critical of a lot of this Marxist teleology that you within society in a material way.

And I wonder can

still find in Marcuse. There is still the underlying art be discussed in this way anymore?
faith that the dialectics of history are tending
towards a revolution. This is a word that is, to my JT: Yes, is art now a world unto itself, its own
knowledge, absent from Rancière, which is not to conversation, such that it no longer relates to
say that he isn’t interested in emancipation. society, as some would claim? I would turn that
question back on you, as a working artist. I don't
AM: I am also interested in how this Marxist think that the way you initially put it is true. I don't
notion of base and superstructure which I believe, think that art has become an exclusively bourgeois AESTHETICS AND UTOPIAN POSSIBILITY:
despite Marcuse's Marxist critiques, is still at the affair, and I don't think Marcuse would find this to
core of his writing on art. In The Aesthetic be the case, despite the fact that he uses the word HERBERT MARCUSE AND THE ARTS
Dimension he says, "the evaluation of art is “autonomy” so frequently. Has art, however,
through interpreting the quality and truth of a work become such an insider’s affair that only An Interview With Joseph Tanke
of art in terms of the totality of the prevailing specialists, regardless of their class, can find it to
relations to its productions...The work of art be meaningful?
represents the interests and world outlook of
particular social classes in a more or less accurate AM: Or, on the contrary, have all the tools and
manner. The truth of art lies in this, that the world structures of art been co-opted or utilized as part
really is as it appears in the work of art." I think it of what Adorno's would call The Culture Industry?
is important to note that what he is talking about is This is a question that gets asked continually or
a relationship between art and a material base, stated as fact. But I don't really believe that either.
between art and the totality of the relations of
production. Does this framework through which JT: Yeah, I don't think Marcuse would believe that
he is looking at aesthetics still apply now? either, or he is crushed. He is writing this book as
he is dying and he does not want to believe that.
JT: Correct me if I am wrong, but I think he is He wants to believe that some of the things he
being critical of those notions. He is critical of this takes pleasure in—which I think is his bottom line
strict Marxist relationship between base and dollar—and which certain Marxists would make
superstructure. He is definitely critical of just him feel guilty for, like Baudelaire. Baudelaire
thinking about art as ideology. And I don't even writes a poem about beating up a beggar with his
know that he would say that the best work, or the cane. He gives the beggar a coin only after the
truest work, is art that gives us a clear perspective beggar gets up and trounces him. Not exactly the
on the prevailing material conditions in society. art of working class people. Yet, Baudelaire is a lot
This need not be what art does. Art has this future more rebellious than many nineteenth century
leaning quality. It also has a retrospective quality. poets, both at the level of his text and his personal
It looks at the past—memory is an important life. He performed a major act of class dis-
category for Marcuse—and carries something identification when he took part in the working-
forward, projecting it into the future. class uprising of 1848. Marcuse is really
responding to people who are influenced by
AM: Yeah, I think you are right. I may have Brechtian aesthetics, and Brecht’s idea about what
slightly muddled his critique and his theory. But I art should do. He is responding to them, near the
still think that at the core of Marcuse there is an end of his life, and saying that maybe these things
emphasis on the material relations, he doesn't stray that he has found pleasure in could have been what
far from the base and superstructure proposition. inspired him to engage in the process of social
He talks about art as reflecting what is happening critique in the first place.
This interview pamphlet is produced to coincide with the sculpture and event series, A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards to
Utopia) created and organized by Anthony Marcellini (blog.anthonymarcellini.info)and presented as part of the exhibition
Immediate Futures, at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, from September 6-October 18, 2008. This project takes the
form of a natural-grass-knoll based upon a structure found at the site of a former California Utopian colony Alturia (1894-96). It
acts as a stage for a series of weekly events taking place on Saturdays throughout the exhibition run. The aim of this sculpture is
that by emulating this grass form (which possibly contained the remains of a Utopian experiment) it becomes a perfect platform
from which to consider the link between art and Utopian potential. This mound acts as a foundation from which to explore,
develop and communicate diverse expressions of other realities and a hope/drive for alternatives to the existing situation.
Participants include, Tommy Becker, Iain Boal, Lewis Jordan, Pat Murphy, Matthew David Rana, and Joseph Tanke.
A note to the reader:
This interview between Joseph Tanke and myself
was recorded on Tuesday, October 7, 2008, in
Joseph's office at the California College of the Arts
(CCA). Our conversation touched on many things
quickly moving from questions regarding A Grass
Mound (With Kind Regards to Utopia) itself, into a
discussion on pedagogy and learning both in this
project and in our lives (I have been a teaching
assistant in the first year program at CCA this
year, and Joseph is assistant professor in visual
and critical studies at CCA.) I realised not
coincidentally, that teaching and learning have
been recurrent themes throughout this project. The
topic has reappeared in many of the interviews and
all of the performers, it turns out, are teachers.
Pedagogy it seems, is an important part of any
project concerning Utopia for it allows for the
education of difference and optimistic possibility.
Though much of our dialogue was interesting, I
believed it to be a little too rambling and too
personal, let alone abstracted from the topic,
Herbert Marcuse's aesthetics, to be of complete
interest to the reader. Therefore, the interview
begins twenty minutes into our conversation at the
first mention of Marcuse. Joseph begins by
discussing Marcuse's philosophical strategies, and
his attempts at clarity. For Joseph, they are part of
Marcuse’s broader effort to conduct his own
analysis of contemporary culture, and to bring the
history of philosophy to bear his present.
JT: Marcuse is someone who tries to make the
thought of the Frankfurt School very clear.
Compared to Adorno and Horkheimer, he is
obviously the most accessible writer of the school.
He is someone who was deliberately engaging
with the contemporary moment in which he was
living. This, in a sense, might make his thought
obsolete; sometimes when you read certain
passages they sound very dated. But I think that is
a very deliberate choice on his part to extend
philosophy to a broader audience. One
Dimensional Man, for example, sold millions of
copies. It was read and probably understood in a
way that a lot of books, which are fashionable to
carry around, are not always understood. People
understood Marcuse in the sixties; Marcuse’s
works were debated by students, workers,
organizers and academics. So, much of his thought
was built by reflecting on the sixties. Thus, if and
when, and to the degree that he was wrong, in the
kind of historical analysis that he was conducting,
that is to say, of the aspirations and hopes he built
into the counter-cultural movements, some of his
thought could be said to fall with those
movements.
AM: Then how do you talk about The Aesthetic
Dimension [a book that has been quite influential
on the themes and intentions in A Grass Mound
(With Kind Regards to Utopia)]? A book that in
many regards seems quite optimistic towards the
project of art, but is published in 1979 after the
counter-cultural movements certainly did fall.
JT: That is an interesting book to talk about. And
this is probably something that I would say in that
respect: The Aesthetic Dimension has been
interpreted, and I don't know if this is right yet, as
a retreat on Marcuse’s part, as a pessimistic move.
Marcuse writes in Essay on Liberation—and he is
practically giddy that the revolution is
imminent—that by looking at what he calls the
“new sensibility,” historical analysis can discern
the roots of a subjective rebellion against
capitalism. He sees in counter-cultural movements
a new sensibility, a new way of feeling, relating to
others, and being-in-the-world, which will lead to
some sort of massive change. Marcuse was fond of
this term, “The Great Refusal”, which he always
capitalized. He thought that there was going to be
this massive stoppage in society where people
would refuse the conditions under which reality
had been handed to them and demand fundamental
change. He is really excited about this in the late
sixties, and when that dream starts to go out the
window, when these same people start to get
white-collar jobs, begin to move out to the suburbs
and buy Hummers he gets very disillusioned. Up
until that point he had been interested in
contemporary artistic movements and analyzes
them from a political perspective. He was
interested in “anti-art,” Surrealism, and impromptu
street performances, these kinds of things. He
gives up on that in the aesthetic dimension.
AM: Sort of, he does not entirely give up on art,he
says at the beginning of the book that he is only
going to apply it to literature though he thinks that
it could be equally applicable to art and music.
JT: But what is the art he is looking at in that
AM: This makes me think of the importance of
subjectivity in Marcuse’s aesthetics. There is a
passage where he says that subjectivity is the
necessary and transformative result of
revolutionary artwork.
JT: And not just revolutionary artwork, but
bourgeois art—“high art”—like Flaubert,
Rimbaud, Cezanne, all these characters.
AM: Maybe revolutionary is a moot point here
because Marcuse, at least in the aesthetic
dimension, believes that all of this art is
revolutionary. Again I will quote from him, "with
the affirmation of the inwardness of subjectivity
the individual steps out of the network of
exchange relationships and exchange values
withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society
and enters another dimension of existence. This
shifts the individuals realization from the domain
of the performance principle and the profit motive
to that of the inner resources of the human being."
For me, this is key.
JT: In my mind, the target is again the Marxist
aesthetician who puts emphasis on works of art
that attempt to give us an objective lesson on
history or, more simply, works of art that are about
social problems. Marxists for a long time had
dismissed inwardness. The language takes us all
the way back to the nineteenth century, to the
critique that Kierkegaard levels against Hegel.
Hegel was interested in the objective unfolding of
historical processes; in the type of truth that he
describes, the subject was secondary. Kierkegaard
argues for a kind of truth as inwardness. This is
obviously dismissed by Marxists, informed by the
Hegelian perspective, as a bourgeois affectation,
as the exclusive province of someone who does
not have to work for a living. Marcuse rejects this
too easy conclusion—which I am not convinced, is
actually borne out by the texts of Hegel and
Marx—quite strongly. This is where the contrast
with Rancière seems to come into existence. I am
still too close to both of these philosophers to be
able to take them apart in as precise of a fashion as
I would like. And I am always suspicious of
philosophical work that brings together two
difficult thinkers, tries to explain one in terms of
the other, and ends up effacing the differences. I
am not sure what the differences are yet between
the two, so I am hesitant to speak about this. I
would want to analyze the ways in which they are
different very carefully. But this is one of the ways
in which they are apparently very similar. They
are both critics of the Marxist tradition in
aesthetics. Marcuse is obviously much closer in
time to some of these debates. And they both
valorize this type of inwardness, to use Marcuse’s
word. Rancière understands the importance of
aesthetics, in a political sense, as the ability to play
the part of the disinterested, casual observer. The
way of looking, the way of relating to the world
that is found and formulated in aesthetics is
something that is very important. It is precisely
what workers appropriate as an essential premise
in the demonstration of their humanity. I recently
followed Rancière’s seminar at Berkeley. There,
he frequently quoted this carpenter, Gabriel
Gauny, who was fixing up an apartment that
overlooked a park or something. Rancier was
especially intrigued, has been for sometime, with
these reflections in his diary where by
contemplating it aesthetically, Gauny takes
possession of it and comes into full humanity.
This is pretty important for Rancière. Marcuse
would call this the aesthetic dimension, the ability
to be alienated from social reality, to resist it and
reconfigure it through an action of the
imagination. That distance, that new relationship
with the world, for Marcuse, provides the impetus
for social critique.
Maybe the difference between the two of
them—just thinking off the cuff here—is that for
Rancière this act is already social critique, already
active in the transformation of identity and what
he calls the “distribution of the sensible.”
Marcuse, however, talks about it as the refuge of
forgotten values, an image of past happiness that
then provides the grounds for social critique. It is
more indirect: the aesthetic dimension is just that,
a dimension that gives us the incentive to engage
in political transformation. Whereas with Rancière
it is already part of the process, it is more intimate.
For him, one stages, demonstrates, and manifests
equality by apprehending something aesthetically.
AM: I also see the following difference: Marcuse
writes about revolutionary art as something that
precedes revolution. It is necessary that it precedes
revolution but it simply aids in it, it does not play a
part in the revolution itself.
JT: Right, and it should be said that Rancière is
reality. It turns the work of art into a vessel, a time
capsule, an alternative universe, or to use his
expression, an aesthetic dimension, from which we
then gain the capacity to be critical of our reality.
It's an old argument that goes back to German
Idealism and the formulations of aesthetics that
you find there. People like Kant, Schiller,
Schelling, as well as Goethe, define the aesthetic
as different from our ordinary ways of being in the
world and the normal functioning of the
mind—what Kant would call cognition. Relating
to an object aesthetically is different from relating
to an object in terms of whether or not it is good
and serves our practical purposes or commercial
interests. This is part of where Marcuse is coming
from. The aesthetic is the moment when the
imagination and the sensibility are freed from the
domination of reason, calculation, etc. The
aesthetic is autonomous; more precisely, the
aesthetic dimension is autonomous. This is not to
say that art is autonomous—abstracted from and
devoid of life—but that the aesthetic dimension
has some sort of boundary to it, which separates it
off from reality. And it is precisely this
separateness, which gives it force for Marcuse.
AM: I think he suggests that there should be more
play within Brechtian ideas; one needs to be able
to play with breaking the fourth wall of Brecht and
almost breaking it, indicating the wall but giving
the audience a choice to break it or not. The plays
or performances, which seem to me the most
successful after Brecht are ones which utilize this
interplay, this space between play and life. I
wonder would this be an area that Marcuse would
be interested in? I thought that Marcuse was
against the more didactic politics of Brecht,
meaning the almost patronizing pedagogic,
slamming-the-point-home, kind of black and
white, politics of his work.
JT: These are the Marxist aestheticians that
Marcuse is responding to, those who think that art
should be like Brecht, that it should create a
mobilizing force, that it should be reflective of the
ascending proletariat class, these kinds of clichés.
That authentic, he uses that word, that authentic art
comes only from the proletariat, the class of the
future, and that the bourgeoisie can produce
nothing but decadent culture. He rejects that
notion. It is interesting in that line that you quote;
“There may be more subversive potential in the
poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud than in the
didactic plays of Brecht.” It reminds me of
something that Jacques Rancière wrote in this
journal that he edited that takes its title from a line
of Rimbaud’s poem, “Democracy.” The journal
that he edited was called Les Révoltes logiques.
Rancière wrote in there, and I paraphrase, a
worker taking pleasure in composing poetry and
rhymes is much more subversive than a worker
learning to sing “The Internationale.” It is very
interesting to hear you quote this now.
AM: And why do you think that this is important
in regards to Rancière? My interpretation of that
would be that this does not imply a subjectivity, it
does not allow the worker to understand
themselves as a being, as a thing that acts, when
they are just mimicking Marxist anthems. To
understand oneself as a creator, which is a very
basic tenet of Marx, to understand that you are a
producer of things, that you make the world you
live in, I believe Marx thinks that there is real
potential in that.
JT: Yes, I think that is part of it. The word you did
not use, that I think Rancière would use, is
“identity.” Artistic expression pertains to, it
changes, the identity of the worker. He is
interested in these workers who compose verse
because it is the way in which they contest the
identity, which, for their contemporaries is
assumed to be natural. Workers work from 9-8
then they go home and sleep and they obey these
confines of time and space. They are beings not
thought capable of anything else. The art of
politics is precisely the ability to show up in places
and at times when one is not expected. That is one
of the things that art does for Rancière. It gives
these workers a different identity and it allows for
them to appear in different ways. This
demonstration of capacity then serves as basis for
their claims of equality. For example, in the
nineteenth century, when workers want to make
demands before a boss, they are often seeking the
help of these marginal worker figures who also
tend to write poetry, those who form part of “an
aesthete working class.” This choice is deliberate,
and not simply because they are better writers, but
to show that workers too are capable of this kind
of thinking, this kind of appreciation, this way of
being.
book? He is looking at what he calls bourgeois
culture, “high bourgeois culture” even, nineteenth
century artistic products, which are not
immediately political from anyone’s point of view.
The book is a strong critique of Marxist
aesthetics—I think it's even in the subtitle, in
German at least—by which he means that the hope
he once put in the more directly political artistic
movements, the more direct engagements that you
have in street performances and such, to prompt
political change have proven to be false. So,
Marcuse revisits the art, literature and other
imaginary products of the nineteenth century in
order to think about the subversive potential that
they harbor.
AM: Which I think is actually very interesting. In
the sections where he talks about politics, in art,
and the implicit political aims of some art,
Marcuse says "There is more subversive potential
in the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire than in
the didactic plays of Brecht." He continues, "The
more immediately political the work of art the
more it reduces the power of estrangement and the
radical transcendent goals of change."
JT: Very interesting, right? He is saying that art is
alienating estrangement. This is a reversal of
Marx’s conception of alienation, and Marcuse is
here ascribing a positive value to it.
AM: Like Brecht?
JT: Well, not like Brecht. He is critiquing Brecht.
AM: Well, he is critiquing the didactic nature of
Brecht, but not necessarily the alienation effect, of
breaking the fourth wall.
JT: As I read him, he is critiquing that in this
book. He would be very critical of breaking the
fourth wall, of merging art and life. Marcuse does
not want to do that at this point. Earlier he does. In
Essay On Liberation, for example, he is in favor of
those kinds of movements. Here, the key concept
is “aesthetic form.” This is precisely the
preservation of that boundary between the artwork
and the audience. This is where the alienation
comes from. The work of art must be made to take
leave from reality. It must define itself as different
from reality. There is a very good succinct quote
where he says, “art re-presents reality while
accusing it.” The bracketing off of aesthetic form,
the systematic estrangement, if you will, is
necessary in order to do this. He is deeply
influenced by Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.
Marcuse reads this at a time when he is
disillusioned by the fallout of the sixties. He
begins to rethink what some might see as the more
radical challenges in his aesthetics, this idea of
blurring the boundary between art and life. Hence,
his interest in Baudelaire and Rimbaud, people
who don't look like they are engaged in politics at
all. The ability of these artists to be estranged, to
be separated out from reality, is precisely what
gives the work of art its political–I don't want to
say political use value–but makes it something
which harbors, a subversive potential, or images of
past happiness. What do they do? Works of art
teach us how life could be different, and that the
way in which we practice, form communities, and
are forced to work, are fundamentally
incompatible with human happiness. Alternative
fantasies, dreams of another life are preserved in
works of art. They thus serve as the vantage point
from which reality can be viewed as unnecessarily
alienating, corrupt, etc.
AM: I read it a little bit differently. I thought he
was saying that the form could be revolutionary
based on two senses. Marcuse defines the first one
as representing "a radical change in style and
technique" and the second as "by virtue of its
aesthetic transformation it represents the
prevailing un-freedom and rebelling forces thus
breaking through the mystified and petrified social
reality.” This is something that I have been
thinking about a lot lately. In my conversations
with Iain Boal and in the presentation on October
11th, that there are two needs for art, one is for the
aesthetic form–the form of the activity–to be
radical, pushing against the boundaries of however
that form manifests itself, and two, that ingrained
within the form is an interest and need to
transform, reflecting the problems and conditions
that should be fought against in the greater society
as a whole. Making the issues apparent without
doing it in a didactic way.
JT: I don't think that is incompatible with what I
said. It would probably hinge on what one means
by “radical.” For Marcuse, the drawing of
boundaries—he talks about the end of a play as I
recall—demonstrates that this is play and not