureaucrats, the senior political powers of the University governing them) and re-politicised by their positive cultural action in forming an embryonic independent artschool   beyond the collective aims, resources and counter-strategies of the Red Gallery occupation of November 1999, two weeks of 'The New Hull School of Art'. The latter was possibly wrongly named an artwork, as if to appear less real, less threatening, less target-able, somehow protected by the philosophical maze around the nature of art, its objects, processes and functions[2] . Upon reflection, maybe the nomenclature was wise, since true art endures, brings pleasure, creates a culture of the gift and a measure of enigma.

This is no ordinary theatre; here, real and imaginary are on the scales of our political unconscious, culture is on the watery slab, the sort of culture we know as having to do with wholeness, the relation of each to all, and each to the void. Theatre d'Art 2000 's going concerns are educational freedom and equality, injustice is the true field of their strife, yet it is a theatre most unlike the lumpen, lumpsucker Hull Truck approach[3] . The sublime night is set aside for their action. They are pledged to the overcoming of obstacles : social life, political life, art -- these truth-troubadours have a synaesthetic vision to work upon us, a staging of Maeterlincks still drama, The Blind Men [4] , that once cataclysmic piece which sings to us yet of anxiety, death and crisis, as do Freud and Nietzsche, the poets contemporaries. No directors spiel on technology, bewilderment or enthralling fun here -- no show in fact -- just another morning odour, this time of a colonial fort (not a colossal fart as Bakhtin/Rabelais might have laughed[5] ) with its marooned garrison under siege ( Freud's image of modern man's complex of guilt and desire)[6]. There is a quiet, indeed sombre quality around the event in this play by Maeterlinck, something that thickened-up in the twentieth century into a cackling, fragmentary, negative stupidity in Beckett's work[7] . The art students version of The Blind Men  during the Root Festival is a spiritual parable, in that sense alone of convictions arising during 'Being-towards-Death'[8] , spiritual only as part of our material relations, not a turning away from these : indeed, spiritual art only as in "struggle for life".

An 1890 Parisian audience immersed in economic crisis, unemployment, violent strikes, government corruption, class and racial prejudice saw this Symbolist play as a space not of raw didactic commentary, nor as that mystification driving most of the fin-de-siecle  art-for-arts-sake work, but as a piece embodying the virtues of contemplation, through which the relation of feeling to understanding settles and matures. In this play, worldly symbolists, like our Independent Artschool  troupe, act out arts power over death, in the face of a dominant culture which would lead us to distraction, then destruction. So, our anarchist-aesthete troubadours perform The Blind Men  while immersed in a climate of economic reductionism, their old artschool swallowed whole by commodified education; immersed too in a society bound to mono-cultures of either excessive wealth and work or no work and poverty, a western post-industrial culture of amnesia, bad faith and malaise.

Felix Feneon, editor-poet-critic sans pareil , no less, after being in the 1890 audience, wrote:

      The Blind Men  by M. Maurice Maeterlinck, twelve of them sitting

      in a clearing, at night, await the return of a priest who was leading

      them, have been waiting for hours, anxious and at last their

      horrified fingers find among themselves the priest, who had not left

      them, who was lying there, in their midst, dead.[9]

In my humble capacity as a Japanese passer-by, witnessing the plays revival here in Hull -- as a sharp revival of political life itself -- I contemplated its meanings as best I could. Let us speculate upon several possible interpretations.

Are the twelve disciples  of the Independent Artschool movement, say, bereft of a guide, the priest being the spiritual and practical form of the old artschool, now dead? From their clearing, from within anxiety still, will their art overcome fear and vulnerability, overcome the loss of a benign heavenly word, vision or touch? More disciples of modernity, you say. Far too late.

Or are the twelve, acted as if Bill Evan's music and Noh drama's stage had a common bond, rather teachers of the old artschool (The Hull School of Art & Design[10] ) fingering lost hopes, or hopes removed from them by force? Fingering their pay-packets, even?

Onwards! My musings led me to Alexander Blok's stormiest poem ,'The Twelve', with its dozen brutal Red Guards and its music, a continuous elemental roar around a tragic death[11] . Forward, to twelve be-suited managers in their new university new learning environment, with no new spiritual journey ahead, newly wringing their horrified fingers at the corpse of their new enterprise? Did they kill the priest by design, newly trampled, newly torn? Such unreconstructed men.

On a Russian surge, reflecting first upon Novy Lef and Rodchenko's part in the reform of the artschools after 1917 [12]  -- Alex the Walking Manifesto -- I then wondered if this dead priest might be that self-same bearded figure in Potemkin? With him out of the way at last, vision might be restored? Pah! Priests, leaders, authorities! Did he die out of weak Reason, duplicitousness, insensitivity or plain ahistorical baloney? Did he die?

Later, it came to mind that Maeterlinck's symbolist creation was a version of the dawning realisation that the mystical task, art's disclosure of wonder and beauty, which is the practical, everyday task, is ours and ours alone, once we have recovered our composure and 'seen' the possibilities of a language of non-dependency.

All the night, waiting with the players, every breather in the warm body of this Theatre d'Art   seemed to question, just like M. Richard Mutt[13] , whether the artist was priest?

The spirit of Marcel Duchamp, with his tongue in his cheek, particularly in his critique of the art institution, his de-stabilisation of the nature of the art object, his labyrinthine ambiguities in language play, and the intentional consciousness accorded the spectator, was a presence to be felt (livelier than the Tour de France). All this arose immediately in open discussion of the Independent Artschool's aims and fate. First came the wave of concern for the political dynamic of radicalism , characterised by Peter Osborne most recently as having a "split, disjunctive, contradictory, self-surpassing form"[14] . These interjections, questions of radicalism, I took to be a condition of all: so modern, so short-lived, so critical, all our energy for purposeful change, not just change for change's sake. One among us, probably a flag-waving propagandist in her youth, judging by her sour visage, declared as a challenge: "as with Revolution, any new form becomes the moment of its supercession. Somehow that casts a warning: authority, codes of exchange, hierarchies are like shadows. Why bother? You may as well join the Party?"[15]

The political consensus, Red-Green, in the shape of the little Free University network, runs as follows, for a movement --

      to live its conceptual life in action, that is, overcoming obstacles

      to find better relations through sharing

      to find an economics which supports ethical life

      (both of these last two through co-operative organisation and through art as     

      research into a better life)

      to share health and vital energies, using inter-disciplinary knowledge

      to be involved in local social and political movements in concrete,             

     experimental projects.[16]

It won't be an 'artschool' anymore, more of a workshop-crucible of political potential, for the recovery of historical meaning. The artists of the Independent Artschool movement one day might be able to say, "we created this model for you of a less alienated aesthetic life, with social, political and ecological truths." Yet hard-core "artists", self-serving artistes of the circuit, from Tokyo to Trondheim, pleaded for "something else", more in the tradition of arts auto-critique: self-sufficiency. The action school denied that self-sufficiency was adequate to the task, an impossibility indeed.

'The blind men' stumbled around, post-performance, as if in open pursuit of beauty, an awakening of a temporal sort, like birds at the commencement of flight, with an evanescent cascade of song and wing-beat questions. There, at that moment, I recognised aesthetic life harbouring political freedom, no more solid than a memory of the stillness of quiet deer or horses. Void and infinity seem measures forgotten by the professional  managers, profiteers, those dead priests of conformity, with their crazed dogma and Awards for Excellence in clumsiness.

In Ursula Le Guin's version of Lao Tzu's philosophy[1] , I had once taken Proportion to heart. My only interjection, during the Maeterlinck play in fact, amidst a swarm of restless responses, was a recital of this poem -- finger-wagging, but with a wry smile --

      You can't keep standing on tiptoe

      or walk in leaps and bounds.

      You can't shine by showing off

      or get ahead by pushing.

      Self-satisfied people do no good,

      self-promoters never grow up.

      Such stuff is to the Tao

      as garbage is to food

      or a tumour to the body,

      hateful.

      The follower of the Way

      avoids it. 

The Independent Artschool movement is on the Way.

 

1. Beukelaer, nephew and pupil of Pieter Aertsen, like the latter, painted many fine, large scale genre scenes. Though a master of foregrounded nature morte, there is the paradoxical matter of the daily life scene being full of action. This painting, 'Fishmarket', is in the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull.
2. One need only think of Arthur Danto's epiphany with the Brillo Boxes, his tracking of the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, his meditations on art after the end of art, to enter this maze of ambivalence and fin folie.
3. Suck one at a popular  theatre near you. Godberite is the metal most unlike titanium. 'Bouncers', 'Teechers', 'Blood, Sweat and Tears', 'On The Piste'...                                                                                     4. 'Les Aveugles', in Maurice Maeterlinck, Theatre, Fasquelle Editeurs, Paris, 1939. My edition, translatable as 'The Blind', lists the characters : Le Pretre, Trois Aveugles-Nes, Le Plus Vieil Aveugle, Le Cinquieme Aveugle, Le Sixieme Aveugle, Trois Vieilles Aveugles en priere, La Plus Vieille Aveugle, Une Jeune Aveugle, Une Aveugle Folle. Six  men, six women play the main parts, plus someone to play the corpse. In addition, an unlisted dog - to guide them to the corpse - plus an infant to wail in the concluding snowfall are essential requirements for a strict rendering of the text. Others have translated it into English as 'The Blind Men', not only Halperin (see Note 9 below) recounting Feneon's report after the first performance at Paul Fort's theatre in 1890.
5.  See Chapter Six of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Indiana University Press, 1984.
6. See Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930) in The Standard Edition...(1961) Vol.XXI, ed. James Strachey.
7.The most obvious worthwhile comparison would be with 'Waiting For Godot' (1952).
8. Here, I use Martin Heidegger's phrase from Being and Time, trans. MacQuarrie and Robinson, Blackwell, 1962, in order to direct thinking towards ontological experience and the call of care.
9. See Part Three, Chapter Nine of Joan Ungersma Halperin's Felix Feneon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin -de-Siecle Paris, Yale University Press, 1988.                                                                                         10. This artschool can trace its origins to 1861, part of the tremor from the Great Exhibition. Its recent history, that of the successive loss of autonomy from when it was the city and region's College of Art, has been a history of incorporation within the mutating body of higher education. The exact terms of incorporation have been 'lost'. Perhaps they will be resurrected and challenged?
11. See the Poetry Pleiade edition, Aleksandr Blok, Selected Poems, trans. Peter France and Jon Stallworthy, Carcanet, 2000. The Introduction is helpful on 'The Twelve'.
12. Tzarist art institutions after 1917 were replaced by the Petrograd and Moscow, then other, Free Studios which allowed the pre-Revolutionary avant-garde onto the teaching faculty. In 1920, the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops (mainly industrial design schools) were established - known as VKhUTEMAS  until 1928. Rodchenko, with others, implemented the Basic Division foundation programme, theorizing wood, metal and graphic construction, and plane and colour,  from a materialist standpoint. See Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism : From Fine Art Into Design 1913-33,Yale University Press, 1983.                                                                                                                                        13.  Richard Mutt : I refer to that lost original 'Fountain', signed 'R. Mutt 1917', photographed by Alfred Stieglitz  (published in the second issue of 'The Blind Man', May 1917 by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood and H.P. Rouche).                                                                                                                                                          14.  Peter Osborne, 'Radicalism and Philosophy', Radical Philosophy 103,September- October 2000, p.9.
15.  From dialectics to disavowal!
16. In the Introduction to Andre Gorz's Ecology As Politics, trans. Vigderman and Cloud, Pluto Press 1980, the author ends with a vision of 'public workshops'  in which we might learn "all of the skills which are now commercially torn from us and replaced with buying and selling...where people produce according to their fantasies, not only according to their needs." Free Studios, returned to at a higher level, if the current paradigm of "work" is overturned ?
17. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula Le Guin and J.P.Seaton, Shambhala, Boston 1997, p.33.