BEING DRAWN TO AN IMAGE
Guy Brett
Why do certain images matter to one, and why is the desire to answer this question as involuntary as the response itself?
Why does it seem important that the answer should have some ' objective ' quality about it, an insight into history, society, knowledge, rather than point to a merely personal obsession?
The American film-maker Maya Deren says somewhere that ' response should always precede analysis', a remark which sounds as if it was made as an artist's challenge to academic dryness and formalism.
But is not the response and the analysis actually part of the same phenomenon, whether it results in an exclamation (' how beautiful! ') or a new ' reading '?
The recourse to books, documents, or sources, underscores a perception which is somehow already in the air.
The effort to recapture art's ' history ' is always entangled with the desire to remake its identity and meaning as part of contemporary struggles.
This article comes out of the familiar experience of being drawn to a particular image, or set of images, without at first knowing why, and the attempt to account for this feeling.
Looking intermittently at the so-called colonial art of Latin America in churches, museums, private collections and books, I became magnetised by the figures of angels.
They are extraordinarily resplendent.
They have a material splendour in their dress.
The spiritual (or is it the psychic?) intensity of their presence goes together with a marvellous air of freedom and delicacy.
They have a tendency to expand, to fill the picture space.
If the angel is already a hybrid (a human with wings), the Latin American angels seem to incorporate further incongruities into this composite of the human and the supernatural which hints at further, latent meanings.
I knew that these paintings were produced for the Spanish in the decades after their conquest of Latin America, and represented the christianising of the old centres of Inca culture, in Peru and Bolivia especially.
I knew that in the main they were painted by Indian and mestizo artists at the command of the Europeans.
It lodged in my mind to try and answer the question as to whether there was something special about the depiction of angels in post-conquest art, and if so, what it could be.
I didn't make a systematic study but I occasionally followed up clues if I came across references in books and catalogues.
I soon learned that the theme of angels was one of the most popular in the paintings produced by indigenous artists for the complex iconographic programmes of the churches and missions established by the Spanish after the conquest.
This word ' popular ' is of course problematic and will be returned to a little later.
All colonial painting began in a process of copying.
Indian artists were obliged, or forced, to abandon their own forms of representation and learn the European way.
But after a period of sheer copying, some themes took off.
Some developed differently in the American context.
Why did angels especially flourish?
As I investigated further, it seemed to become clear that if this question could be answered it could only be in a complex way.
These paintings, in other words, could only be read as the site of a complex play of forces.
They were not simply transcriptions of the power of the conquerors and the coercive force with which they attempted to annihilate the existing culture and beliefs of the Indians and impose Christianity.
Nor, obviously, were they a simple expression of Indian resistance to this assault.
In some way they were both these things at once.
The more I looked into it the more the paintings seemed to go beyond simple unitary ideas of authorship and meaning.
The Peruvian art historian Luis Enrique Tord has written:
The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire had a profound impact on many aspects of Indian society, but by far the most serious blows suffered by the Andean peoples were administered by the Church.
The efforts of priests and missionaries to eradicate the Indians' ancestral beliefs produced profound emotional disturbances as well as great changes in their conception of the world.
To enforce conformity to the new orthodoxy, the Spaniards instituted ecclesiastical visitas, or inspections intended to extirpate the idolatory that persisted long after the conquest.
In the sphere of art the range of subjects and genres permitted by the church was extremely narrow, only in fact religious paintings and portraits.
At that time after the conquest there was effectively no ' thought ' (recorded discourse) outside the religious framework and institutions.
The first university in Peru, for example, was founded by the Dominicans.
Painting was from the beginning one of the most important instruments of conquest in the sphere of thinking, the mind.
In the earliest years of their missionary efforts Dr Tord writes:
the friars discovered that the Indians were deeply impressed by sacred images created with the newest artistic techniques brought from the Old World...
Those images were first seen in the catechisms, Bibles, books of hours, and hymnals used to convert the Indians and direct their worship.
' The Archangel Raphael ', by a follower of Luis de Riano, Cuzco School c. 1640.
Oil on canvas, 65&quot; x 42&quot;.
Convento de San Francisco, La Paz.
The Jesuits brought over their leading painter in Europe in the late sixteenth century, the Italian Bernardo Bitti, to live and work in Cuzco.
A school of painting grew up in Cuzco which became the leading centre of the production of paintings south of Mexico and exported paintings and painters to many other parts of the continent including remote areas.
Leopoldo Castedo, the Spanish-Chilean art historian writes:
Of forty-seven painters documented in Cuzco during the period, thirty-five were Indians, seven criollos or mestizos, four Spaniards, and one Italian.
This list does not include the great number of Indians who remained anonymous....
The similes usually used to describe the stylistic hybrid produced over the years by the Cuzco painters  the ' melding ', or ' blending ', or the ' intricate amalgamation ' of European and indigenous traditions to produce an art of ' Byzantine richness and splendour '  obviously belies the violence of events.
These phrases do, however, have the ring of truth in an aesthetic sense  or rather there was an aesthetic process involved which had to some extent its own story.
This was manifested not only in the precise, artistic and critical response by Indian peoples to European paintings, but also in connoisseurship within the colonising ranks.
A blossoming of the arts followed the rebuilding of Cuzco after the catastrophic earthquake of 1650, partly due to the arrival of Bishop Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo.
His collection included two El Grecos, and other outstanding Spanish pictures, and he sponsored Indian painters like Diego Quispe Tito, as well as sculptors, architects and jewellers.
Sometimes the coercion and oppression is felt directly in the paintings: for example, in images of Saint Isidore, a rather obscure Spanish saint vastly amplified in the New World as the patron of labourers, who is shown to carry a small bag of coca leaves as the Indian peasants and miners did, and do, to chew to combat hunger and fatigue.
Castedo points this out.
He also shows that images of Santiago (St James) staying the moors were often changed to Santiago slaying the Indians.
Indian painters would in this case be painting an image showing the Church's and the State's warning to Indians who contemplated rebellion, as many did.
And occasionally, as, for example, during or around the time of the rebellion led by Tupac Amaru II in 1780, an image would appear of explicit resistance to colonialism.
In the somewhat unlikely context of the Pelican History of Art (the relevant volume is Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions 1500C1800), an anonymous painting is described which shows America:
nursing Spanish noble boys.
Negroes and mestizos are pressing around her throne, while nude Indian children weep abandoned.
Two richly dressed Indian couples present their gifts in a beautiful park crowded with different animals.
The legend says: Where in the world has one seen what one sees here...
Her own sons lie groaning and she suckles strangers.
The images of angels are much more ambiguous and capable of different interpretations (this could, of course, be said of the angel theme generally as it recurs in the history of art, and in various guises across different cultures).
It is not hard to find documentary evidence for the Church's deliberate use of the angel theme as an instrument of conversion.
The Bolivian art historian Teresa Gisbert writes that the Councils of Lima, which were responsible for questions of orthodoxy in the Viceroyalty: ' sought to attract Indians to the new faith by the use of images which would be especially appealing to them. '
Why were angels appealing to them?
In the Pelican History, Martin Soria tentatively puts forward the theory that angels were popular because ' they replaced similar messengers in pre-conquest beliefs'.
Teresa Gisbert produces evidence to show that Diego Quispe Tito's series of paintings of the zodiac for the Cathedral of Cuzco was commissioned in order to counteract the traditional indigenous worship of the stars and were intended to aid in Christianising the Indians of the Andes.
And she suggests that the angels, especially the series of angels, could have a similar purpose, to ' replace worship of celestial phenomena with the theologically acceptable cult of the angels'.
So apparently they were ' popular ', for different reasons, with both Christian and native American, with oppressor and oppressed.
It is as if you could read in them simultaneously transcriptions of inducement, threat, coercion, protection, solace, yearning and resistance.
Does this explain their complex expressivity?
For the same quality can be interpreted differently according to one's point of view, one's experience, and one's feelings.
Protection can mean Defence of the Faith, i.e. of Christianity, or it can mean the adoption and identification of a ' guardian spirit ', who will watch over your life-journey, a universal, but at the same time very individual and personal desire, expressed in most religions and cultures.
Looking at the angel's image you can dream, ask for what you want.
The angel, with its brilliantly opulent but light clothing, its mobility, its freedom from hierarchical placing in the pictorial composition, and its bisexuality, is an intimate image of enablement.
Among the images of angels is a genre apparently unique to South America, even to the Andes, the Angels with Guns.
This was also a very popular subject (one church inventory for 1748, for example, lists 36 pictures of armed angels).
Julia P. Herzberg, who calls these pictures' representations of winged beings at once military, aristocratic and religious, gives this explanation of their raison d'tre:
Paintings of angels with guns appeared at a time when the religious orders were confronted with the stubborn persistence of pre-conquest religion amongst their Indian charges.
Immense problems remained not merely in the campaign to destroy Indian idols, but in teaching and reinforcing the principles of the new faith.
Sermons and catechisms were of course the primary means of conversion, but images of angels with guns were useful symbols of important teachings of the church.
The Spaniards conquered the Incas with both the Cross and the arquebus.
The key to understanding the religious function of these images is found in the gun motif.
Firearms, unknown to the Indians at the time of the conquest, seemed a frightening manifestation of the supernatural, for they ' fled out of fear when there was a blare of trumpets, the roar of arquebuses and artillery '.
The firearm in an angel's hands must have had a powerful impact on Indian converts.
But since guns were also used defensively, the images functioned symbolically as reminders of the protection offered to those who embraced Christianity.
The image of the angel with a gun served a secular as well as a religious function by emphasising the lesson that the Church and the Spanish colonial rgime were united in their goal to christianize the Indians.
The military aspect of the crusade is subliminally suggested by the gentle figure who handles his firing weapon in varied positions which recall those of a fighting force.
In speaking about the angels' clothing, Herzberg continues:
Far more important than the military aspects of the angel's costumes are the explicit references to the high social status of both Spanish colonial gentlemen and Inca royalty.
Richly brocaded fabrics, ribbons, and lace characterize the opulent viceregal dress of the 17th century.
The gentlemen-aristocratic nature of angels with guns is defined by their elegant dress, which relates them directly to the ruling viceregal aristocracy.
A key phrase here seems to me to be ' gentle figure who handles his firing weapon '.
Although the technical military details of loading and handling the gun and so on, of the angel paintings, is very precise  taken in fact from a Flemish military manual of 1607  the ' common soldier ' of the image in the manual is not retained: he becomes the gorgeous aristocrat.
The non-aggressive angel-like pose, is of course extremely seductive, which makes the threat of force oblique, only implied, as if a beautiful face was being laid over the ugly face of violent coercion.
Are these pictures simply transcriptions of power, in which the hard approach is mixed with the soft, and the Church is allied with the State (and in this case hinting as well, not just at the foreigner's domination of the native inhabitants but also at class conflict within colonial society, since the angel is a mlange of Spanish and Inca aristocracies)?
Perhaps.
But again they seem to me more enigmatic, more multiple  images full of aesthetic tensions.
Can one again make a conflation between domination and rebellion in the image, an expression of both the Church/State and the Indian wishes?
Leopoldo Castedo writes:
The prestige of the armed archangel was and is still very great.
In mestizo architectural decoration of the 18th century, the archangel brandishing the flaming sword had a prominent place (particularly fine examples are in the Cathedral of Puno and San Lorenzo, in Potosi); and in the traditional diablada boliviana (Bolivian devil play), a religious drama, the Archangel Michael defeats [... ] the Devil of the Seven Masks.
In 1950, in a curious or consistent coincidence (as Castedo Pointedly calls it $, Pope Pius XII declared the Archangel Michael patron of police  a decision that may well diminish the archangel's prestige in Latin America.
' Archangel with Gun ', by an anonymous painter of the Cuzco School, early 18th century.
Oil on canvas, 63 1/4&quot; x 39 1/2&quot;.
Museo de Arte, Lima.
' Archangel with Gun ', by the Master of Calamarca (Jos Lopez du los Rios?)
Lake Titicaca School, c. 1684.
Oil on canvas, 63 5/8&quot; x 46 1/2&quot;.
Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz.
Aside from dealing, as I have been doing, with one of the major subjects and themes of Cuzco painting, an inventory could be made of ways in which painters departed from European models, or from academic notions of excellence.
There are peripheral insertions, like borders of flowers, or tropical birds which populate the background landscapes of many religious paintings.
Or survivals at the level of colour: liking for flat and intense colours, local earth and vegetable dyes, which may go all the way back to the ancient textile traditions such as that of the Paracas culture in Peru.
Also, intensification of the colours in the angels' wings as compared with Europe.
These questions were not merely ' academic '.
Disputes among Spanish and Indian painters themselves, in some ways antecedents of all subsequent debates around ' indigenism ', go back to the early days in Cuzco.
In 1688 the Cuzco guild of painters split.
The immediate reason seems to have been that Indian painters working for some of the Spanish and criollo masters complained of mistreatment.
The Spanish admitted their guilt but no agreement could be reached and the two sides moved apart.
The Spanish guild tightened its European rules of style.
The Indian painters lost contact with European developments and, according to Teresa Gisbert, ' sought inspiration both in the old styles and in their own tastes and traditions', a mixture of ornamental stylisation with observation of the reality around them.
Their religious pictures, she writes, ' belong to an archaic world [... $ who viewed the religious realm as something ' different ' from mundane reality. '
The argument so far has been intended to put forward the possibility that an art work or image could be official and coercive, and unofficial and subversive, all at the same time.
The example I have given is by no means the only one that exists.
The same process has been documented in other situations where a people have been conquered, colonised and their cultural beliefs assaulted.
Eduardo Mondlane found that African carvers in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Mozambique had made their own use of Christian themes imposed by priests and missionaries:
When a [ makonde ] sculptor departs from the stereotype [... $ this is nearly always because an element of doubt or defiance has been worked into it; a madonna is given a demon to hold instead of the Christ Child; a priest is represented with the feet of a wild animal, a piet becomes a study not of sorrow but of revenge, with the mother raising a spear over the body of her dead son.
Magazine advertisement, featuring a painting by Botero.
Such images may startlingly demonstrate the general truth that the meaning of a work can not simply be equated with its subject.
But particularly intriguing is the phenomenon of syncretisation itself, as an artistic process, and its relationship to meaning: the process whereby something new is created that can not simply be reduced to either side of two antagonistic forces, or returned to a former ' purity '.
A new ' in-between ' is created.
This is especially true in the context of Latin America where this kind of duality and fusion has been a feature of culture from the time of the conquest right up until today  both on the popular and the intellectual level.
' Latin America is such a syncretic, eccentric, disjointed fusion of European, Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean culture, ' in the words of the Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Pe?a.
Or, as the Chilean painter Juan Davila recently put it: ' You take something of yourself, something of the conqueror '.
In both cases these are intellectuals talking about their own work by linking it with a process continually taking place at a popular level and in everyday life.
Today, the image of the angel is still alive, and still in contention; it has by no means been merely consigned to the museum.
It is still a part of contemporary power struggles.
On the one hand it has appeared as a focus for resistance.
The militant angel appeared, for example, in wall paintings in Haiti during the shortlived popular uprising for food and democracy of 1986.
The extraordinarily effective popular figure of the masked Superbarrio, who emerged spontaneously to lead the movement to demand the provision of proper housing in the aftermath of the disastrous Mexican earthquake of 1986, surely appeals to memories of the angel-enabler, along with references to Mexican popular masked wrestling heroes and perhaps to Superman.
At the same time, the armed angel is continually reproduced as a figure of folklore, a naive stereotype of Latin America, typically exploited in the paintings of Fernando Botero, the highest selling Latin American artist in the world today.
His shallow humour trades in, but misses the actual drama and sensibility of that hybrid fusion of the aristocratic and the popular which took place all those years ago in Cuzco.
Symbolic angel lances a Tonton Macoute on a mural in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1989.
Photo by Pablo Butcher.
An Inca Warrior in the guise of the Archangel Michael with a flaming sword.
Stone carving in a church at Potosi, Bolivia, 18th century.
' Popular culture is not what is technically called folklore, but the popular language of permanent historical rebellion. '
This sentence, by the Brazilian film-maker Glauber Rocha, written at the turn of the 1970s, clearly identifies a form of expression with a mass of oppressed people whose experience has been continuous over at least four centuries.
And Glauber also implies that the forms and images in which this experience is expressed are not fixed but open and changing.
The sentence comes from an essay called Eztetyke du Rve, an eccentric spelling of Esthtique du Rve (' Aesthetic of the Dream') in which, building on the idea that ' the dream is the only right which can not be forbidden ', Glauber Rocha described how he had come to realise the revolutionary importance of the mystical in Latin American popular culture.
It was the only way of contesting that ' bourgeois reason ' which, for him, was as much a feature of left-wing political programmes as it was of traditional colonial domination.
In his 1965 article, ' Aesthetic of Hunger ', enormously influential on Third World cinema and art, Glauber felt he had given ' the measure of my rational understanding of poverty '.
By 1971 he was saying that, as artists:
We must touch, by communion, the vital point of poverty which is its mysticism.
This mysticism is the only language which transcends the rational schema of oppression.
The role of the angel as an intermediary between the human and the mystical world, and its elaborate beautifying as a vehicle of the dream, would seem to tie in closely with Glauber's identification of a continuing thread of psychological resistance in Latin American culture.
The writer would like to express his appreciation of the art historical studies of Teresa Gisbert, Leopoldo Castedo, Julia P. Herzberg and dr Luis Enrique Tord, to which he has been deeply indebted in writing this article.
' HER DRESS HANGS HERE': DE-FROCKING THE KAHLO CULT
Oriana Baddeley
The 1990s have witnessed a shift in the art establishment's attitudes towards art produced outside of its traditional parameters.
The work of previously marginalised artists has become an area of rich speculation among art dealers priced out of the ' modern masters' market.
Almost every year has witnessed the discovery of new artistic terrain  graffiti art, Soviet art, Australian art, the art of Latin America.
The major auction houses have moved with the times and have found new ways of selling works which in both form and content would have proved an unstable investment a decade ago.
The current status of the work of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is a dramatic example of this change.
Once known primarily as the wife of Diego Rivera, her reputation outside of Mexico now far supercedes his: since 1919, sale room estimates of her work have risen from $40,000 to over $1 million, and in 1990 a work by Kahlo broke all records at Sotheby's New York for a Latin American artist.
The enormous rise in the economic value of her work has developed in tandem with the increased critical and popular response to her particular blend of naive style and incisive content.
While the first wave of popular interest arose with the 1982 Whitechapel exhibition instigated by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, it was the publication of Hayden Herrera's biography of Kahlo in 1983 which has led to her current cult status.
Since that date she has been the subject of TV documentaries, a feature film (' Frida ' by Paul Leduc), a stage play, numerous publications and the inspiration for designer clothing.
In May 1989 Elle magazine ran a 16 page feature on Frida Kahlo as the ' spirit of Mexico ' (Fig. 1), while in Vogue (Feb. 1990) there was a 10 page interpretation of ' the romance of Frida Kahlo's Mexico ' (Fig. 2).
Almost as a logical outcome of this media blitz, it emerged in the summer of 1990 that Madonna, already a devotee of Kahlo's work, was commissioning a screenplay based on Kahlo's life.
Fig. 1.
Elle Magazine, May 1989, p. 18C19.
As with most artists who have become mythical personalities in the popular imagination, such attention has focused primarily on the anecdotal and tragic details of Kahlo's admittedly fascinating life.
The passionate obsession with her husband Diego Rivera, her flamboyant appearance, but most of all her physical and emotional pain have come to dominate responses to her work.
While Kahlo's art helped her to deal with the vicissitudes of her life, for most audiences it is her life story which allows access to her art.
In this one can draw obvious parallels to the appeal of Van Gogh, a traditionally popular artist recently made fashionable by the media attention generated during the centennial of his death.
The archetypal dropout/spiritualist became an appropriate icon for the sixties revival of 1990's long hot summer.
Yet despite the iconic status of Van Gogh's ' tragic ' life, it is the appearance of his work by which he is ultimately signified, his thick impasto brush-stroke, his vibrant yellows, the urgency of his creative drive.
In the case of Kahlo the popular image is of the artist herself, the characteristic brows, the elaborate hair, the Mexican costume (Fig. 3).
It is primarily her appearance, not the formal language of her art, that has graced the pages of Elle and Vogue magazines.
The Elle feature transposed the ' Kahlo style ' to Kahlo lookalikes in contemporary clothing balanced around segments of Herrera's biography of the artist.
In the later Vogue piece only the style remained as the far more overtly sexual, Kahloesque models lounged and pouted in their ' Mexican ' interiors.
There is a poignant irony in the way clothing, which on one level served to hide Kahlo's broken body, falls or is lifted by the model to reveal a luxuriantly perfect physique (Fig. 4).
The visual references in the two magazines are as much from photos of the artist as from her work.
In both features she is also seen to embody a wider set of assumptions about Mexico itself; exotic, passionate, yet constantly struggling against pain and deceit.
While Elle, Vogue and subsequently The Independent (Fig. 5), stressed different facets of Kahlo's public persona, they all shared the emphasis on ' her ', as an encapsulisation of stereotypical images of Mexico, rather than her work.
It is her body as the canvas, her appearance as art.
The art of self-expression becomes self-expression as art.
Fig. 2.
Vogue, February 1990, p. 130C1.
Fig. 3.
Elle Magazine, May 1989, p. 28.
Of course, the line between art and life is a particularly hard one to draw in Kahlo's case.
The majority of her work is self portraiture; her aesthetic concerns grew from her fascination with the falsity of appearance.
Dressing up, role playing and masquerade form the conceptual basis of Kahlo's work.
In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1944) (Fig. 6), she paints herself wearing Rivera's suit, challenging traditional expectations of femininity and attempting to appropriate his authority (while simultaneously) threatening castration).
More disturbingly, in The Mask (1945) (Fig. 7), she throws doubt on too straightforward a reading of her self-portraits as revealing of her inner emotions.
Where does the mask fall: Does not the ritual repetition of those familiar features' mask ' far more than it uncovers?
There is, however, an inevitable logic to the appropriation of her meticulously constructed image, a process which the artist was mocking as early as 1933: '... some of the gringa women are imitating me and trying to dress' a la Mexicana ', but the poor souls only look like cabbages and to tell you the naked truth they look absolutely impossible. '
The ' impossibility ' stemmed from the failure of such followers to recognise the symbolic importance of Kahlo's choice of clothing, a failure also intrinsic to her recent magazine appearances.
The particularities of post-revolutionary Mexico are frequently subsumed by the decorativeness of the ethnic, by the generalised attractiveness of the radical avant-garde.
For Kahlo, however, choosing to don the costume of the Tehuana, as for example in Tree of Hope (1946) (Fig. 8), was to embody a powerful icon of cultural identity.
Mexican Indian dress is extraordinarily diverse and by and large geographically specific, varying from region to region.
The Tehuana dress is by no means the most decorative variant or the closest to pre-Hispanic forms of clothing.
It is the mythology surrounding the women wearers of the costume which directed Kahlo's choice.
The ostensibly matriarchal society of Tehuantepec led to the adoption of the Tehuana, in post-revolutionary Mexico, as the image of the strong Indian woman; the undefeated counterpart to the despised ' Chingada ', who, conversely is the female embodiment of Mexico's hybrid post-conquest culture.
In a culture where sexual metaphors are frequently used to convey racial and political conflict, the Tehuana represents that aspect of Mexico's indigenous tradition unbowed by centuries of colonial and male rule.
Kahlo's adoption of Tehuana dress, while being an attractive disguise of what she saw as a less than perfect body, asserted both a feminist and an anti-colonialist position.
Fig. 4.
Vogue, February 1990, p. 138.
Fig. 5.
The Independent on Sunday, 8th April 1990, p. 37.
In Kahlo's work there is a powerful mix of these discourses, yet her role as an archetypal woman painter has come to dominate responses to her work.
It is through her emergence as a cult painter of the feminist movement of the 1970s that her current reputation has evolved.
Her work almost perfectly illustrates debates as to the nature of traditional exclusions of a woman's art.
The fascination with functions of the body, the analogies between artistic and physical creative processes, self-portraiture used to reveal the female body as the site of patriarchal aesthetic discourse; all of these mirror the concerns of many women painters of the 1980s.
Fig. 6.
Frida Kahlo: Self-portrait with cropped hair, 1940, 40x27.9 cm.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Fig. 7.
Frida Kahlo: The Mask, 1945, 40x30.5 cm.
Coll.
Dolores Olmeda.
Fig. 8.
Frida Kahlo: The Tree of Hope, 1946, 55.9x40.6 cm.
Coll.
Isidore Ducasse Fine Arts Inc.
In their formal language, Kahlo's works are exemplary of certain feminist arguments; the adoption of the decorative, the intimate and non-fine art mediums reveals the restrictive nature of traditional definitions of ' high art '.
This' appropriateness' of Kahlo's aesthetic to contemporary debate has tended to remove her work from its historical context, to stress the collective and the cross-cultural.
Although this is not in itself to be dismissed as a tactic, it has diminished the complexity of Kahlo's achievement as a specifically Mexican painter, operating within the particularities of her historical moment.
More problematic is the way in which such a dislocation has led to the acceptance of her ' Mexicanness' as mere decoration of the essentially feminist themes of her work, thereby defusing a substantial part of the art described by Breton as a ' ribbon round a bomb '.
It is the ribbon that runs through the pages of Vogue, the glossy surface of the images in direct opposition to a work such as Kahlo's The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939) (Fig. 9).
In this painting, a memorial to a woman's tragic death is transformed into an indictment of the culture which destroyed her.
Hale's suicide became a poignant metaphor for the oppressive nature of the social values of New York and North America in general.
The story behind Hale's death was one with which Kahlo obviously identified, and within which dress formed an important symbolic function.
Before jumping from the window of her apartment, Hale had dressed meticulously in her most flattering dress, the corsage of yellow roses a gift from a male admirer.
In Kahlo's painting, the figure falls from the fantasy world she has inhabited to the harsh bloodspattered reality of the street, literally coming down to earth.
Hale's eyes stare knowingly at the viewer, a human sacrifice to an alienated and consumerist culture.
The horizontality of her fallen body is juxtaposed to the vertical thrust of the apartment building.
She leaps from an architectural monument to a phallocentric world.
Although destroyed, she has also escaped.
The painting, dedicated to Hale's mother, was commissioned by a mutual friend of Kahlo and Dorothy Hale, the managing editor of Vanity Fair, Clare Boothe Luce.
The painting was agreed to by Luce in part to recompense for what she saw as her misjudgment of her dead friend.
Having lent Hale money to pay her rent she had been angered to discover her spending enormous sums on an haute-couture dress, and refused to turn up to what, in retrospect, became Hale's farewell party.
Later it was revealed that the money had come from a different source.
A male friend had tried to dissuade Hale from seeking a much needed job and had given her a thousand dollars to buy ' the most beautiful dress in New York ', telling her that what she needed was to find a rich husband.
On one level this work deals with a generalised ' woman's experience ', yet the metaphorical power of Dorothy Hale's dress derives from Kahlo's use of clothing in her own self-portraits.
Dress not only covers and decorates the body but instils in the wearer its own characteristic strengths and weaknesses.
Hale's black velvet dress is cursed because it represents the values of the ' Gringolandia ' so hated by Kahlo.
In those paintings where Kahlo wears European dress she is passive, weak and unable to control her own destiny, but in the Tehuana costume she is strong, powerful, hopeful.
Unclothed, her body becomes yet more vulnerable, but as Jean Franco states:
The unclothed body is not a ' self but a socialised body, a body that is opened by instruments, technologized, wounded, its organs displayed to the outside world.
The ' inner ' Frida is controlled by modern society far more than the clothed Frida, who often marks her deviation from the norm by defiantly returning the gaze of the viewer.
Kahlo's naked body becomes not just the tortured self of her personal biography but a visual counterpart to the injured and defiled manifestations of Mexico's colonised past: La Llorona ' the weeping woman ' of popular myth and La Chingada, the raped and abused mother described in Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude.
Descended from an Aztec mother goddess, Llorona is a long-suffering mother figure, symbolic in a wider sense of the trauma of the Spanish invasion.
Driven mad with grief by the loss of her child, she is thought to wander the streets weeping and crying out a ghostly memory of the pre-Conquest past.
At its most simple, La Chingada, as the mother of Mestizo culture is' the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived '.
The female soil possessed and misused by the masculine force of the Spanish invaders.
The Indian Mexico raped and abused by the conquistador yet bearing his bastard child.
The rhetoric of the Tehuana opposes the nihilism of traditional feminisations of colonial trauma, and asserts the potential of a dignified cultural resistance.
Fig 9.
Frida Kahlo: The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1939, 58.1x47.5 cm.
Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona.
A major, though often ignored, work by Kahlo demonstrates the cultural politics underlying her art.
My Dress Hangs There (1939) (Fig. 10) is one of the artist ' s most formally adventurous works, mixing photographic collage with paint to produce a critique of North American culture.
Kahlo does not appear in the work, her Tehuana costume hangs empty in the centre of the composition, suspended between a toilet bowl and a golfing trophy.
On one level My Dress... is a coda to Self-Portrait on the Borderline (1932) (Fig. 11) of the previous year.
This small painting on metal, in the style of a Catholic votive image, shows the artist poised between the technological inhumanity of a capitalist North America and the archaic fertility of Mexico.
Interwoven with these images are subtler references to the metaphorical borderlines which separate Latin American culture from that of Europe and North America.
This is done by a series of juxtapositions; the past versus the present; female nature versus masculine technology; growth versus exploitation; and in its very material presence, the traditions of fine art versus the popular.
At the same time the ambivalence of her own, and modern Mexico's position is manifested in the figure of the artist.
The paper flag of her homeland is contrasted to the modernity of the cigarette held in her other hand.
The red and green of the Aztec necklace links it compositionally with the indigenous plants to the ' south ' of the painting, the pink colonial-style dress tonally blending with the skyscrapers to the ' north '.
My Dress... again suggests a conflict, but the ambivalence is gone.
Nature has been banished, technology and its concomitant values reign over a harshly masculine world.
Three elements refer to the female presence, all of them dealing with an essential lack.
The empty dress, a peeling poster of Mae West and in the far distance the Statue of Liberty.
Fig. 10.
Frida Kahlo: My Dress Hangs There, 1933, 46x50 cm, estate of dr.
Leo Eloesser.
Although occasionally humorous, the work presents a bleak view of urban alienation.
The Church, Wall Street, and Industry are joined by a network of telephone lines, forming a remorsely inhuman environment.
Beneath this man-made mechanism of oppression are the people, literally distanced from their surroundings by Kahlo's use of photo-collage.
In the forefront of this scene flutters the dress, incongruously vibrant despite its suggestion of loss.
Dislocated from its political context, it hangs like a pi?ata above the teeming streets of the city; decorative yet potentially explosive.
There is no place ' there ' for the values the Tehuana dress represents, its folds are given meaning by Kahlo's search for a cultural identity.
Within the confines of the painting it becomes a silent emblem of protest, a reminder of political alternatives.
The physicality so characteristic of Kahlo's work is missing, no flesh, no blood, just the tawdriness of the peeling poster and the hollow reminder of lost Liberty.
The inter-relationship of body and dress so self-consciously referred to in many of Kahlo's most polemical works (Fig. 12) has been strangely inverted by her current popularity.
Her ' Mexicanness' has become a stylistic gloss, decorative, colourful, pretty, even individualistic.
The colonised body which Kahlo clothed in revolutionary idealism has lost its function as a symbol of nationhood becoming instead an icon of female suffering.
What is obscured by this process is that it was through clothing, in both art and life, that Kahlo attempted to redress the wrongs of history.
Fig. 11.
Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait on the Border, 1932, 33x45.8 cm.
Coll.
Mr &amp; Mrs Manuel Reyero.
Fig. 12.
Frida Kahlo: The Two Fridas, 1939, 173.5x173 cm.
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico D.F.
SURREALISING THE BAROQUE: MEXICO'S SPANISH HERITAGE AND THE WORK OF ALBERTO GIRONELLA
Valerie Fraser
It is a truism to say that that which can not be readily classified will tend to be overlooked.
In Art History the rehabilitation of artists and bodies of work which have been overlooked has been going on since Vasari made such a good job of classifying Florentine art that all other art in Italy and beyond has had to be defined, at least until this century, and at some level even now, in relation to Vasari's classifications, or at least in relation to the model of stylistic evolution which he outlined.
Non-Italian artists, non-Italian preoccupations, women artists, artists working in media other than Vasari's chosen painting, sculpture and architecture, non-Western art and so on: critics have been busy reviewing such areas and, in so doing, producing new categories and classifications.
Latin American art has been undergoing such a review both from within Latin America itself and from elsewhere, with several exhibitions and books on the subject in the last few years in Europe and the US.
That there should be an issue of the Oxford Art Journal devoted to Latin American art is itself testimony to the success of such efforts.
But new categories can in turn prove to be exclusive.
Within the field of Latin American art as a whole there are still many individual artists who have not received the attention they deserve because their work does not seem to fit into any larger pattern.
In the case of the work of the Mexican Alberto Gironella, the reason would seem to be precisely because of his insistent concentration on art of a very different category  that of Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly court portraiture.
Among the more comprehensive books on twentieth-century Mexican art in recent years, Shifra Goldman only mentions him in passing, Luis Cardoza y Aragn says little more than that Gironella ' escapes him ', and Ida Rodriguez Prampolini dismisses him from her discussion of Mexican surrealism as an ' international ' artist, more closely related to Spain than to Mexico.
When he has inspired sympathetic coverage, the results tend to be not so much an exposition of Gironella's achievements but belong to that particular branch of literature which uses works of art as a starting point for literary excursus.
Octavio Paz's elegant essay is the prime example, where despite some insightful remarks he uses Gironella's work to make general observations about the creative role of the critic, for example, or for digressive flourishes on Spanish culture.
When they met in Paris in 1963, Breton hailed him as a surrealist, but in a recent interview Gironella disclaimed so tidy a classification, saying he is as much a baroque artist as a surrealist.
In fact, although there are both surreal and baroque elements in his work, Gironella prefers to call it mestizo ', a term which has often had negative, racist overtones but which has been acclaimed in this century, especially in Mexico, as a positive value, indeed the distinguishing feature of Mexican culture: the rich and fruitful mixture of the European with the indigenous American.
This rather simple notion, that there is one single Mexican culture, problematic principally because it tends to valorize the European over the indigenous and to ignore the diversity, and richness of the latter, but also, conversely, because it excludes or denigrates the more purely European aspects of the culture.
Nevertheless it seems to me that Gironella is right, or that he is right in so far as he is using ' mestizo ' to claim for his work a Mexican, not a European identity.
He is probably also right when he says that he is only seen as a Spanish artist because his interest lies in Spanish art, instead of in French art ' like everyone else': in other words, within the accepted categories there is no room for a Mexican who is interested in Spanish art. '
My purpose in what follows is to try to place him within a Mexican context.
Gironella's subject matter is the acclaimed artistic masterpieces of the Spanish past which he reworks in various ways, most dramatically into ironic altars assembled from a variety of painted, sculpted and ready-made elements (Fig. 1).
Favoured subjects are court portraiture, and allegorical images of death, decay and the transience of life, usually handled with the blackest of black humour.
Favoured artists are Goya and his predecessors in the Golden Age   El Greco, Pereda, Valds Leal and above all Velzquez.
It is worth emphasising that the period spanned by the lives of El Greco and Velzquez saw in Latin America the consolidation of colonial government and of the Christian church, the establishment of the Spanish language and of European culture, the introduction of new methods of exploitation of people and resources.
Goya's life, on the other hand, coincides with the decline and ultimate collapse of the Empire; Spanish rule in America had been overthrown by the time of his death in 1828.
In other words, these artists lived during Latin American's formative years.
the work of the artists who interpreted their historical reality on to canvas, but the importance in Latin America of the art itself should not be underestimated, particularly the iconography of the monarchy.
Velzquez's name, for example, would have been familiar to very few Mexicans in the seventeenth century, but as the only artist authorised to execute likenesses of the King his official portraits of Philip IV and the innumerable engravings after them would have been well known.
A painting by his contemporary, Juan Bautista Maino, The Recapture of Bahia, of 1635, represents the recapture of the harbour of Bahia in Brazil (then under Spanish control) from the Dutch in 1625.
(Fig. 2) While an injured man is tended in the foreground, the Dutch forces to the right kneel in homage before an allegorical tapestried portrait of Philip IV.
This is a highly unusual painting in a number of ways, not least because no such royal portrait could ever have existed, including as it does, and on almost equal status with the king, the figure of his ambitious minister the Count-Duke of Olivares.
Nevertheless, on special occasions the Spanish authorities in America would certainly have erected large representations of the king in this manner, as objects of semi-religious devotion.
On the death of a member of the royal family elaborate catafalques were constructed in cathedrals throughout the Empire and the deceased mourned in effigy.
Paintings and prints were distributed to colonial officials for display in much the same way as British embassies are provided with an official photographic portrait of the Queen.
In other words, the focus of Gironella's attention is neither historically nor iconographically arbitrary, although in some ways his reworkings of the paintings of others could be seen to be simply an extension of a fairly conventional activity.
Within the Western tradition of art we tend to take it for granted that much can be learned from the study of the art of the past and, traditionally, copying from the works of the Great Masters was one of a young student's most important tasks.
This activity, this dependence on the art of the past, is not, in itself, ideologically highly-charged.
Reynolds may have admired and borrowed from Michelangelo, and while this could be said to represent, perhaps, a long-standing tradition of cultural domination  or the domination in England of the Italianate tastes of the English upper classes  it would be a mistake to make too much of this.
In the case of Latin America it is more complex.
Historically the relationship between Latin America and Europe is not only one of cultural domination of the former by the latter, but of political and economic domination.
While the obvious colonial ties have been broken, the power still lies elsewhere.
The sources of domination have in some ways simply broadened to include the US, japan, and international capitalism.
Within the art world the problem remains that the production of art in Latin America, from a student's training to the art market, is rooted firmly in the European tradition, while to compound the difficulties, few Latin American museums can boast any examples of European, North American or even non-national art at all.
Everything conspires to exacerbate the situation: conventional art education teaches an art-historical line of descent through the successive achievements of the Great Masters, but such works are unavailable in Latin America except in the form of often poor-quality reproductions.
In this sense things have not changed much since the seventeenth century.
Gironella always seems acutely aware of these issues.
For him the reworking of familiar images is not simply a matter of drawing attention to the way in which mass-reproduction numbs the optic nerves, by shocking the spectator with a moustached Mona Lisa, but rather, using a peculiar blend of both iconoclasm and a sort of wry homage, of investigating the power of certain images, particularly those which have national resonance.
In this sense his Habsburg and Bourbon portraits are not dissimilar to Jasper Johns' American flag series, except of course that the flag, whatever individuals may think of it, is unquestionably American, the lineage is clear.
The connecting threads between the Spanish monarchy and colonial Mexico, between Spanish artists and Mexican, between past and present, are tangled or broken.
Within Spanish art itself, on the other hand, the line is almost too simple: Goya was intensely aware of Velzquez, Picasso of both, but for Gironella the problem is not just that Picasso could be seen to have inserted himself into the next place in the sequence but that as a Mexican an unequivocal position in any such art-historical lineage is utterly unattainable.
Fig. 1.
Alberto Gironella, Lot y sus hijas (Lot and his Daughters), 1984-1987; retable, 303 x 241.5 x 30 cms, collection of the artist.
Photograph: Jorge Pablo de Aguinaco, courtesy Galeria OMR, Mexico.
Gironella was born in Mexico City in 1929.
His rather was Catalan; he had come to Mexico as a young man and worked in his brother-in-law's grocery shop.
He later set up his own business importing groceries from Europe, particularly from Spain.
His mother was Yucatecan, a mestiza from Mrida, but she was' catalanised ', as Gironella put it, by his father and grandmother; in other words a jointly Eurocentric upbringing, but, perhaps significantly, without personal contact with Europe until his first visit to Paris in 1960.
He absorbed European culture through nineteenth-century French novels, and through the literature of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain, the Spanish cultural Golden Age.
His major literary enterprise, as a student at the Universidad Nacional Autnoma in 1951, was the invention of a bad Golden Age poet whom he named Tiburcio Esquirla.
His later artistic inventions display the same fascination with the possibilities of getting inside the skin of another era.
Through his efforts in this direction he effectively mocks much that is dear to scholars, historians, literary critics and art historians, especially the concept of a clear chronological sequence: his answer to the problem of how a Mexican can ' belong ' to the dynasty of European art is, as it were, to invade it retrospectively.
The decisive move from literature to painting came in 1952.
Gironella seems to have been very confident about the change, as in the same year he was instrumental, together with Vlady and Hctor Xavier, in establishing a new art gallery in Mexico City, the Galeria Prisse.
This quickly emerged as one of the most avant-garde of the new Mexican galleries, and the locus of a group of young artists, including Jos Luis Cuevas, who ' with no fixed programme and no common plastic language, [... ] were united only by the desire for change '.
Their discontent at this time was principally with the social realism of the muralist school but, even at this early date, there was unease with the propaganda emanating from the US that Abstract Expressionism was the only possible alternative.
Gironella's solution was entirely individual: to focus on the art of the European past, looming large as it did in Latin American consciousness regardless of how often it had been declared dead and buried by Europeans.
Fig. 2.
Juan Bautista de Maino, The Recapture of Bahia, 1635, oil on canvas.
Madrid, Prado.
His artistic career began with a series of paintings based on the thirteenth-century sculpture of the elegant countess of Uta on the fa?ade of Naumburg cathedral, a photograph of which had been lent to him by the young artist Vlady, but in the late fifties he turned his attention to Spanish art.
His early choice of subject set the tone for his later work   Goya's Queen Maria Luisa, and Velzquez's portrait of the dwarf Francisco Lezcano (Fig. 3)  in other words, great Spanish artists' handling of their arrogant, ugly, bizarre or idiotic sitters.
He subjected both to repeated analysis, ending up with a version of Maria Luisa in which she is transformed into a sharp-beaked, staring owl, and of Francisco Lezcano in which he has metamorphosed into a dog.
In both, Gironella is exploring the characters of the sitters as suggested in their portraits rather than the formal, painterly qualities.
Is Velzquez's Francisco Lezcano simple-minded, or is his expression one of aloofness and distance?
Gironella has said he was drawn to this painting because Lezcano is holding some playing cards, so his disconcertingly direct gaze is inviting us in to test our wits and/or our luck against him.
Queen Maria Luisa, wife of Charles IV, an unlovely, clever, deceitful and immensely powerful woman, is metamorphosed into a barn-owl, a lechuza, a word which in Spanish also means an ugly hag or a procuress.
Gironella's first direct encounter with Velzquez was at an exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1959.
Amongst the works on view was the one to which he has returned most often  the portrait of Queen Mariana of Austria, second wife of Philip IV, painted in 1652 (Fig. 4).
This painting has become a veritable obsession and he has returned to it repeatedly over the past thirty years.
It is a full-length portrait showing the young queen very formally dressed, in a stiff conventional pose, looking out at the spectator.
She wears a gigantic wig decorated with feathers and red bows, the shape of which echoes that of the wide skirt.
One arm rests on the farthingale of the skirt, the hand very delicately holding a large white scarf; the other hand rests on a chair back.
In the earliest versions, which date from 1959  60, Gironella turns her into a sort of rag doll; perhaps never more than a well-dressed shell, she is now simply a collage of fragments of coarse, torn cloth that appear to be pasted down with thick smears of paint (Fig. 5).
These early half-length versions, like close-up details of the original, also investigate compositional qualities, the slight angle of the torso to the picture plane and the relationship of head and wig to shoulders, as well as emphasising features which are to become increasingly fetishised in subsequent renderings  the massive wig, for example.
And in the second version he introduces a three-dimensional hand not, as in the Velzquez with the fingers straight and limp, but drawn up into an uneasy gesture, that claws at her skirt rather than rests against it.
The hand and the wig are to become identifying features, often used in isolation or in conjunction with elements from other pictures.
They become relics, like the dismembered remains of Catholic saints that are boxed up and dispersed around Christendom to provide individual churches with the Church's authority.
Fig. 3.
Velquez, Francisco Lezcano or El Nino de Vallecas (The Child of Vallecas), 1637, oil on canvas, 107 x 83 cms.
Madrid, Prado.
Fig. 4.
Velquez, Queen Mariana, 1652, oil on canvas, 231 x 131 cms.
Madrid, Prado.
In The Black Queen of 1961, Mariana has more substance than in the early collages of rags, and so, being more tangible, is more a victim, of Gironella, of time, of historical circumstances (Fig. 6).
In this full-length version Gironella places her square to the picture plane, a crucial adjustment which changes the tone from that of the formality of the original into one of helplessness.
Moving from her external trappings to her internal structure, he represents her as a sort of wooden skeleton.
At her breast, instead of a gold rosette, she wears a brass bell and a series of wheels and cogs, apparently parts of an old-fashioned, manually operated lift.
She is like a mechanical musical doll that will perform a ponderous dance when someone turns the dial.
She is also black.
In particular, the uplifted, unseeing face, and the hand, now even more tense and strained, are modelled in three dimensions and painted shiny black.
She is, of course, a parody of her pale, former Habsburg self, but Gironella's title, La Reina Negra, suggests a range of different resonances, as indeed it does in English.
She is a piece in an international game of chess; she is gloomy and melancholic; she is also, rather more strongly than in English, unlucky, wretched, doomed.
But conversely, in Latin America, negra or neqrita are often used as terms of affection.
As if to ensure, however, that we can not interpret this work as a declaration of Gironella, s ideas about race and colour in Mexico, there exists another version, almost identical but for the fact that this is a white queen.
Fig. 5.
Alberto Gironella, Reina Mariana, 1960, oil and collage on canvas, 100 x 80 cms.
Collection of Maurice Reims, Paris.
Photograph, courtesy Galeria OMR, Mexico.
Fig. 6.
Alberto Gironella, Reina Negra (Black Queen), 1961, mixed media on canvas, 108 x 120 cms.
Private Collection.
In the following year she is reincarnated, but into wood, not flesh and blood: she becomes furniture, a cross between a throne and a commode, her mask-like head and rigid hand fixed to the chair back, her wig suggested by curly iron coat hooks and carved wooden scrolls and flourishes.
In one version, the space beneath the seat contains a small, stuffed cayman and, as this is the equivalent of the space beneath her skirts, there are obvious psycho-sexual overtones.
In another there is in fact no seat as such, rather like a monk's misericord, a chair that is not a chair (Fig. 7).
Again her heart is represented by the mechanism from an old lift: she goes up and down as others will her.
The origins of Gironella's peculiar assemblages lie in his childhood.
His earliest memories are of stacks of colourful imported tins, boxes, bottles and packets of the family grocery business, and of the paraphernalia of popular Catholicism, which would have included reliquaries and tabernacles, retables combining paintings and sculpture, altars decorated with damask cloth, candles, flowers and ex votos of an often intensely personal nature.
He recalls building himself private altars of chocolate wrappers and tin cans.
The packaging of imported products has continued to fascinate him, for intrinsic qualities   the names, the colours and the designs  but also no doubt because of the way products from far away have been integrated into the domestic Mexican environment.
Such products are known by the general term ultramarinos, ' from across the ocean ', and to emphasise that Mariana herself is also an ultramarina, she is often accompanied in Gironella's tableaux by tins of sardines.
There are connections here too with Spanish Golden Age painting which, as Gironella himself has observed, often looks very smelly.
The picaresque literature of the period is also very preoccupied with food and drink.
But it is not just the strong smells of food, but the metaphorical smells of corruption and moral and social decay which are suggested by the inclusion of such items in his work.
And where the tins of fish are juxtaposed with fragments of Mariana's body the evocation is also of death and putrefaction, perhaps also of coarse jokes about the distinctive ' fishy ' smell of vaginal secretions.
Gironella's choice of Velquez's Mariana as the basis for so many of his works is worth considering in more detail.
First, to develop the idea of the punning associations already referred to in relation to the term ultramarinos, there is the pleasing assonance between the name of this earthly Queen Mariana, and that of Maria, Queen of Heaven.
The Virgin has always been more popular than Christ in the New World; indeed in the sixteenth century certain churchmen had argued that while the East was the domain of Christ, the newly discovered West was that of his mother.
Once in America, however, Maria soon fragments into numerous different Marias, each with her own distinctive attributes.
In Mexico, during the Wars of Independence the Virgin of Guadalupe protected the nationalist forces while the Spaniards placed their trust in the Virgen de los Remedios.
Gironella's many versions of Velzquez's Mariana similarly fragment her into different roles  queen, woman, icon, cadaver, carnival figure, victim, aggressor.
There is a third sister in this euphonious family: Marina, the baptised name of Malinche, mistress of Cortz, through whose good offices and linguistic skills Mexico was conquered both for the Virgin Maria, and for Marina's royal ancestors.
Marina is the original and ultimate traitor to her people, but as mother of the first mestizo she is also the mother of modern Mexico.
Mariana herself is remembered more as a name on a family tree than as a person.
Wife of Philip IV, she was also his niece; she had been betrothed to his son Baltasar Carlos but on his death at seventeen the King (her uncle) married her himself, and the only surviving son of this union was the cretinous Charles II, last of the Habsburg line.
She is also remembered because she was painted by Velzquez, although this is not unrelated to the family tree.
Velzquez shaped the public image of this family for his own and for all subsequent generations, investing them with an extraordinary pictorial power and stability.
His portraits must in turn be considered an important constituent in their power, as compensation for their more corporeal weaknesses.
With hindsight it perhaps seems strange that one of the indisputably greatest figures in the whole of Western art devoted the better part of his life to sell-advancement, and to painting the King, his family, and their attendant dogs, dwarves and sycophants Certainly the irony of this, together with the fact that this inbred family of often considerable mental as well as physical fragility should have controlled the destiny of so vast an empire, is not lost on Gironella.
fig. 7.
Alberto Gironella, Reina Mariana, 1962, object.
Private collection.
We can read into Las Meninas such a view of the Habsburgs (Fig. 8): Philip IV and Mariana are merely reflections, living in a world of grotesquerie and make-believe; a tiny princess dressed as an adult with a skirt so stiff it makes her look as if she is on wheels, surrounded by curtseying maids, a dwarf, a midget, a huge dog with the ability to sleep through anything, and a great artist, aloof and all-powerful.
Such a view is of course anachronistic, but this is exactly the attraction of Gironella's reworkings  he can present us with shifting visions of the art of the past, from within and from without, exploiting contrary responses, period eye and innocent eye.
Not surprisingly Gironella has returned over and again to aspects of Las Meninas and in particular to the portrait of the artist himself, the insider, the fawning courtier, the creator of icons.
Festin in Palacio is one of Gironella's latter-day altarpieces, and a digest of elements from three paintings  Queen Mariana, Las Meninas and the portrait of the dwarf Francisco Lezcano, popularly known as El Ni?o de Vallecas (Fig. 9).
In the lower register, on the altar frontal, the tilted head of Lezcano leers at us while, boxed up alongside, a disembodied head and a hand are presented as relics of Queen Mariana while above Velzquez himself, palette in hand, seems to fade into a dog.
On the altar table itself, in front of a piece of red damask, lies a large, realistically-modelled dog.
This is the dog from the foreground of Las Meninas, but here awake and ready for action, the centre of attraction and, apparently, the object of devotion.
The implications of Festin in Palacio are realised in a particularly horrific version of Queen Mariana of 1963, Perro devorando a la Reina Mariana (Dog devouring Queen Mariana) where she is set upon by hunting dogs who tear at her blood-red head gear (Fig. 10).
During the conquest of the Caribbean the Spaniards trained packs of such dogs to kill Indians and so to wipe out whole villages.
Here history is inverted: Mariana, Queen of the American Empire, is devoured by her own hounds.
But no simple anti-colonial reading of Gironella's work is possible, precisely because to denounce the
Fig. 8.
Velzquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, 318 x 276 cms.
Madrid, Prado.
Fig. 9.
Alberto Gironella, Festin in Palacio, 1958, retable, 251 x 174 x 60.5 cms.
Collection Maria Rodriquez de Reyero, Mexico.
Photograph, courtesy Galeria OMR, Mexico.
Spanish past is to deny many of the elements which go to make up modern Mexico.
The Queen of Yokes is a good example in its complexity and range of reference (Fig. 11).
Here again Mariana is pinned out flat, composed of disparate elements.
Her wig is made up of bottle tops, left over from ordinary twentieth-century life, trodden into the dirt underfoot, pressed on to noticeboards.
The majority are painted yellow, the colour of the bottle tops on Superior, a light Mexican beer famous for its slogan ' la rubia que todos quieren ' ' the blonde which everybody loves/wants', reducing Mariana to that Latin American clich, the accessible, desirable, blonde foreign female.
Her expression here is a mixture of naivet and anxiety.
Her carved wooden bodice suggests popular Mexican crafts, and particularly the calaveras, animated skeletons which make up her rib cage.
These are the central feature of the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico, but then again skulls and skeletons are commonly used as emblems of the transience of life in seventeenth-century Spanish painting.
The gourd-breasts and the leather-thonged sorcerer's switch can be seen as referring to indigenous culture, as can the snakes' heads with which the yokes of her skirt appear to terminate.
The inclusion of these wooden yokes, the yugos of verbal associations and pun.
The word Yugo in Spanish, as in English, evokes different ideas: el yuqo colonial, el yugo matrimonial and el yugo de la iglesia, the colonial yoke, and the yokes of marriage and of the church, and all of these are implied here.
Mariana is yoked in an arranged marriage to her uncle, Philip IV; she, as representative of the Spanish crown, is also a representative of the colonial and religious yokes which bound Mexico to Spain.
The motif of the yoke was originally the emblem of Isabella of Castile, Mariana's distant predecessor, who had been responsible for sending Columbus on his first transatlantic voyage in 1492; in other words she had been responsible for initiating the whole colonial process (Fig. 12).
In the present century the combined emblems of Isabella's yoke (Y for Ysabella) and her husband Ferdinand's arrows (Flechas) were expropriated by the Falangists in an attempt to claim some historical legitimacy.
In other words, verbally and visually the emblem of the yoke has strong resonances in Spain and Mexico.
But it is important that here the yokes are inverted: Mariana and the ties with Spain she represents have been transformed, translated into Mexican, into the complexities of the mestizo Mexican present.
She is an essential but individually helpless cog in the colonial machine; she is pinned out like a pre-columbian sacrificial victim, bruised and blood-stained; she is a religious icon, like a popular image of the Virgin Maria; she is a mannikin from some popular religious festival.
Fig. 10.
Alberto Gironella, Perro devorando a la Reina Mariana (Dog devouring Queen Mariana), 1963, painting/object.
No longer extant.
Fig. 11.
Alberto Gironella, La Reina de los yugos (The Queen of the Yokes), 1975C1981, oil and collage on canvas, 240 x 180 cms.
Collection of Luis Felipe de Valle, Mexico.
Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk, courtesy of Galeria OMR, Mexico.
It is worth stressing the differences between Gironella's treatment of the art of the Spanish past and that of Picasso.
Picasso's extensive series of variations on Las Meninas was produced in 1957, but even if Gironella knew of them when he himself began to work on versions of Velzquez (which is highly unlikely, as Picasso's paintings were not exhibited until 1959); even though their interest in the art of the past at that point in their careers was for both, perhaps, a rejection of abstraction; and even though both can in some way be defined as exiled from their Spanish roots, as outsiders looking in   yet the results are widely divergent.
Picasso's paintings are principally explorations of, or developments of matters internal to Las Meninas: the light, the perspective, the angle of Mariana's head, the bobbing handmaids, echoed, for example, in the paintings of pigeons bobbing on his window sill, and so on.
In one version, for example, the odd position of Nicolas Pertusato's hands is rationalised by the addition of a piano.
Gironella is far removed from such light humour.
Edouard Jaguer, when comparing the two, rather acidly remarks that ' despite all the irritating virtuosity ' of Picasso's rendering of Delacroix or Manet or Velzquez, in the end they are one-dimensional.
Gironella is of course also interested in the formal qualities of these works, but it is the subject matter, the content, which really holds his imagination.
Drawn to the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction aspects of Spanish history, Gironella found in Velquez's portraits a perfect starting point for a detailed investigation of the contradictions which go to make up modern Mexico.
His preoccupations are unusual (if not unique, as he claims) but they are unquestionably engendered by the search for a cultural identity which lies behind so much of Latin America's greatest artistic and literary creations.
Ambivalence towards European culture, doubts about the possibilities of finding an authentic voice, a restless search for confidence and self-esteem, these are among the many bitter fruits of colonial rule in Latin America.
In 1921, Siqueiros had urged artists to ' avoid those lamentable archaeological reconstructions' (' Indianism ', ' Primitivism ', ' Americanism') but he had also warned against the use of ' archaic motifs' from the old masters of European art ' which for us would be exotic '; instead his advice was to study the arts of both, learning from the ' constructive base ', the ' great sincerity ', of the latter, and the ' synthetic energy ' of the former, to combine the ' lost values' of the past with new values to produce an art appropriate to modern America.
It may not be quite what Siqueiros envisaged, but Gironella's is an authentically Mexican solution.
Fig. 12.
Arrows and yoke emblem of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Kings from Casa de Las Conchas, Salamanca, 1483.
Previous Convictions
Paul Wood
Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, Alex Callinicos, Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989. pp. 207, ISBN 0  7456  0614  8. 8.95.
What is it that makes this substantial book produce, mixed-in with its rewards and knowledge, a depressing effect?
Does it matter?
Callinicos' own apology about publishing yet another study of an over-worked subject notwithstanding, it remains an important contemporary debate.
It isn't that; the more so since Callinicos' contribution contains a significantly original dimension.
Despite its fashionable subject the book is in no sense routine.
Uncritical testimonials to the postmodern's attractions are ten a penny, and conservative denunciations thereof not much scarcer.
This study has the distinction of being both critical and radical, essentially turning the tables on advocates of the postmodern and reading their rhetoric as symptomatic of a conservative milieu's interests in a period of overall stagnation.
It is' of course ' unlikely that Callinicos' criticism will cut much ice with those whose substantial career investments lie in one or another of the postmodern's corners: movementist politics, the radical academy, post this-ism and that-ism, a variety of well-upholstered ' dissenting ' niches from both the dominant culture and traditional opposition to it.
Too much is at stake for a book dedicated to proving the continuing value of classical Marxism to dislodge them.
Maybe this is one reason for depression, then: that the book's well-wrought arguments will not exercise those whose ideology it dissects.
This indeed has already happened.
Callinicos' Marxism has been repelled from the ramparts of pluralism for being... well, Marxist.
It leads to the Gulag, you know, and is patriarchal to boot (translation: Marx had a beard).
Given that Callinicos' book is difficult, and given the probability that despite the seriousness of its argument it is unlikely to be widely debated, I will firstly offer an interpretation of what I think its main themes are, and what they are not.
In the first place, as the title makes plain, if offers a searching criticism of the claim that we are living in a postmodern epoch, and the consequence of that claim, that the culture and politics appropriate to such an epoch are structurally different from those of the preceding  and now past  Modern one.
Callinicos' criticism of the ' postmodern ' hypothesis contains a range of emphases, the three principal ones of which are: First: advocates of the postmodern in art (which attains uncommon prominence in so far as the ' postmodern ' is powerfully underwritten by a claimed distinction from Modernism), tend to misread the modern and arrogate its defining characteristics to their own period.
The main ones of these are: the ordering concept of ' doubling '   double coding, the laying of one text over or against another; the relationship to historical codes of representation; and the relationship to popular codes of representation.
Callinicos is able to set the claims of such postmodern advocates as Charles Jencks and Linda Hutcheon against an analysis of Modernism (predicated largely on that of Eugene Lunn) in order to demonstrate that the latter is a good deal more complex in respect of its characteristic conceptions of the subject, expression, reflexion etc, than the former are wont to have it.
This is so to the extent that the claim for a structurally distinct postmodernist mode of signification breaks down in the face of a variety of historical avant-garde practices ranging across Europe from London to Vienna and Moscow in the hands of such as Eliot, Joyce, the Cubists, Surrealists and others (including, somewhat surprisingly, Kokoschka).
A further set of more qualified  or at least less wholesale  more ambiguous claims are then encountered, by authors such as Lyotard, Jameson and Lash.
These include: the postmodern as a tendency within the modern; a notion of the ' sublime ' and postmodernism's related freedom from dependence on the concept of totality; a distinction between the postmodern conceived in terms of the externalised and impersonal as against a view of the modern as characterised by the internal and ' impressionist '; and a claim that it is the characteristic of the postmodern to signify figurally rather than discursively (?).
Callinicos' conclusion to these arguments is that despite their efforts, built around a claimed contrast of the postmodern either with or within Modernism, these authors have produced only ' mutually and often internally inconsistent accounts' of the ' postmodern ', manifesting an ' inability to come up with a plausible and coherent account of its distinguishing characteristics' (p. 28).
It is in fact Callinicos' later claim that, rather than occupying a qualitatively distinct position, ' late capitalist culture represents a continuation of trends operative throughout this century ' (p. 53).
The second main emphasis of Callinicos' critique is aimed at the philosophy most frequently regarded as underpinning claims for the distinction of a postmodern culture, viz. poststructuralism.
Drawing on his own previous work, as well as that of Dews and Habermas, the main thrust is initially to connect both ' wings' of poststructuralism  the ' textualist ' strand associated with Derrida, and the ' contextualist/historical strand identified principally with Foucault  to the Nietzschean philosophical tradition; and then to isolate the most common problems attributed to that tradition to which, a fortiori, post-structuralism succumbs.
These concern: the subject; the issue of how critical resistance to dominant codes ever develops in the absence of an adequate conception of the subject; and, perhaps most fundamentally, the traditional problem facing any philosophy seeking to reduce knowledge to interests tout court, of using rational argument to prove the limits on rationality.
This is the densest, yet at the same time one of the most persuasive sections of the book, wherein a variety of arguments drawn from the analytic tradition are deployed against Nietzsche's lineage: Quine and Davidson on a theory of meaning both holistic and realist  demonstrating that there are more ways out of atomism and the myths of the given than Saussure 's; and an anti-relativist notion of truth as a ' regulative ideal ' derived from Tarski, Popper and Lakatos.
There is no space here, central though it is to Callinicos' argument as a whole, to do other than note how this perspective is then deployed not only to counter poststructuralism but also significantly to modify the position of its main critic, Habermas.
If Foucault and Derrida are taken to task for their Nietzschean lineage, Habermas' main weakness is deemed to lie in his Kantianism, manifest in a formalist ' metaethics', and his conception of ' communicative rationality ' grounded in the consensual account of meaning offered by speech-act theory  and as such likewise vulnerable to Davidson, as well as to Wittgenstein.
In essence then, at this philosophical level, Callinicos is marrying historical materialism and analytical philosophy, as it were Marx and Wittgenstein, in order to defeat a range of new and old Idealisms: principally that tradition, dismissive of Enlightenment rationalism, descending from Nietzsche via Heidegger to a bathetic end in Lyotard and Baudrillard.
Compelling as it is, however, this strategy does not form the conclusion of Callinicos' case.
The third main emphasis in his critique of the concept of the postmodern is to attempt to explain the hold exercised by a demonstrably deficient theory of culture and its dependence on a fundamentally irrationalist philosophy: which is to say he offers a politics of the postmodern.
There are two pillars to this account: the emergence in the post-war period, and more particularly in the last two decades, of a mass social layer analysable under the rubric of a new middle class  though internally much differentiated as well as distinct from a traditional petite bourgeoisie in respect of its structured ' overconsumptionism '.
And secondly, the defeat of the last major challenge to the system associated with the overdetermined name of ' 1968 ' but finally petering out in the mid-1970s.
The latter is primary; the emergence, or at least acceleration, of the former a consequence of measures adopted by newly confident conservative states to cope with the re-entry of the world system into a succession of capitalist crises after the exhaustion of the Long Boom.
This kind of argument reads well in Callinicos' hands, but it is worth reminding ourselves of the unattractive reality to which it bears witness.
A real tragedy has taken place.
If one only takes educational institutions such as universities and colleges, let alone the world outside, the emancipatory impulse of the sixties and early seventies has been turned inside out.
What began as a compelling rejection of a straitjacketing orthodoxy made its criticism in terms of a materialist demand that the socio-political locale of culture be addressed, in the face of an institutionalised aversion to any such examination conducted under a self-serving misrepresentation of the autonomy of art.
This stance has now been inverted by a puritanical moralising clerisy which virtually polices conduct and enquiry in the name of a postmodern triptych  as Terry Eagleton has put it  of class and race and gender.
What amounts to a fear of art, perpetrated under a false rhetoric of care and defence of the marginalised now dominates everything this oxymoronic ' radical orthodoxy ' touches.
And it touches a lot.
Making all due allowance for the return of historical tragedy as farce, watching this soporific monolith of the virtuous rise out of the debris of a liberating movement is akin to nothing so much as witnessing Bureaucracy emerge from the ashes of Revolution.
It is one of Callinicos' main concerns to relate the constellation of ideas and cultural practices trading under a conception of the postmodern condition to an inadequate and escapist politics: the claim, as one of his own critics has had it, that ' the conditions that sustain oppression can be altered piecemeal ' (Patton, cited, p. 85).
Callinicos mordantly comments on the descent ' from revolutionary groupuscule to single-issue campaigns and then to social democracy '.
In sum then, while acknowledging the stature of some elements of this constellation, such as the historical aspects of Foucault's work or the critical lan of Fredric Jameson (not to mention the giant figure of Habermas), Callinicos develops a root and branch assault on claims for the cultural distinction of the ' postmodern ', for the conceptual adequacy of its theoretical base, and above all for the deleterious political consequences of adherence to it.
So far so good; or one might almost say, so unproblematic.
Callinicos mobilises as powerful a body of argument and evidence as is readily conceivable against a variety of contemporary critics and theorists whose claims he sees, with justice, as a trahison des clercs.
Thus far there is something almost conventional about the book's stance.
It is possible  just  to imagine a relatively orthodox artist, critic or historian appreciating the demolition of postmodernism (if not the evidence of late capitalism's corruption and decay).
But this is not the argument's main thrust; and it is this rather elusive second aspect which gives the book its definitive character.
' Elusive ' isn't quite the word, however.
It is more a matter of approaching the book's arguments from within a milieu of relatively academic contemporary art theory and being unable to see the wood for the trees.
For the concomitant of Callinicos' critique of postmodernism is not, as it would be in half a hundred other cases, the defence of modernism.
For one thing, Callinicos goes out of his way to establish that the intellectual tradition he is concerned to critique is itself most fruitfully read, not as an articulation of a qualitatively new postmodernism, but an instance of a Modernist-type response.
Thus: ' poststructuralism [... $ the philosophical expression of Modernism, whose characteristic themes were indeed announced by Nietzsche ' (p. 6); Nietzsche's ' system of ideas' is' in many respects a philosophical articulation of the main themes of Modernism ' (p. 67).
Callinicos is concerned to give weight to the proposition advanced by Franco Moretti in respect of Carl Schmitt, that it is not the task of Marxism to defend Modernism as if its devices were ' inherently subversive of the existing social order ' (p. 48).
The point is that for Callinicos, Nietzschean thought is an instance of Romantic anti-capitalism: that form of refusal of the implications of capitalist modernity which has been present virtually since the birth of that condition, described by Michael Lowy as' opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values' (cited p. 67).
The consequence of this is that Modernism too must be a form of romantic anti-capitalism, and as such one-sided and vulnerable.
The principal weakness of both the modernist tradition proper, and indeed of Nietzsche himself is, for Callinicos, their aestheticism.
It is as well to be clear on this.
Callinicos' defence of classical Marxism, of historical materialism, is in the first instance deployed against a postmodernism which has come to proclaim the death of the grand narrative of emancipation and the need for a new form of politics not constructed along the lines of the traditional left.
This defence of Marxism carries over, however, to a critique of Modernism itself: not merely for the fact that Nietzsche attaches' importance ' to art but for the further claim ascribed to him, and therefore to Modernism itself, that ' the nature of aesthetic experience contains in nuce the form of understanding proper to the world itself (p. 66).
In the end, that is, Callinicos pits historical materialism against not merely postmodernism but, following the logic that the latter is indistinguishable from Modernism properly conceived, against Modernism itself.
Drawing largely on the Marshall Berman/Perry Anderson debate, and thereby making of Modernism the characteristic expression of the experience of modernity, itself conceived as a response to capitalist modernisation, Callinicos seems to want to claim in essence that both the former are partial in respect of the fact of this last.
Weber's conceptualisation of the modern as a process of structural differentiation is, I think, seen to be echoed in Modernist claims for the specificity of art.
Both are then held to be deficient relative to Marx's conception of a ' mode of production ' within which differentiation can be understood, made intelligible and ultimately accountable to a materialistically grounded ethics of emancipation rooted in a conception of a ' complex ' totality.
It is in connection with this perspective that Callinicos was concerned to deny the common conflation by postmodernists of Modernism with the Enlightenment.
From his point of view, Modernism as a sub-species of romantic anti-capitalism is one partial moment in the rejection of the consequences of Enlightenment properly understood: understood, that is, in terms of a Marxism which is itself held out as the genuine heir to the Enlightenment narrative of emancipation and its romantic critique.
Here lies the root of Callinicos, project  the buttressing of Marxism as the ' true radicalisation ' of the Enlightenment; and here I suspect lies also his ultimate discomfort with Modernism  prone as it is to slip the leash of a guiding politics and dance under the less biddable star of the Aesthetic.
At this point Callinicos has to be careful: it is one thing to dismiss the claims of a rootless postmodernism, wandering naked except for its designer trainers across the face of a barren late capitalism.
It is quite another also to offer a wholesale refutation of Modernism.
And Callinicos is aware of this: ' Is not the general tendency of this analysis similar to Lukcs' celebrated denunciation of Modernism as' aesthetically appealing, but decadent '? (p. 53).
For fairly obvious reasons, mostly no doubt connected with the spectre of Zhdanov and Socialist Realism (but also I suspect because of a more subterranean philosophical linkage between Callinicos' endorsement of Althusser's ' complex totality ' against Lukcs' ' expressive totality ' and the political voluntarism which it informed in the early twenties), Callinicos has to answer: No.
This begins to be interesting, and it is I think the originary focus of that sense of misgiving with which I began.
If I have been primarily expository hitherto (and I have been because I believe Callinicos' book to be the best on this subject that we have) I will now begin to turn to criticism; or at least to trying to ventilate that reservation which, faced by Callinicos, certainty, will not be stilled.
In a sense it doesn't matter if Callinicos' defence of Marxism is registered or not by the legion of Post-isms and -ists which form the undergrowth of contemporary cultural politics.
They will wither at the first frosts anyway, if they come; and if they don't...
But with his placement of Modernism in the lineage of Nietzsche, and as such at odds with Marx and Freud as the real motors of that ' true radicalisation of the Enlightenment ' (p. 120) which is the only way ahead, something more serious is at stake.
To backtrack a little, the case is perhaps not so monolithic as I have implied: for which we have to return to the detail of Callinicos' ' No ' to Lukcs.
On the one hand  and this is a point to which I shall return  there is a dual claim against Lukcs' evolutionism (to the effect that different levels of a social formation are relatively autonomous: crudely, if bourgeois society is decadent this does not necessarily mean, as Lukcs thought it did, that its art is too), and in favour of the possibility of being able to pass a positive ' aesthetic judgement ' upon a particular work however questionable the general category under which it has been produced (a position related to Brecht's polemic against Lukcs).
More empirically however, on the other hand, and drawing upon the work of Peter Brger, Callinicos accepts the case for Modernism having contained a critical moment  a ' protest against the capitalist society to which it is in complex ways related ' (p. 53).
This is principally indexed to the claimed historical transformation of Modernism into a series of engaged avant-gardes dedicated not to the aestheticisation of life, but to the integration of art into life.
As Brger has it: ' Aestheticism had made the distance from the praxis of life the content of works.
The business of the new configuration was different: art ' transferred to the praxis of life '  not however ' to integrate art into this praxis' but ' the attempt to organise a new life praxis from a basis in art ' (cited p. 54).
The ' avant-garde ' here means, of course, constructivism, surrealism and a range of Weimar practices grouped by Callinicos somewhat misleadingly under the label ' Neue Sachlichkeit '.
Just how remote this stance in fact is from the aesthetic is a matter for further debate, but it is perhaps worth interpolating that the implied valorisation of the products of these engaged avant-gardes as a function of their engagement is defeasible.
Contra Buchloh et al.,
as well as Callinicos, there is nothing as far as art (as distinct from culture or politics) is concerned which will a priori privilege a Tatlin made in revolutionary Petrograd from a Matisse painted in a hotel bedroom on the Riviera  Benjamin on technique notwithstanding (don't forget: Benjamin owned a Klee).
Be that as it may, these avant-gardes are held to have a ' distinctive character ' which resides in their ' seeking to abolish the separation between art and life '.
For Callinicos this is' unquestionable '; as is the fact that the shift is enabled by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.
(These arguments owe much to Perry Anderson's location of the tripartite enabling conditions of the Modern movement as: a decrepit academicism; the presence of new technologies; and ' the imaginative proximity of social revolution '.)
For Callinicos it is October which made the vision of social transformation ' concrete '.
The downside of this, so to speak, is that the defeat of October's aspirations also marks the avant-garde's defeat.
' Between them Stalinism and Nazism destroyed the avant garde.
The political defeats of the 1930s' shipwreck ' the avant-garde, and furthermore, through a kind of extension (since one assumes Anderson's tripartite conjuncture fuelled even those Modernist forms which did not quite take the transformatory step into engaged avant-gardism) come to determine ' the more general exhaustion of Modernism '.
The end of the Second World War is marked by the incipient commodification of social life, and as such ' the disintegration of the Modernist conjuncture ' (pp. 60  1).
The problem then begins to stand clear and I shall now have to be brief and schematic.
Callinicos drives a coach and horses through postmodernism; well and good.
But the roads on which he drives it also go through most of the art produced in the last half century  shall we say for the sake of convenience, since the death of Trotsky; or in a more apt frame of reference, since Guernica?
I will simply have to state the case dogmatically, but: this is untenable.
All of Callinicos' philosophical sophistication and matchless political experience evaporate in the face of the art of his own lifetime.
Aside from the fact that he doesn't actually discuss it in any detail, there is little more than a disappointed huffing and puffing at the exhaustion of the avant-garde's shock value (backed up by a particularly crass quotation from Peter Brger about Duchamp's readymades) and some utterly routine panting over the outlandish prices being currently paid for Van Goghs  plus a quotation from a sub-Warholian Manhattan ' artist ' answering an art magazine questionnaire with a few smart remarks about business and producing art for the market.
As if this were adequate to underwrite a claim for the avant-garde's loss of critical virtue.
In an extraordinary passage towards the end of the book, amplified in discussion at Marxism 90 in a debate specifically convened to discuss Modernism and Postmodernism, Callinicos described his experience of walking around an art gallery: ' I have often been struck by the tedium that overcomes one while walking through a gallery of twentieth-century painting arranged in chronological order as one moves from the excitement of the early part of the century to the desperate and all too frequently sterile iconoclasm of recent artists' (p. 161).
The specifics aren't clear, but the contextual indications are that this would include American art from say, Pollock to Andr, not to mention a range of contemporary work on commodification stemming from Warhol.
All of which says more about Callinicos, and the limits on his knowledge and interests, than it does about the work.
Whither Brecht now, on the lure of the good old days; not to mention the nostalgia laid at the door of romantic anti-capitalism?
I shall conclude briefly.
The point is I think that the argument from here can go two ways.
The first response is that it doesn't matter very much.
Callinicos, defence of Marxism is erudite and compelling, and the fact that he runs out of steam over post-war art is of less moment than the fact that he takes the range of issues seriously enough to discuss them at all.
Most sociologists, economists and politicians, after all, don't get that far.
The second road is however rockier; and it is an undecided question whether its implications are depressing and frightening, or challenging and exhilarating.
Callinicos is very careful to say, in at least two places in the book, that aesthetic judgement as to the value of a work of art is at least relatively independent of the cultural and philosophical critique of the bases from which it proceeds.
Thus, in his discussion of Modernism relative to Lukcs and Brecht: ' to highlight the fact that Modernism shares with Romanticism a ' subjectified occasionalism, is not thereby to pass a negative aesthetic judgement on the works of art grouped together under the former label.
Brecht's polemic (i.e. against Lukcs) [... ] retains all its force today ' (p. 53).
And again  propos Postmodernism: ' Nor does the argument set out in this section imply the dismissal of all recent works  including those described as' Postmodern '   as worthless rubbish.
Good art can be produced in an immense variety of different conditions' (p. 161).
This magnanimity is precisely the problem.
The traffic is all one way.
Callinicos appears to think that he can detect ' aesthetic merit ' from the position given to him by his politics; politics, writ large, as embodying an ethics and a philosophy, is the active force.
Thus post-Second World War art is as it is   with an ' emphasis on the autonomous and abstract work of art ' (p. 154)  allegedly because of the ' effects' of the stabilisation and extension of capitalism.
Cause and effect: what took place was a ' flight into abstraction '.
This is a language, a world view, a form of life perhaps, wherein one of the principal reasons for according praise to a type of art is that it is able to give voice to a politics; Bolshevism in the main case, though as Callinicos acknowledges, one of the salient points about Modernism was its' ambiguity, its capacity to express a variety of different political positions'; that is, when it was not engaged on its more usual ' flight from politics' (p. 161).
Art, it seems, is the perpetual recidivist, always ducking back into the aesthetic as soon as vigilant life averts its gaze.
When times are bad and reactionary commodification sets in, the deleterious upshot is' the recuperation of the avant-garde for art ' (p. 157).
When things are on the up and the lodestar of a transformatory politics shines bright, so too does' the avant-garde project of overcoming the separation of art and life ' (p. 171).
In this perspective it seems that Callinicos can only mean relatively little with his disclaimers about good art.
The individual ' good ' work might get thrown up, however unpropitious the circumstance.
But it can only be a quirk; and the force of its' goodness' is strictly limited and circumscribed.
Only once, in a fleeting reference to Matisse is there a sense of the boot being on the other foot, of art offering a sense of liberation from social ideology.
But even this is done in the name of a supposed ' immediate sensuous charge ' rather than any more extended critical capacity of art or the aesthetic.
Of course, the whole thrust of the historic avant-garde, and particularly its celebration here, lies in its being associated with a liberation from bourgeois ideology; but this is not quite the same as having your revolutionary commitments tested by your aesthetic judgement.
For by far the greater part, the aesthetic is bracketed in the name of a robust historical materialism.
And there is no room for doubt as to which is the tail, and which the dog.
Walter Benjamin once implied something rather different.
Speaking against social realism in ' The Author as Producer ', he identifies a work's ' political tendency ' and its' literary tendency '.
The relationship he postulates is not one-way traffic; it is dialectical.
A work ' can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct '.
I take this to mean that there is an equality, a reciprocity between the aesthetic and the political such that an aesthetic dimension or response can give the lie to a political claim.
The point of Benjamin's article seems to be to decentre the political, or at least to subject it to test, to remove those making claims for their political correctness from their habitual position of judge and jury: such that the art can, in principle, sort out the politics, and not just vice versa.
It is this, in the end, which I find disquieting about Callinicos' book.
Not the vapidity of the postmodern which it reveals.
But the way in which the very limits of its historical materialism (which I take to be the most developed statement of the case available in English) put back on the agenda questions one had considered closed.
The critique of Nietzsche's apocalyptic aestheticism, with its injunction to build your dwelling on the slopes of Vesuvius, just can not be reduced to the clich about Baudrillard fiddling while Rome burns with which the book closes.
(Is it anyway such a bad thing to make music while Atlantis sinks and cities evaporate?
At least you would have to be a doctor to say so, and not a politician or an academic.)
A requirement to minimise, even to trivialise the aesthetic  one might almost say, a fear of the aesthetic  is the hollowness at the heart of historical materialism as it is defended here.
There is obviously a problem concerning the subjective dimension of the aesthetic.
But a tame aesthetic is no friend of historical materialism.
Art has to be more than an ornament, or a reinforcement.
There has to be the possibility that the politics can be put at risk by the aesthetics, or the relationship as well as each of its components will be inert.
An unpredictable aesthetic, it could be said, is a requirement of an historical materialism adequate to its political task.
If the aesthetic is genuinely to have reciprocal leverage upon the political, certain problems have to be faced.
For example, what goes on when looking at, say, a Matisse in an art gallery.
It is easy to say that the time spent considering the Matisse is time better spent than that spent considering a Gerasimov, let alone a Bouguereau.
(It is a terminal problem with the race n'class n'gender triptych that all these transactions are equivalently sociological.)
But what of time spent otherwise?
How to adjudicate?
The problem of course goes inescapably to a notion of the quality of experience (though what we are calling the aesthetic here is not, or not only, a question of intensity).
The relationship between, say, reading an article in Socialist Review on the bureaucracy's pursuit of revenge on Arthur Scargill, and what it is that can be got from staring at Rembrandt's nose in a late self-portrait just is open.
One is not a priori more important than the other.
Which is also to say that it is not the case that there is no connection, or that a category mistake is involved in the mere comparison.
The information about Arthur should bear upon how one regards the Rembrandt.
But the way Rembrandt's nose is worked should equally provide a corrective to rhetoric or elision in the writing on bureaucracy.
Which is to say, the political commentary is a form of writing.
Or, to use an unfashionable term in these linguistic days, of thought.
And it is of the utmost importance to realise that the pragmatic answer to these questions is itself what makes the revolution never happen.
Which latter is not however to say that ' correct thinking ' overturns society.
Thought and organisation, or aesthetics and politics, must circle each other warily, the one never letting the other out of its sight.
The abyss which all this opens up is, perhaps, terrifying before it is' depressing '.
I have mentioned Walter Benjamin here.
Callinicos concludes his book by invoking the memory of Benjamin to the effect that socialist revolution in the form of an irruption into history is the secular vehicle of a redemption hitherto conceivable only in mystic terms.
For Callinicos it is a belief in this possibility, and that alone, which remainders melancholy and irony  that is to say, Modernism  as an adequate response to modern life.
It is the consequence  presumably unintended  of his argument, however, that it demonstrates so irrevocably how much this is a matter of commitment and as such beyond the reach of proof.
One could say that the pressing question is how it is possible to live, rather than what teleology to adopt; or at least that the latter does not sort the former out.
Benjamin remarked, tellingly, that it is less a question of what a man's beliefs are than the kind of man those beliefs make of him.
This is no less an aesthetic matter than a political one.
Callinicos, in his haste to counter aestheticism, reduces the aesthetic.
He has to.
Yet the aesthetic will not be reduced.
It is not the means to an end conceived elsewhere: but an ' as if ', no less substantial than the as if of revolution itself.
Value, you say?
Pushkin eating cherries before a duel; Lenin working day in day out on Iskra; one sentence or a newspaper (the point is of course, not one without the other); Benjamin on the requirement to denature your work ' like ethyl alcohol ' lest it be of use to the other side.
For revolutions may occur, but the belief that they will does not of itself ensure a better lived life.
As to truth and beauty  the truth can doubtless be beautiful, though it need not be.
Certain kinds of one-way traffic, certain kinds of one-way street, are in the end not hard to negotiate.
Their avoidance may be more difficult by far.
And there is always the possibility  the necessity?  that beauty can be its own truth.
Like taking poison on the border.
THE ART OF SCIENCE
GEOFFREY CANTOR
The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, Martin Kemp, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990. pp. viii  375; 554 black and white illustrations  16 colour plates.
ISBN 0  300  04337  6. 49.
In a heady essay written over thirty years ago, Giorgio de Santillana argued that some of the key ideas of the Scientific Renaissance were to be traced to developments in the arts.
In particular, the idea of space was transformed from the Aristotelian conception  a ' tidy arrangement of a simple multiplicity of things, not unlike, let us say, the shipping department of Sears Roebuck- into ' a matrix for infinite potential complexities and states and tensions'.
The main innovators of this transformation were not scientists but artists, especially Alberti, Brunelleschi and Leonardo, who created on their canvases and in their architecture and treatises a new conception of space.
When I first encountered de Santillana's paper in the late 1960s I found it both fascinating and suggestive.
Its attraction arose principally from its iconoclastic message, for de Santillana explained one of the key conceptual innovations in the rise of modern science in terms that challenged the assumptions of my teachers in the history of science.
They had argued that the new ideas about space and motion had arisen from an intellectual and, to a much lesser extent, empirical critique of the preceding, largely Anstotelian, notions.
Discussion of this transformation was confined to the great tradition of philosopher-scientists beginning with Aristotle, continuing with medieval authors, such as Oresme and Jordanus, and ending with Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and, of course, Newton.
De Santillana offered a very different account of the new ideas of space and a different cast of actors.
Most importantly, he claimed that the new science was not the progeny of earlier science but the outgrowth of developments in the practical arts.
In his account the history of art and the history of science were intrinsically linked: in the late 1960s this was an heretical claim to most historians of science (and probably many historians of art).
Although sympathetic to this heresy I found myself intoxicated but also somewhat inhibited by de Santillana's impressionistic style.
However exciting his paper, his thesis seemed in danger of crumbling if it were reworked into a conventional historical discourse.
In the book under review, Martin Kemp reexamines the art-science relationship with much care and circumspection.
His style is lucid and he emerges as an honest broker who judiciously weighs the historical evidence.
He has an impressive command of the literature of both art and optical science across much of Europe and over a span of four centuries.
In contrast to de Santillana's uninterrupted thirty pages of text, Kemp's thesis is amply illustrated with several hundred plates, including many of his own line drawings showing artists' deployment of visual angles, vanishing points, etc.
The reader is led gently through the history of art and the details of optical science to appreciate their interrelationship.
Albeit less impressionistic and insightful, Kemp's analysis is of broader scope and greater clarity than de Santillana 's.
Kemp identifies optics as a topic of common concern to both art and science.
(In a sequel he proposes to pursue the role of anatomy and natural history in the history of art.)
Of the many interweaving strands within this extensive topic he concentrates primarily on the way artists have deployed scientific ideas and instruments  these connections constitute ' the science of art ' of his title   while he also encompasses a number of related themes.
The science of art, claims Kemp, has not been adequately appreciated by art historians and to begin to rectify the situation he strives to demonstrate that ' there were special kinds of affinity between the central intellectual and observational concerns in the visual arts and the sciences, in European history between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century (p. 1).
In the first of the book's three sections Kemp examines the theory and practice of perspective from Brunelleschi to Turner.
The second section, which is less focused and less easy to characterise, contains discussion of perspective machines and other technical aids as well as theories of perception.
The final section is concerned with the theory and depiction of colour.
In the first section one of Kemp's main themes is the relationship between theoria and praxis.
Renaissance artists confronting the problem of portraying spatial arrangement, responded by developing linear perspective.
The initial emphasis was on praxis.
Following the first crude attempts by Giotto, Lorenzetti and others, Brunelleschi got it right.
Then, in the mid-1430s, Alberti the theorist codified the system.
The basic rules of linear perspective were now accessible to any artist.
Theoria could influence praxis.
The relation between the theory and practice of perspective over the next four centuries is examined in detail.
Textbooks flourished making the rules of perspective available to aspiring artists.
Codifiers produced ever more elaborate schemes for the depiction of spatial arrangements, often thereby rendering their work incomprehensible to the practising artist.
Artists, architects and draughtsmen experimented with the new schemes since the theory of perspective offered exciting possibilities to depict the spatial relations between bodies.
Thus the eye could be subjected to precise ' reality ', or it could be repositioned, led, titillated or deceived.
Some of the most fascinating material in this book is provided by the uses of perspective to create illusions  such as Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi (1465  74) and Pozzo's dome of San Ignazio (1685).
Moreover, Kemp hints at the diverse uses of perspective which offer a rich commentary on European history.
In the third and final section of the book Kemp addresses the use and theory of colours.
He argues that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many artists adopted versions of the Aristotelian theory which asserted that colours are a mixture of black and white in different proportions.
They also often used constructively the analogy between colours and the harmonic scale.
However, Newton's theory of light and colours, first published in 1672 and extended in his Opticks (1704), provided a new direction for colour theorists.
In opposition to Aristotle et al, Newton showed with his prism that white light is a mixture of its composite colours.
Moreover, in the Opticks he identified seven colours in the spectrum and described a circle divided into seven segments that could be used to account for colour mixing.
Newton's views were subsequently both elaborated and criticised.
Colour circles became ever more elaborate and orientated towards the practice of colour-mixing  witness those of Moses Harris (c. 1770) and Michel-Lugne Chevreul (1839).
Louis Castel exploited the analogy between light and sound with his' Ocular clavichord ' and Goethe explored subjective colours.
For their part artists were experimenting and drawing on the insights provided by the colour theorists.
Delacroix took Chevreul seriously.
Turner, always alive to new ideas, responded creatively to both Harris and Goethe.
Seurat paid close attention to both Helmholtz's Handbook of Physiological Optics (1867) and Ogden Rood's Modern Chromatics (1879) which, in turn, was based on James Clerk Maxwell's three-colour theory of vision.
Such a brief summary does not do justice to the detail and complexity of Kemp's argument.
Optics provides a superb locus for examining the art-science relationship since optical problems, theories and constructions were integral to both science and art.
To admit that much is not to foreclose the question of defining that relationship since a nuanced understanding requires the command of historical detail that Kemp provides.
Viewed from the late twentieth century and the widespread acceptance of the ' two cultures', the search for affinities between art and science possesses particular significance for the historian.
Yet, by viewing history in this manner Kemp encounters an historiographical difficulty that he never satisfactorily resolves.
This problem surfaces even in his introduction in which he states that his concern is to show how artists' consciously aspired towards goals that we would now regard as scientific in a broad sense ' (p. 1).
Part of this passage has been italicised to draw attention to the somewhat presentist presupposition that underpins much of this book.
In qualifying ' scientific ' by ' in a broad sense ' Kemp shows that he is aware of this problem.
However, the presentist influence is all too pervasive.
His frequent appeals to ' scientific concepts' and ' scientific ideas' often presuppose an unambiguous definition of science and one that is atemporal.
The difficulty is most apparent when discussing the Renaissance since by hypostatising science and art as two separate and separable activities Kemp is framing a problem that did not exist for the historical actors.
Take the example of Brunelleschi who, according to Kemp, introduced ' scientific consistency ' into his use of perspective (p. 14).
The phrase suggests that Brunelleschi was engaging in an activity other than art.
Was he doing science?
And if so, would he and his contemporaries have recognised that in pursuing this consistency he was doing science, not art?
Again, how were science and art demarcated in the early fifteenth century   socially, intellectually and institutionally?
Kemp's difficulty in defining ' science ' and ' art ' is not confined to his discussion of the earlier period.
For example, in his appraisal of the eighteenth century he uses' scientific ' and ' Newtonian ' as predicates to create the impression of an hypostasised activity which stood separate from art and other aspects of Western culture, including philosophy.
Thus we are told that Brook Taylor, the author of the first major British work on perspective (1715), was' a professional Newtonian scientist ' (p. 287).
Although Taylor was active in the Royal Society, both predicates misrepresent this English gentleman who wrote extensively on mathematics and religion.
Likewise, owing to his over-rigid use of categories, Kemp characterises David Brewster, the most eulogistic of Newton's nineteenth-century biographers, as an ' anti-Newtonian ' (p. 300).
A related and equally significant problem arises from Kemp's search for causal historical relations between science and art.
Questions of historical influence feature prominently in this study.
Kemp frequently provides details of superficial social acquaintance between scientists and artists and refers to their reading habits.
This is, in one sense, unobjectionable and Kemp rightly weighs the evidence for influence circumspectly.
However, the very preoccupation with identifying causal influences begs more fundamental questions about whether contemporaries shared intellectual assumptions.
For example, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was constituted not only by the new theories of Descartes, Galileo and Newton but also by new ways of experiencing the world, interacting with it and thinking about it.
According to this claim, the mores of the eighteenth century were radically different from the sixteenth.
Yet this difference is somewhat obscured in Kemp's analysis by his concern to explicate the details of numerous perspective schemes and the techniques employed by artists.
He thereby pays less attention than he might to interpreting the science of art as a cultural phenomenon.
Ideological and philosophical issues receive inadequate attention and yet these could have helped define the common context (or, perhaps, the contrasting contexts) in which art and science were pursued.
Again, Kemp's subject raises important questions about the structure and function of institutions which he only engages parenthetically.
More generally, a less causal and more structural approach might have been fruitful in illuminating the historical conditioning of the science of art.
Another example of a terminological difficulty arises in the section in which Kemp briefly examines the relation between perspective and eighteenth-century theories of perception.
Unfortunately he predicates his discussion on the contrast between ' empiricists' and ' nativists', a distinction he soon recognises as inadequate.
In the light of Kemp's historiography, it is not surprising that he concludes that ideas about perception (which were often explicitly discussed by ' scientists' and ' philosophers') had little impact on artists (p. 237).
While he has usefully identified theories of perception as an aspect of the science of art, they deserve a more eclectic and sustained analysis.
Let me therefore mention briefly some further dimensions of the subject.
Many artists, scientists and philosophers engaged the question of whether linear (or any other) perspective provides the true account of how we perceive.
For some authors perspective provides both the laws of perception and also the key to the true and rational representation of objects.
Learn perspective and you can imitate nature precisely.
However, many artists seriously questioned this wisdom.
In their art they combined perspective with drawing ' by eye '; they instinctively knew when to follow the rules and when to break them.
This, for Kemp, is an important clue to the success of Velzquez and Turner for whom perspective was a useful servant but a poor master.
But artists were not alone in considering and debating the truth and limitations of perspective.
A related point on which most (but not all) physical scientists (or, more appropriately, natural philosophers) of the seventeenth century would have agreed, was the primacy of mathematics in analysing the physical universe.
Their reasons for adopting this view differed somewhat, but we can take Galileo's position as not atypical.
Echoing Plato, Galileo claimed that God had created the world according to mathematical proportions.
This implied that only in the sphere of the mathematical sciences can the human intellect attain knowledge that is as objective and as certain as it is known to the divine mind.
Through mathematics truth and reality could be laid bare and appearances transcended.
This metaphysical commitment came under scrutiny not only from those artists who refused to be limited by the laws of perspective but also from ' scientists' and ' philosophers'.
One of the most forceful attacks was by George Berkeley in his An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709).
Here Berkeley argued strenuously against the view that we judge the distance of objects by means of lines and angles.
Although most commentators have claimed that Berkeley's principal opponent was Descartes, whom he cited as an example only in the second (1710) edition, he was more generally denying the widely-received assumption that we see according to the laws of geometry  this assumption being central to the perspectivist tradition.
(Berkeley was familiar with perspective machines, one of which he described in a later work.)
Instead, Berkeley sought to show that we learn to judge the distance, magnitude and situation of objects.
This controversial book was widely discussed but whether it was read by artists I leave to further research.
Berkeley was not alone in questioning whether geometrical methods are adequate to account for visual perception since there was a large literature on the subject by ' scientists' and, as Kemp shows, artists also frequently commented on it.
One of the leading problems in this area was the horizontal moon illusion: the moon appears larger near the horizon than in its zenith.
Since Ptolemy tried to solve this problem in the second century, it has been on the agenda of theorists of perception and is still, I understand, not fully resolved.
In the eighteenth century it was one of the main test cases for the dominance of geometry.
Attacks on geometrically-based theories of vision (together with the deployment of such examples as the horizontal moon illusion) provide a theme of common concern to artists, scientists and philosophers and deserve further analysis than Kemp offers.
If there are aspects of the science of art that Kemp fails to engage adequately, the scope of this book is nevertheless very impressive and a number of the issues he discusses impinge on my concerns as an historian of science.
Let me allude to two of these issues.
In the history of science theoria has usually been accorded far greater importance than praxis.
The general view has been that theoria is the engine driving the historical development of science and that praxis is merely the application of theoria.
Although some historians, often Marxists, have rejected this consensus, only recently have aspects of praxis, such as laboratory skills, been subjected to close and sustained study.
In this respect the historian of science has much to learn from an art historian like Kemp.
Moreover, the analysis of skills provides a common topic of research for both art and science historians.
The second issue concerns the art-science relationship which Kemp analyses through the history of perspective and of colour.
The latter case is the more straightforward since he presents the impact of Newton's theory of coloured light as radically reorientating this area.
With perspective, the key figures of the Scientific Revolution are presented as the heirs to developments in art.
For example, we encounter Galileo as a bit-player who corresponded with Lodovico Cigoli over his lunar and sunspot observations.
More particularly, Galileo used standard perspective procedures in accounting for the foreshortening of the spots which he claimed in 1613 were on the surface of the sun.
Unfortunately Kepler receives even less attention.
Yet in 1600 Kepler made important contributions to optical science, especially to the theory of image formation.
Kepler's concern with the formation of images was a response to a practical problem.
He noticed that when viewed with a camera obscura the image of the sun was too large but this enlargement was not explained by existing theory.
Instead, he conceived every illuminated point being the source of rays spreading in all directions; a bundle of these rays (rather than a single ray) pass through the hole in a camera obscura (or the pupil of the eye).
Thus the image is enlarged owing to the finite size of the hole.
In his resolution of the problem Kepler represented his rays by strings.
For example, in ascertaining the image of a book on a distant plane, he adopted a procedure familiar to artists for almost a century.
He used a stretched string to plot ray paths that just grazed the book in their transit from the source of the screen.
This method of repeatedly deploying a stretched string to plot the light rays and thus ascertain selected points on an image was incorporated into the perspective machines described by Leonardo and Drer.
While the example of Kepler illustrates the influence of artistic practice on a ' scientist ' (which is not Kemp's primary concern), discussion of this instance would have enhanced considerably the author's argument that both the theory and practice of perspective were significant resources for the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.
He also argues that, in its turn, the Scientific Revolution had some effect on the visual arts.
Military engineers, who were also often mathematicians, such as Simon Stevin and Girard Desargues, contributed significantly to the subject of perspective.
Newton is portrayed as influencing eighteenth-century perspective in an unspecified manner, although his effect on colour theory is seen as considerable.
However, on Kemp's account few artists took notice of the philosophical, mathematical and scientific innovations of Descartes and Kepler.
By the eighteenth century there was a considerable parting of the ways since the more erudite mathematical treatises on perspective, such as those by Lambert and Monge, were of no use to the practising artist.
Even optical instruments, such as perspective machines, the camera obscura and the camera lucida, were used sparingly.
It appears that once science gained its independent identity, scientists and artists used perspective for increasingly different purposes.
As with de Santillana's innovatory essay Kemp's book not only offers new ways of understanding the history of science and the history of art but it also raises a host of historical and historiographical questions.
These questions in turn suggest further lines of research that deserve serious attention by historians of both science and art.
Kemp has performed a valuable service in opening up this area.
I hope other historians will now follow his lead.
ON THE PASSAGE OF A FEW PEOPLE: SITUATIONIST NOSTALGIA
PETER SMITH
An endless adventure... an endless passion... an endless banquet.
A Situationist Scrapbook, edited by Iwona Blazwick in consultation with Mark Francis, Peter Wollen and Malcolm Imrie, Verso/ ICA Publications, London, 1989. 96 pp.
ISBN 0  8691  983  8. 10.95. (sandpaperback)
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment in Time.
The Situationist International 1957  1972, edited by Elisabeth Sussman, The MIT Press/ICA, Boston, Massachusetts, 1989, 200 pp.
ISBN 0860919838. 19.95.
I
These books are both related to the exhibition On The Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Period of Time presented at the Muse national d'art moderne-Centre Georges Pompidou, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts during 1989  90.
The exhibition was conceived and realised by Mark Francis and Peter Wollen with Paul Herv Parsy.
Francis and Wollen have also contributed articles (one each) both of which appear in both books as introductory statements on the Situationist International.
Both books are anthologies of materials by a large number of contributors.
Their titles invoke the Situationists' rhetorical use of long and rhapsodic titles.
They also denote deliberate obfuscations deriving from Dada and Surrealism.
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment in Time (henceforth ' the Boston text') is a film title used by Guy Debord in 1959.
The Situationist Scrapbook includes only two synoptical essays, the rest being made up of a selection of documents produced in various parts of Europe and Britain from the fifties to the eighties, some of which predate the founding of the Situationist International (henceforth the ' SI').
These are followed by documents relating to the SI in Britain which include Ralph Rumney's Psychogeographic Map of Venice (1957), and brief statements by Michle Bernstein which appear in the British press in the 1950s and 1960s.
The greater part of the Scrapbook largely consists of what the editor identifies as' the British inheritance ' which covers the period from 1966  1988.
The book is therefore very much an account of the movement's influence in Britain.
The Boston text relates more exclusively to the movement itself and includes, along with historical material, a brief statement by Mark Francis which is intended to justify and explain the motives behind the exhibition (the Situationists did not give the event their blessings and none of the past members participated in its planning).
' What we have sought to do ', claims Francis speaking for the organisers of the exhibition, ' is not to reconstruct time past but to expose to the light things that have run the risk of acquiring the patina of nostalgia and the glamour of neglect. '
If this statement betrays a certain uneasiness it is perhaps not surprising given the subversive status of the Situationist project and their condemnation of the art world.
Francis also implies, somewhat unconvincingly, that the event was conceived in a spirit of Potlatch and accepts the Lettrist belief in the legitimate use of plagiarism.
The Lettrists and the Situationists had used ' pre-existing elements' for their own ends, and so the editors of the Boston text and the curators of On the Passage have, they feel, a certain entitlement to do the same.
This legitimation in turn is related to the principle of dtournement, a term which had been coined initially by the Lettrists for their neo-Dadaist practice of cannibalising pre-existent materials (in the manner of Duchamp's LHOOQ) with subversive intent.
My view of the exhibition and these complementary texts is that they seem for the most part to lack the critical motivation and the dialectical irony of the Situationists.
They are normative representations, reverential in tone, recuperative in effect and the ideological positions which they reflect are conveniently distanced from those of the SI.
Self-evidently these texts are strikingly different from original materials issued by the SI in the sense that they have the status of copyrighted property and have been funded by organisations which in the past may have supported progressive art but which do not sound like the champions of revolutionary causes.
The Boston text, for example, is published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program, Massachusetts Council of the Arts and the Humanities, and additional funding is provided by the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund (the benefactor of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
The Scrapbook is also variously supported by Association Fran?aise d'Action Artistique, the Ministry of Culture, Copenhagen, the Instituo Banco San Paulo of Turin, Becks Bier, to name some of the backers, and also by the furtively named Friends of the Situationist International, whoever they are!
More prosaically, the sandpaper cover (which, like the Jorn/Debord text Mmoires of 1959, is meant to damage your other books) was donated by English Abrasives and Chemicals Ltd.
One of the first ' political ' statements in the Boston text is the copyright restriction notice.
It appears a few lines away from the plagiarised title of the book.
The proscription is, of course, a legal convention which we would normally take for granted, but is, in this context, inconsistent with the SI anti-copyright policy and, in the light of the Lautramont axiom: ' Plagiarism is necessary  progress implies it, ' which Francis cites on page 19, is an unintended irony.
The Boston text is more obviously an exhibition catalogue, if only because it includes a ' checklist ' of the exhibition, which, ignoring the problematic identity of some of the works, distinguishes between works of art and other items (books, tracts, pamphlets, etc.) and also carefully identifies the status of individual exhibits by signifying their producer's relationship to the formally identified Situationist group.
There is another category for Situationist wannabees, which was an additional and problematical area of both books and the exhibition.
Some of the materials in this area seemed to have the purpose of padding out the exhibition, whilst at the same time fulfilling the traditional function of consolidating the achievements of the founding group whose significance it was the purpose of the exhibition to celebrate.
Francis identifies the stages of the SI narrative as a chronological trajectory corresponding to (i) the Experimental Laboratory period; (ii) the detonator period (which refers to Debord's boast that he provided the explosive machinery that ignited in May 1968); (iii) the Fallout period after the SI disbanded in 1972.
These stages provide the logic for the ' diachronic structure ' of the exhibition.
In the Fallout section are included artists, writers and others' who all had (sic) some contact with the SI '.
Periodisation and classification present some difficulties which Wollen hints at when he comments on ' the ' simulationist ' art boom of the eighties and its debt to the dry husks of Situationist thought '.
It is to be regretted that neither of these books examine the pluralism of the ' simulationist ' period.
To the extent that the Situationists raised questions about cultural hierarchies and the ' supersession ' of art, how should we judge the Fallout period?
The notion of progression is clearly important in assessing this work, especially as the temptation to isolate, or even dismiss, it as an epiphenomenon of the SI is strong.
The materials displayed in the exhibition and reproduced in the Fallout section of the Scrapbook no doubt express ideas about which strong convictions are held.
What are these convictions, and why are they not articulated?
Why were the exhibits left to speak for themselves?
It seems extraordinary that, given the political fervour of the Paris-based SI fraction in its post-Lettrist phase, the exhibition should have been so solemnly organised with little regard to Debord's caveat on auteurism and his contempt for the art market.
Whatever objectives the organisers might have had, the exhibition turned out to be a quite normative curatorial project.
The contradiction is perhaps a familiar one.
As Debord has commented: ' This society signs a peace treaty with its most outspoken enemies by giving them a spot in the spectacle. '
It is noteworthy that the Situationists have produced nothing in the way of new projects for these texts, nor for the exhibition.
Predictably they kept their distance.
At the centre of the re-grouped SI in 1961 Bernstein and Debord refused any separation between artistic and political activity.
It was at this time that Asgerjorn resigned his membership of the SI, although he continued to finance it through the sale of his paintings which were increasingly in demand in the 1960s.
Thus re-grouped, the SI increased their political activity, eliminating all artistic production except in terms of agitational forms which meant, essentially, the use of dtourn illustrations in their publications.
The article by Wollen is an important piece of research and a major contribution to both anthologies.
Despite its usefulness as an introduction to the subject, it does, however, judiciously avoid overt criticism of its subject and devotes little analysis to the SI in its mature phase.
Nevertheless, Wollen presents a lucid account of the movement in its formative period and makes an interesting case for Andr Breton as a figure of some distinction in French intellectual history.
He also traces the Hegelian, and Lukcsian influences on leftist theories in France in the heightened intellectual atmosphere after the Liberation which provided the aesthetic and political context for the Situationists.
Apart from Wollen's historical and theoretical essay, the other major contribution in the Boston text is Thomas Y. Levin's ' Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord '.
This is again a comprehensive and thoroughly investigated article and is probably the first extended account of Situationist cinema in English.
Levin makes a special case for Debord as a film-maker whose aim was to contribute to the ultimate destruction of cinema as a spectacularist medium.
Debord's cinema for Levin is a paradigmatic vehicle for the movement's ' destructive creativity '.
The main purpose of Levin's article, however, is to reclaim Debord for the aesthetic discourse of avant-garde cinema.
For example, he identifies Debord as the source of Godard's innovations: ' Indeed, well over a decade before Godard's Vent d'Est, Debord was producing a revolutionary, materialist ' counter-cinema '. '
Not having seen Debord's films (he refused screenings at the ICA in London), Levin's arguments are in one sense untestable; nevertheless the article is not without difficulties.
Defensively, he observes what he considers to be Debord's virtues and comments on the latter's avoidance of, as he puts it: ' the various pitfalls  formalist essentialism, aestheticist myopia, politically naive fetishism of reflexivity, and so on, typical of certain avant-garde practices linked to radical political agendas. '
Nevertheless, Debord's place within a reified history of ' political modernism ' is assured, more by virtue of what is claimed for the work than by its testing in public  Levin admits that screenings have been rare, especially outside France.
Both the personality and the work remain famously obscure in a way which seems almost contrived.
Further to this, Levin claims that Debord ' does not disparage pleasure ' and yet argues elsewhere in the essay that his films deliberately refuse to make concessions to the viewer.
An example of this is the early Lettrist film Hurlement en faveur de Sade, with its long periods of blank screen and extended silences.
As far as one can assess the merit of Levin's text in relation to its subject, it seems somewhat implausible that Debord can be all the things for which he is proclaimed.
Whatever defence is mounted, it is clear that these films, for Levin, exist as auratic objects, and Debord their auraticised progenitor.
Hence the mythologisation of Debord by Levin, and others, has a significant bearing upon the reception of his work.
His remoteness and the scandal and intrigue associated with the SI have significantly contributed to the enhancement of the movement's reputation.
Levin's essay, interesting though it is, achieves little more than assimilating Debord into the spectacularised history of the avant-garde cinema.
His hero-worship results in him reiterating the same claims that the cinaste makes for himself.
In the opening sequence of Hurlement, as Levin notes, Debord provides the audience with a reference to a cinematic tradition in which his own work is putatively situated.
The tradition includes' great landmarks' in film history from early ' genre classics, (Levin's term), Expressionist, Dada, Soviet cinema of the 1920s, Surrealist, Chaplin, Lettrist and last, but not least, Debord.
Situationist cinema is therefore important, indeed, self-important, not least because it provides' an alternative sort of cinematic activity, incompatible with the economy of the spectacle '.
Levin earnestly considers Situationist film to be an effective oppositional practice.
One of the attractions for Levin is the persistency with which Debord, like the Dadaists before him, continued to explore the medium, whilst contributing to its eventual destruction.
Moreover, Levin claims that the Situationists never lost sight of their own contradictions, ' by consenting to act in culture ' as a precondition of their co-existence in the present order.
Nevertheless, cinema ultimately retains a relative autonomy in Levin's tribute.
It is like Hegel's notion of the beautiful soul which denounces the world from which it has withdrawn to avoid having to recognise the extent of its participation in its disorder.
Debord, as a film-maker, and Levin, as his apologist, take refuge in the transcendental space of autonomy where meanings have the illusion of self-regulation and independence of the totality they represent.
Debord takes up his place (certainly in Levin's account) within the lineage of modern masters with its attendant construction of patriarchy, distinction and causal succession.
In Levin's essay, avant-garde cinema is assimilated into the wider discourse of Modernist art despite their material and institutional differences.
One of the pitfalls of this is that different audiences and different modes of consumption are contingencies largely ignored.
Debord's apparent contempt for audiences has its counterpart in Levin's emphasis upon origination and prestige as paradigms of his cultural history.
The blurring of art and film histories leads Levin into the murky waters of Situationist discourse on art.
Suffice it to say that this discourse is generalising and intemperate, and lacks depth and clarity.
Debord, for example, proclaims: ' The critical position later elaborated by the Situationists has shown that the suppression and realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art. '
There is some sense in this comment which may well explain the position of the Situationists at a particular conjunction, but it is a sense which would also explain earlier avant-garde trends in art (if not cinema) since, say, Futurism.
Moreover, the notion of art's ' single supersession ', an histrionic claim, would benefit from some kind of historical and theoretical contextualisation.
It sounds important but in fact is an impenetrable statement.
Further clarification might also be required as to how the Situationist negation of art (and cinema) related to the wider sphere of cultural-political struggle.
The critique of art as an institution is continuous with earlier formations (including early Surrealism and Russian Constructivism), but Levin remains unclear in his definition of Debord's avant-gardism.
For Lukcs and Adorno the concept of the avant-garde was a touchstone: for the one it was negative and decadent, for the other positive and progressive.
In Levin's account of Debord, his subject appears to hold both positions at once.
More specifically, on the issue of cultural hierarchies and class relations the Situationists tried to distance themselves from bourgeois notions of progress and their equivalence in the neo-avant-garde of the post-war period.
The SI thus rejected ' mechanical becoming, with its notions of progress, merit and causal succession '.
This statement reflects the resistance of the SI to piecemeal historicism out of which lineages are made, but in Levin's history the independent achievements of Debord as a film-maker eventually collapses into it.
In fairness it has to be said that Levin tries to isolate Debord from a purely formal Modernism, and from naive realism (the politics of the signified).
He does this by proclaiming, a ' third avant-garde ', which avoids the major pitfalls (of the ' two avant-gardes') and secures some theoretical authority for Debord.
However, because this is not adequately related to the political ideals of the SI there is no analysis of the projected means (theoretical or practical) by which the sublation of art in the praxis of life might be achieved.
The reverential tone of Levin's text poses a problem which the movement's survivors, I imagine, would be quick to condemn.
It is, in short, uncritical in the sense of failing to site Debord's films within an adequate theoretical discourse.
Levin objectifies his subject through the use of an argument which leaves the SI unexplained as a revolutionary organisation with the potentiality of reflecting, by its own methods, a radical social transformation.
What he provides is the missing chapter in the secret history of the cinema, the missing link between Berlin Dada and postmodernism.
As with other contributors, exaggerated claims are made for dtournement (the communication which contains its own critique), firstly because it was an inheritance from Cubism and Dada, and secondly, because, as the exhibition shows, its deployment by ' pro-situs' has made of it a commonplace, popularised in punk fanzines, and ' Biff ' postcards etc.
The Situationists' activities within the cultural sphere constituted an attempt to create a unified range of activities which functioned as a radical critique of the conventional boundaries between specialisations embedded in the institutions, practices and agencies of modern life.
The fragmented appearance of their work, especially its Lettrist phase, their repudiation of conventional skills and scholarly manners (evidenced in their use of personal insults) have been absorbed by subcultural milieux and in due course adapted by the culture industries.
The influence of the Situationists is clearly demonstrated (if overstated) in these books.
If the historical trajectory of the Scrapbook is followed (SI through Fluxus, Heatwave, King Mob, Jamie Reid, Vivienne Westwood, and the Sex Pistols) the Situationist role for the intellectual as an informed but passionate critic gives way to philistine incitements to violence (typified by King Mob in Britain, the Motherfuckers in the USA, and also indirectly the punk phenomenon) but more commonly a laidback and philosophically weak critique of everyday life.
The political and philosophical origins of Situationist thought to a large degree derives from Marx's critique of alienation and commodity fetishism, Lukcs's development of this critique, and the Marxist-existentialism of Sartre and Henri Lefebvre.
The rejection of liberal democracy and bureaucratic Marxism led the Situationists away from dominant political organisations and towards libertarian and syndicalist influences.
The ideas of Anton Pannekoek which emerged with the publication of his Workers' Council after World War One provided a ready-made model of a non-hierarchical political system.
The simple faith conveyed in Pannekoek's treatise recalls earlier utopian writing, and contrasts with the strident and acerbic tone of Situationist writing.
With the exception of Wollen, the contributors to the Scrapbook and the Boston text convey little concern for the forms of political organisation espoused by the Situationists, and it is perhaps symptomatic of their interest in the SI as a purely aesthetic phenomenon.
The SI clearly endeavoured to produce a revolutionary critique of modern life, and towards this end devised a convulsive rhetoric and an inventive vocabulary.
The revival of interest in its ideas might be explained by this, rather than by its standing as a political organisation.
The remoteness of the movement from working-class experience guaranteed the survival of its bohemian image.
Its re-emergence as spectacle relates more visibly to its cult status and the nostalgic allure of fifties Paris; a marginalised and dissolute existence in the company of exotic friends and of romantic places with beautiful names.
The Boston text reproduces old photographs of founding members.
The gamine looks of Bernstein and the neatness of Debord have an aesthetic relevance which signifies a rather vague, but nevertheless compelling, reason for their inclusion in the text.
They are not merely documentation.
They are in fact significant elements in the story of ' Situationism ' which is the subtext of the book.
The political reticence evident in these volumes is indicated by a degree of randomness in the choice of materials and by implication a commitment to the more ' expressive ' or irrationalist side of their work.
It is, for example, revealing that there is no indication in either book of the Situationist commitment to political struggles in the Third World and their critique of imperialism.
The introductions in both books are anodyne and brief.
The historical significance of the SI is not questioned, and the importance of the movement is asserted largely on the basis of aesthetic innovations which derive from the Lettrist period prior to the founding of the SI.
Dtournement and drive (drifting) are thus reclaimed in terms of their contemporary relevance, or rather for the extent to which they influenced punk and the camp and erudite artistic radicalism which exploited it.
With the exception of Levin's extended analysis of film, neither the products nor any specific agitations of the Situationists and their epigones are subject to critical reassessment.
The short commentaries and comic imagery in the British section of the Scrapbook are largely printed ephemera with unserious political pretensions.
Some of it is amusing, some of it pretentious drivel.
Clearly much of the material is unsupportable and there is a sense in which this is self-evident in that the Scrapbook is styled as an ' anti-document ' which, like the films of Debord, is co-extensive with the equally unsupportable and qualitatively diminished world to which it relates.
The temptation is to view these publications and the exhibition as a proliferation of surfaces which are in a sense pretty vacant reminders that despite the essentially teleological nature of the Situationist project, it is now immobilised and its documents merely a contribution to culture as the spectacular remains of an abandoned revolutionary ideal.
The tendency is to ignore value distinctions and to undermine qualitative difference so that popular and high art genres are presented side by side in a unified space or text.
There is of course an inside knowledge which makes this' coherent ' for those in possession of it.
This presupposes the same audience separations, the same hierarchies, the same educational and class difference as before.
Frank Mort has commented on this kind of separation between the new intellectuals who are happy and confident to mix genre and ignore qualitative and semantic difference ' because they already know the map of Western culture ' and are distinct from those ' who do not carry with them those levels of cultural capital. '
He adds to this: ' In that sense postmodern discourse with its relativism, its denial of grand narratives and its refusal of questions of value, is a world tailor-made for the new metropolitan intellectual cadres. '
It therefore seems that ' in a purely negative way ' the silence over the question of meaning in the Boston text and in the Scrapbook is perhaps not surprising   it is an historically appropriate response to the disappearance of the SI.
' There is a sorrow in the Zeitgeist ' bemoans Lyotard, an inappropriateness in the metaphor of the ' avant-garde ', and consequently a kind of absurdity attaching to the belief in art as a prefiguration of a global collectivist future.
That sorrow hangs over the discontinued struggles of the SI.
The belligerence of their message and the violence of their appeal to negation and revolt is now passed over in silence and their works appear as if they were blank sheets to the privileged audiences of the present day.
II
What I have argued so far is that the Situationists are ill-served by these publications, and that this is partly due to the influence of a certain pessimism which haunts contemporary cultural politics.
What I want to argue now is that there is a sense in which the symptom of this pessimism exist in the movement itself.
The Situationists were idealists in the sense that they perceived themselves apart from the spectacle, always managing to be ' other-than-spectacular ', as Levin puts it, so that this became a pre-condition of Situationist practice.
Their self-image was that of the chosen few for whom the spectacle provided an inexhaustible supply of objects (and people) to hate, and whilst the apparent ease with which they targeted and disposed of their opposition often made good copy (the endless adventure, the scandal, etc.), there is a sense in which the hectoring tone of their documents became repetitive and wearisome.
The effusions of Vaneigem have an air of mystical revelation which is even more intense in recent publications.
Debord's political fatigue is less evident but his filmwork has finished and he refuses to permit distribution and screening of his work in this medium.
Bernstein is now a journalist and works for a French newspaper.
There are, I think, just three statements which count as unequivocally critical comments on SI in the Scrapbook.
They appear in the documents section and therefore do not, we may take it, represent the views of the editors.
Firstly, Art &amp; Language's piece ' Ralph the Situationist ' expresses considerable misgivings about the Situationist project: ' The texts are effectively incorrigible and self insulating... '; '... bland incoherence  a self-contradictory absurdity  a moral ground to give up reading and remembering... ', and so on.
Whatever gave Francis, or whoever it was, the idea that Art $ Language had anything to do with the Situationists?
On what basis is this reference made?
There is no evidence of SI influence in their work, which has quite different intellectual roots, and the article itself leaves no doubt as to the extent of their disapprobation.
Furthermore, the inclusion of three early works by the group in the exhibition (dating from the late sixties) reveals a kind of make believe idea about an A $ L/SI connection.
There was no such connection.
As late as 1970 members of A $ L, to my knowledge, had never heard of Debord, and if they had were not the least bit interested.
The arbitrary inclusion of artworks in the exhibition is further evidence of a curatorial effort to construct a narrative of ' situationism '.
The case for Merz, Pistoletto and Buren may be different, but it is not unreasonable to expect a rationale for the proclaimed indebtedness of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art to the Situationists.
Nowhere in these publications are these connections argued for: they are merely dogmatically asserted.
Given the withering contempt expressed by the Situationists for ' prositus', one shudders to think what Debord et al.
are going to make of the ' quasi-situationists' discovered in America by Elisabeth Sussmann.
On the basis of her understanding, it appears that any artist in the USA who uses the conventions of the mass media in such a way as to produce a critique of the media (and I can think of a good many) is veritably a ' quasi-situationist '.
The desire to create a pseudo-history of the movement's afterlife may be good for business, and may have provided extra material for the book (I refer to the Boston text, see pp. 10C13) but it is not in keeping with the purer aims of the Situationists outlined elsewhere in these and other texts.
The second critical comment I came across in the Scrapbook was George Steiner's statement from the Sunday Times in 1967.
Steiner accepted that the Situationists had identified and accurately described the emptiness of everyday life and even accepts their pleas for subversion, but was very sour about what he described as the ' depressingly banal ' prescriptions of Debord and the ' turgid creed ' of Vaneigem.
Christopher Gray, one of the small number of English members of the SI, is the third commentator I found to be not entirely sympathetic.
His comments come from an anthology of Situationist writings he edited in 1974.
Gray's comments evoke a kind of mystical disenchantment with the movement which he found to be too focused on an intellectual critique of society.
' There was', he complains, ' no concern whatever with either emotions or the body.
The SI thought you just had to show how the nightmare worked and everyone would wake up.
Their quest was for the perfect formula. '
The history of the SI is in some ways a struggle for recognition (despite Debord's evasions) sustained by a radically negative critique which ultimately failed to find a middle way between Hegelian metaphysics and the dynamics of political organisation in the pursuit of its utopian objectives.
The declamatory style of writing (which now seems dated) too often obscured the probity of the Situationist's critique of the alienating and manipulative effects of late capitalism and its creation of pseudo-needs.
The movement's critique proclaimed a uniqueness and originality for its discoveries to which it was never entitled and which served only to reinforce the self-deluding image of its own power and influence in the world.
Anti-authoritarian leftism and the critique of bureaucratic socialism had of course been well established before the foundation of the SI in 1957.
The rejection of trade unionism was a common demand amongst anarchists and libertarian socialists.
At the end of her life Rosa Luxembourg called for the abolishment of trade unions and promoted the view that workers' councils were essential organisations in the establishment of socialism.
More generally the idea of the inseparability of cultural and political revolution has a long history within the libertarian tradition with its roots in revolutionary Romanticism.
The more direct inspiration for the Situationists was the Dada-Lettrist connection which provided the aesthetic and political basis for their adoption of non-cognitive methods of expression (such as automatism, chance and other depersonalising techniques of production) and also led to the definition of some key terms in their vocabulary.
The critique of scientific socialism and economism has a major place in Marxist debate in the twentieth century.
The Situationists, contribution to this was negligible.
The Frankfurt School's Marxian approach to cultural criticism, and production and the social effects of technology and the culture industries pre-dates the writings of Debord, and yet, despite its relative lack of revolutionary fervour remains a far more wide-ranging and thoroughgoing critique of the field.
The conjunction of passion and knowledge, of libertarianism and planning, of feeling and thought are conventional oppositions in post-Enlightenment thought which have also bedevilled Marxism.
The more orthodox theorists in this tradition have preserved this separation along the lines of a Romanticist/Utilitarian split.
Others have sought a reconciliation of the positions that these terms represent, and there is an abundance of literature which examines this relationship in advance of the Situationists.
If the Situationist project is flawed, as I believe it is, it is not because antecedent theories of libertarians, Marxists and Council Communists are ignored by them, but rather because they lacked the will to build on this tradition a systematic utopianism consisting of critique and plausible projections into the future.
Like the Surrealists before them, their transcendence of alienation remains abstractly utopian.
Despite revolutionary zeal, or perhaps because of it, they sought immediate compensations for the miseries of daily life, and spontaneous methods of attack which they mistook for political strategy.
The Situationists' strategy consisted of an exploratory utopianism  a kind of heuristic projection of a future society.
Raymond Williams has remarked that the danger of the heuristic utopia is that it ' can settle into isolated and sentimental desire, a means of living with alienation '.
Another Surrealist inheritance which distances Situationists from the more radical utopians is their blanket condemnation of work.
' Never work! ' announced the Surrealists.
It is an amusing quip (especially for those with private means) and makes joyful and nonsensical graffiti.
But what does it mean?
Obviously it is an incitement to refusal, and an indictment of alienated labour.
The refusal is as understandable as it is naive, but seems to constitute at the same time what amounts to an abnegation of intellectual curiosity about human needs.
Its political inflexion contests the middle-class work ethic which is the main purpose of its message.
The aristocracy, for its part, has never needed to be convinced of the importance of not working.
For other theorists such as William Morris, the concept of work is not considered negatively.
Indeed; for Morris and other Marxists the nature of work necessarily changes in the process of social transformation.
Marx defined labour as' human sensuous activity '.
Lukcs claimed that labour became the model for any social practice.
The plea for an understanding of ' totality ' in Situationist writing derives from Lukcs and Marx whose critique of ' separation ' is directed exactly at the work/leisure distinction.
Asger Jorn's interest in folk cultures and tribal societies which lacked a notion of ' art ' as a distinct intellectual practice separated from the common culture, was based on an understanding of the extent to which the spheres of art and work have become conflicting practices within bourgeois relations of production.
Despite this the common tendency in SI writing on most forms of directed or purposeful activity (other than agitation or ' destructive creativity') is negative.
The aristocratic disdain for manual labour has its counterpart in the Situationist ' attitude to the working class considered as the moronised victims of the spectacle.
In contrast the Situationists' notion of pleasure is a negation of work in almost every sense of the word  a kind of involuntary idleness in the land of Cockaigne.
Their notion of pleasure is indistinguishable from a sixties Zeitgeist.
Its meaning is inadequately theorised and remains largely at the level of common sense, a crude alternative to the repressive order of work.
Now that Situationist texts are widely available (and with these publications adding to the list) it is ironic that they seem less crucial than they once did.
Their appeal in the past was partly attributable to the popular texture of some aspects of the writing, its accessibility and its festive and irreverent politics.
These writings appealed essentially to a generation of students bored with academic life and attracted by the street credibility of the Situationists, and often provided students with the dubious pleasure of being flattered and insulted at the same time.
The Situationist lifestyle (in so far as it could be imagined) had some influence on the hippy sub-culture in the late sixties and punk ideology in the seventies in Britain.
Situationist influence was more menacingly felt in France especially in the universities, although it has to be said that their influence upon the events of May 1968 has been exaggerated.
For the most part, however, the legacy of the movement remained less obviously political, and restricted in its appeal to fairly specific audiences in the cultural milieu and especially the visual arts.
Indeed, the extent to which the Situationist influence has flourished in the spheres of art and popular culture is noteworthy and contrasts with the absence of the movement's influence in other domains.
The uneven profile of the Situationist group and its existential fragmentation together with the eclectic and impromptu formal character of the artefacts they produced, as I have suggested above, make it an ideal type for the postmodernist critic.
The Situationists' rejection of the classical model of left-wing monumentalism, and their apparent lack of commitment to the historical overview or the grand narrative is consistent with postmodernism.
Moreover, the freedom with which they juxtapose theory and humour, and plagiarise for artistic effect suggests strong affinity with the postmodern.
The decline of the meta-narrative in favour of aphoristic models of philosophical expression (following Feuerbach and Nietzche) has been the favoured form of the Situationists.
The fact that Baudrillard's name has been linked with the Situationists should not be held against them.
Nevertheless, the de-Marxisation of their project by him and the ' death of the social ' which he has announced should alert us to the doubts raised by Raymond Williams on the issue of certain types of Utopianism.
The concept of the spectacle is an effective term which now has a wide currency, but perhaps only in a sense which approximates its use by the Situationists.
The historical period which has seen its political devaluation is one in which political optimism has become unfashionable, which perhaps is one way of explaining the retrospective or merely historicist character of the Situationist exhibition, and the books I have reviewed.
We have seen a shift from the utopianism of the 1960s to a culture of nostalgia and, as with the more dystopian elements in postmodernism, the exhibition and the books which accompany it look backward in a search for appearances as if they were compensatory fantasies substituting for a forgotten dream.
