Preface

I am not sure how much relevance any of the issues raised in this paper will have for today's undergraduates and postgraduates in the arts and humanities. As I write (this evening) I recall a conversation overheard in the lift at the university during the day: a student suggested that another member of his group, from South Africa, was or had been sympathetic to apartheid; the student to whom he spoke asked what apartheid was. Later, I remembered being in a bar in Manhattan, having brunch one Sunday, when Nelson Mandela's first public speech after release from prison was broadcast live, and how the whole bar fell silent and remained so until he finished. But events, of whatever historical momentum, are fast erased in public consciousness as the world moves on. And here I reconsider writing from the 1930s, when my parents were in their teens, and the 1970s, when I was in my twenties. Perhaps it is a waste of time. But it is my work, and part of my role is to draw attention to problems which seem, to me at least (because I can speak only for myself) to retain a degree of resonance. the world moves on, after all, but in doing so seems to reproduce the same difficulties in new and perhaps more dangerous forms.

 

Introduction

The question of distance and engagement runs through the aesthetics of modernity. It means, very briefly, the extent to which someone engaged in intellectual or cultural work can intervene in, or have agency in changing, social and political conditions. In putting it this way I make two assumptions: first, that there is a continuing evolution of social states, much as there is at a slower pace of biological states, and that there is no final solution (such as the model of a Utopia in which a society finds its ultimate form). Second, that intervention can have some effect, on the basis that, as in Marx's model of dialectical materialism, human subjects can change the objective conditions by which they are themselves conditioned - as in his 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach (1845). There is a third but looser and more problematic assumption underlying both of these, which is, on the model of modern history, that specific, usually privileged, groups within society - this society - have a particular kind of agency by virtue of their status.

 

In the case of the modern artist this is ambivalent. The twentieth-century artist either invents new languages of form (as in Cubism) or plumbs psychic depths which others fear to tread (as in Abstract Expressionism),^[i] or, in the mid nineteenth century, makes heavily politicised statements urging engagement for social justice (as in Realism).^[ii] In postmodernism this version of art's social contract no longer applies. I the outcome is not an entirely atomistic cultural formation in which anything goes, then my purpose is to ask what can be salvaged, as it were, from the histories of (often failed) efforts at intervention. Running through this is the problem of engagement and distance: is it at all possible to be critical without a distancing of the conditions which are the object of critique? Does that criticality run to the concept of a subject - such as the idealized, autonomous subject of liberal humanism.^[iii] That sense of autonomy, in which subjects decide by themselves what happens (in a drama, in life ...) appears incompatible with a post-modern sense of contingency: everything is conditioned by everything else; all causes and effects appear interchangeable in a fully relational world.

Context

In the 1880s and 1890s the withdrawal of Symbolist and Secessionist artists - in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Munich - was a refusal of political engagement in favour of an autonomous art; or, it could be seen as passive resistance to a political and economic system regarded as bankrupt and repressive - with which, after the failure of the avant-garde, there was no point confronting directly. In Paris, specifically, two key events prefigure the cultural withdrawal of the 1880s and the turn to Symbolism (in which the artist's or writer's state of psyche becomes the subject-matter of their creative work): the first is the defeat of the Commune in 1871 after which Gustav Courbet was imprisoned, sent the bill for the re-erection of the Vend™me Column (after his supervision of its removal during the Commune), and died in poverty and exile. The second is the stock exchange crash of 1882, after which Paul Gauguin, hitherto a stock broker, art collector and Sunday painter, turned full-time to art as a way to make a living. Courbet died in 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition (named after a painting by Claude Monet). Impressionism is sometimes seen as chocolate-box art, pretty pictures for the new bourgeoisie who dwelt in the new apartment blocks lining the equally new boulevards cut through the old working-class quarters of the city by Baron Haussmann for Napoleon III. But there is a political content, too. For example, Manet depicts a one-legged veteran of the Commune hobbling down an empty, flag-decorated street in Rue Mosnier with flags (1878, Getty Museum). And, in Place de la Concorde (1875, Hermitage) Degas uses the black hat of a foreground male figure to blot out the exact site where the statue of Alsace-Lorraine, the province lost in Napoleon III's defeat at Sedan in 1870, stood draped in black as a public memorial. Such works use coded means to indicate an inconvenient content which was nonetheless obvious to informed spectators at the time. Such messages, of course, are easily lost as history moves on. Similarly, artists working in the East bloc before 1989 used coded images or visual languages to suggest ideas inconvenient to the regime. Even the general style of impressionism may have a critical edge. Andrew Wood writes of Impressionist street-scenes:

 

Those streets tell a story of the bourgeoisification of Paris. There is no question of that, but they also contain a memory of the price of that bourgeoisification.. There is not a seamless transition between the Second empire and the third Republic [in 1871]. Instead there is something like a collective nightmare ... ^[iv]

 

He adds, '... early Impressionist scenes of urban leisure draw a veil of light across a chasm in French history.'^[v] This corresponds with the position advanced by Teodor W Adorno, that, to paraphrase, the conditions of a work of art's production are always sedimented in its appearance and likely to be evident in the work's reception.^[vi] But this position is quite broad, and differs from that for which Walter Benjamin argues in his address to a gathering of Communist writers in Paris in 1934, that the writer needs to revolutionize the means of producing literature (discussed in a previous seminar).^[vii] Benjamin cites a Soviet writer's informed participation in the everyday organization of a collective farm. This represents one polarity - engagement - in an axis of degrees of intervention, the other polarity of which might be affirmation of art's autonomy, the view of art for art's sake characteristic of the 1890s, as the only remaining defense against a philistine society. But my aim is not to reproduce but to problematize such an easy dichotomy.

 

I do this via two connected issues: First, the role of abstraction in early modernist art - as an extension of art for art's sake - in critical debates on German Expressionism in the 1930s; which I compare with the argument for figuration advanced by British art critic Peter Fuller in the 1980s, looking back on the art of the 1970s (such as colour field painting). Second, the question of autonomy in aesthetics; which I compare with the model of text as a system of difference proposed in the 1970s by Roland Barthes. I should add that, while critical theories of culture and society in the 1930s are haunted by the rise of fascism, the 1970s are, in a half-tone symmetry perhaps, haunted by the failure of revolt in Paris and elsewhere in 1968.

 

Expressionism

One of the main advocates of German Expressionism as offering a critical perspective on the conditions of its production, especially in Germany, is Ernst Bloch.^[viii] Bloch argues that hope is made visible, given form and brought into a greater understanding, in art.^[ix] This happens, he says, even in periods of repression such as the ancien regime in France, citing Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera. Of this work )of which there are three versions), Bloch writes, 'even its title is clearly utopian.'^[x] Young couples await the barque which will transport them to the island of love, taken as an idyllic and quite elsewhere, far-away location of a life of bliss and ease. In a similar way, Bloch writes of the Expressionist painter Franz Marc's work,

 

... in the placelessness in which interior and perspective mutually merge and permeate themselves with a didssolved other world, a whole existence surfaces in the other place; here tyhere is nothing more than the wishful landscape of this Everywhere, of this permeatedness with homeland.^[xi]

 

That is, the mythical elsewhere receives the projection of another world imagined as redemption of this world (as in the term homeland, which Bloch uses at the end of The Principle of Hope to denote the end of history in freedom). The other is seen within this world, but necessarily distanced from it because it is radically other than it. But Bloch finds himself caught between two oppositional positions in his defense of German Expressionism. He writes against the categorization of Expressionism as degenerate by the Nazis (in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937); and, probably more importantly and before the Nazis came to power, defends Expressionism against attacks from Marxist critic, Georg Lukács, previously a fellow philosophy student.

 

Lukács, a proponent of Realism, saw Expressionism as an art of bourgeois decadence, while Bloch saw decadence as a necessary part of cultural inheritance, alongside the cultural evidence of times of hope and revolution. Deriving the term Erbschaft from Friedrich Englels' term Kutlurerbe, Bloch argues, as Tony Phelan paraphrases,

 

... a heritage can be taken not only from periods of revolutionary ascendancy ... and not only from cultural golden ages, but ... we can and must become the inheritors of periods of so called decadence.^[xii]

 

For Bloch, the Nazi assault on culture was another aspect of its effort to construct a false millenarianism, in many cases appropriating the traditional means of workers' organizations - such as torch-lit parades, banners, and songs - to their own use. The assault from Lukács was more difficult and required a more careful defence. This was carried out in literary journals of the Left, such as Literatur and Das Wort. Among the artists to whom Bloch refers are Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix and Georg Grosz. He sees Expressionism as a broad tendency from around 1912 to around 1922, overlapping or even including with Cubism and Surrealism. In part, Expressionism's language of fragmented planes and dislocated, abstracted images denotes, for Bloch, a period of social upheaval, in which the world no longer presents a clear image of itself (as perhaps in the European tradition). In part, too, the separation of planes, lines and colours in art from the perceptual appearances of the natural world - the basis of art's autonomy as claimed by Kandinsky^[xiii] - is a necessary vehicle for giving form to the imagined alternative, an indisputably better world.

 

Lukács asks whether the problem is one of the modern and the classical, and admits that cultural development - he cites literature - is 'extraordinarily complex.'^[xiv] He then identifies three main tendencies in modern cultural production: first, anti-realist work which constitutes an apology for the existing system (as if denying it); second, avant-garde work which progressively distances and dissolves realism (of the kind Bloch defends); and third, realism (as in but not exclusive to Socialist Realism), 'swimming against the mainstream of literary development, in fact, against the two currents noted above.'^[xv] Using this structure, he is critical of Bloch's critique of modernist writers such as James Joyce:

 

... Bloch does as a theorist exactly what the expressionists and Surrealists do as artists. ... [citing Bloch's denigrating remarks, for example 'An empty shell and the most fantastic sell-out; a random collection of notes on crumpled scraps of paper, gobbledygook, a tangle of slippery eels ...' and Bloch's idea that Surrealism is an ultimate form of Expressionism] ... The reader can see here very clearly, in Bloch's advocacy of Expressionism, just what he regards as the literary mainstream of our age. It is no less clear that his exclusion of every realist of importance ... is perfectly conscious.^[xvi]

 

For Lukács, realist writers such as Thomas Mann offer a more direct representation than any Expressionist work of the crisis of modernity under capitalism. Of Mann he says, 'who knows how thoughts and feelings grow out of the life of society and hoe experience and emotions are parts of the total complex of reality.'^[xvii] This extends the function of the novel as a recent literary form, finding its place in bourgeois society in the nineteenth century, from representation to oblique intervention. The novel, in other words, is a critical literature. In contrast, for Lukács, Expressionism conveys only the decomposition of society.^[xviii] He continues,

 

One inescapable consequence of an attitude alien or hostile to reality [as in Expressionism] makes itself increasingly evident in the art of the avant-garde: a growing paucity of content, extended to a point where absence of content or hostility towards it is upheld in principle. ^[xix]

 

A lack of content, taken as meaning, is what art critic Peter Fuller finds in Abstract expressionism and colour field painting as the dominant art of the 1970s. Yet Fuller turns away at this time from the Marxist critique on which Lukács' position is based.

Fuller begins his seminal essay 'Where Was the Art of the Seventies?',

 

Future art historians will look back on the 1970s as the time when modernism breathed its last. Two experiences I had in the closing weeks of the decade underline this. The first was my visit to the Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Royal academy. This made me recall how modern art arrived belatedly in Britain when Roger Fry organized his famous exhibition, 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. ... [citing Cezanne as exemplifying] 'what I think Marcuse meant when he wrote that the critical function of art ... resided solely in aesthetic form.'

 

And now for the second of my fin de decade experiences. In December, I was invited to sit on a panel at an Artists' Union meeting. Afterwards, in the pub, I found myself surrounded by conceptual artists, political artists, and someone who kept on about art practice and the new media. Like myself, they were almost call of the Left: but I could not help feeling intense discomfort. This was accentuated when a man wearing a hat and an ear-ring (presumably in homage to that charlatan, Joseph Beuys) handed me a copy of his new avant-garde magazine, PS. ... The lead article was head-lined, 'Mutation through Auto-Surgery'....

 

The PS article was clarifying. It vividly demonstrated how the great promise in the origins of modernism had reduced itself to the pornography of despair.^[xx]

 

Of course, cultural trends do not reduce themselves, any more than populations. But Fuller indicates the narrative construction of modernism which he attributes to Clement Greenberg - a reductionist art history culminating in the, for instance, the all-blue canvas - painting as colour on surface as that beyond which it cannot be further reduced, its essential quality. Sculpture, similarly, is three-dimensional form.^[xxi] In the extract above, Fuller points to conceptual and related non-object based tendencies in the 1960s, and tends to conflate these with other kinds of art he does not like. Either way, Fuller laments the loss of content, as Lukács had, but for other, almost opposite reasons. Fuller had recently read Herbert Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension,^[xxii] recently published in English, and - as he explained to me in a conversation around 1980 - was influenced by it to reject conventional Marxist art criticism. Fuller's objection to that criticism was that it was simply inadequate to understand why people continued to look at art when they had little or no knowledge of the conditions in which it was produced. What was it, he asked frequently, that compelled attention in art's reception. This led him to propose that certain kinds of figuration, most notably images of the Mother and Child (as in much Western religious art), created a resonance with basic human feelings and memories of infancy. Some years later, in Art and Psychoanalysis,^[xxiii] he develops this idea informed by British object-relations psychoanalysis - citing D W Winnicott, Melanie Klein and Marion Millner - to say that certain kinds of abstract art, too - such as the work of Marc Rothko and Robert Natkin - has this quality in floating relations of figure and ground which could possibly be compared to the space of, say, Paul Klee and in the work of some German Expressionists. But on abstract Expressionism - Jackson Pollock - Fuller is scathing: nothing to say and no way to say it: the same paucity of content to which Lukács had objected in the 1930s looking at art which, presumably, Fuller would have found meaningful and expressive of human memories and desires. I leave this seemingly contradictory (but actually complex) state of critical affairs for the reader's interest.

 

Autonomy and Form

I want to turn now to autonomy as a basic quality of cultural objects, such as paintings, films and texts. in the 1900s, abstraction meant the distortion of representation. According to art historian Wilhelm Worringer, in his PhD thesis 'Abstract and Empathy', abstraction was characteristic of north European art, as in the decoration of medieval manuscripts and a tendency to pattern; while a more direct representation, which he called empathy, characterised classical, Mediterranean art. This overlooks the - equally distorting - idealization of form in Greek art, but the argument was taken up nonetheless by Kandinsky - whose improvisatory work of 1910-1912, in Munich, quotes the visual signs of stylised Russian folk art and imagery from seventeenth-century woodcuts from the Book of Revelations. Kandinsky then moves to completely abstract art, in around 1914, parallel to the independent moves to abstract art by Mondrian (in Paris until 1914 then in the Netherlands) and Malevich (in Russia). Coincidentally, all three artists aligned themselves to Theosophy. In some ways, all three, if differently, evoke a greater reality in the metaphysical than the physical world. But apart from that, modernism in general departed from the criterion of equivalence to the perceptual code of so-called natural appearance. Among other influences was awareness of developments in the science of optics, particular colour vision theory, which showed natural appearances to be natural only to the extent that they are produced in human consciousness.

 

Compared to abstraction, realism looked nineteenth-century. But it is helpful to differentiate Realism as a politicized art movement in France from the 1840s to the 1870s, from Socialist Realism as the official style of the Soviet Union after 1924, and realism as a general term for an art or literature of everyday life, appearance, and the state of society as it is. For Lukács, abstraction, or formalism, is incompatible with realism. For Adorno, arguing against Lukács, formalism 'means the structuring of the elements of a work [of art] in accordance with laws appropriate to them ...'^[xxiv] This begs the question as to how that appropriateness is determined, but also harks back to a Kantian aesthetic, from which I think Adorno never completely departs, in which beauty is apprehended in a disinterested knowledge, apart from the immediacies of sensation. Beauty, in its way, is abstraction, and in as much as it has formal dynamics which are independent of ordinary appearances, it is already the distanced reality of a utopian consciousness. This is how Marcuse sees beauty in his later work, as a kind of elsewhere onto which a better life can be projected, while its imagination is itself a refusal, if passively, of present, repressive actuality.

 

To return to Adorno, he admits that Lukács' criticism of Brecht needs to be addressed. Brecht's character Arturo Ui, whom Adorno cites, stands for fascism, but the political reality is transposed to commerce, with Ui as capo of a Cauliflower Trust, a resistible and laughable dictator. Charlie Chaplin's depiction of Hitler in one of his films might be viewed similarly as deflating oppression when the opportunity to end it is absent. But there is a price:

 

By thinking of fascism as an enterprise belonging to a band of criminals who have no real place in the social system ... you strip it of its horror and diminish its social significance. This invalidates the caricature and makes it seem idiotic ...; the despotic rise of the minor criminal loses its plausibility in the course of the play itself. Satire which fails to stay on the level of its subject lacks spice.^[xxv]

The same difficulty occurs in art's representation of suffering. Citing extreme situations such as Auschwitz, Marcuse argues that pulls away: 'because it cannot represent this suffering without subjecting it to aesthetic form, and thereby to the mitigating catharsis, to enjoyment. Art is inexorably infested with this guilt.'^[xxvi] Yet he adds that art is not thereby relieved of the responsibility to remind its audiences of what occurred - the duty of witness. He continues, 'Authentic art preserves this memory in spite of and against Auschwitz; this memory is the ground in which art has always originated - ... and the need to create images of the possible ÒotherÓ.'^[xxvii] At this point, Marcuse adopts a transcendent approach: the alternative imagined in art is not historically specific. This accords with Bloch's vision of an eventual homeland of which art gives glimpses. It could also be aligned with a Kantian aesthetic in which the beauty known through disinterested judgment is separated from the instances of its occurrence in sense impressions. For Marcuse, in the 1970s, art thereby keeps vital the possibility to foresee 'the reconstruction of society and nature under the principle of increasing the human potential for happiness. The revolution is for the sake of life not death.'^[xxviii] The precondition for this function of art is its autonomy, as Marcuse explains in the previous section of The Aesthetic Dimenion.

 

Asking how art can indicate a radically different world, Marcuse argues that its qualitative difference resides in autonomy - but not in arbitrary invention. Art relies on shared meanings, even in its abstract language (colour, sound, and so forth). He adds,

 

... no matter how much art overturns the ordinary meanings of words and images, the ttransfiguration is still that of the given material. this is the case even when the words are broken ... This limitation of aesthetic autonomy is the condition under which art can become a social factor.^[xxix]

 

Hence art is both integral and counter to the extant reality (objective conditions). He remarks, 'This contradiction is preserved and resolved (aufgehoben) in the aesthetic form.'^[xxx] One way this happens is when 'the encounter with the fictitious world restructures consciousness and gives sensual representation to a counter-societal experience.'^[xxxi] Cutting across the divide which separated Bloch and Lukács, he adds that the realist novel, too, can be transformative, providing it is subjected to aesthetic formation. This does not mean an easy path to Eden, or Eden regained at all. If art offers a promise of liberation - or what Marcuse cites elsewhere, and obliquely references here, as promesse du bonheur^[xxxii] - 'the image of liberation is fractured by reality'^[xxxiii] because, for the most part, the happy end is elusive. Hence, since art is always mimetic, concerned with representing reality and experience,

 

Mimesis remains re-presentation of reality. This bondage resists the utopian quality of art: sorrow and unfreedom are still reflected in the purest imagery of happiness and freedom. they too contain the protest against the reality in which they are destroyed.^[xxxiv]

 

Marcuse continues,

 

Art cannot redeem its promise, and reality offers no promises, only chances. we re back at the traditional concept of art as illusion (schein) though perhaps beautiful illusion (schšner Schein). True, but bourgeois aesthetics has always understood appearance (Schein) as the appearance of truth ... Cognition and experience are antagonistically divided, for art as illusion (Schein) has cognitive content and function. Art's unique truth breaks with both everyday and holiday reality ...^[xxxv]

 

Art, then, works in a space between the dire reality and an imagined other, always in a space of negation, its realism and its abstraction operating as principles in permanent, fluid tension. Something similar is found in Adorno's much longer (and posthumously published) Aesthetic Dimension. In 'Reconciliation Under Duress', he argues that the characteristics of decadence, formalism and aestheticism begin in Baudelaire's work, while Baudelaire's interest is not in timeless ideals but in the contingencies of modernity. Adorno then gives a version of the argument made later by Marcuse (cited above): 'Art exists in the real world and has a function in it ... Nevertheless, as art it remains the antithesis of that which is the case.'^[xxxvi] He qualifies art's representational role, however: 'Art does not provide knowledge of reality by reflecting it photographically ... but by revealing whatever is veiled by the empirical form assumed by reality, and this is possible only by virtue of art's own autonomous status.'^[xxxvii]

 

Finally, I want to ask what happens when that autonomy is applied in specific way to language itself. Marcuse relies on shared meanings for art to communicate, even when the meanings are broken (presumably, as in some poetry, in ways which still allow the broken meaning to be grasped, and the gap left by the demise of an accepted meaning to be intuited in some meaningful if vague way). But suppose, drawing on theories of language, the meanings of words (or visual signs) are not transcendent but only and always culturally specific, historically produced. Cultural studies gives many cases of words taking on new meanings in shifts of ideology, and Luce Irigaray argues that the presumptions of a gendered language such as French carry into ingrained and unstated social attitudes.^[xxxviii] For Roland Barthes, visiting Japan after the defeat of revolt in 1968, though not regarded as engaged in the same way as, say, Jean-Paul Sartre, language offers a system of difference in which signifiers (words) float freely apart from the phenomena signified, with no objective relation - only that a common code allows the signification. He writes, at the beginning of Empire of Signs,

 

What can be addressed ... are not other symbols, another metaphysics, another wisdom ... it is the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the property of symbolic systems. Someday we must write the history of our own obscurity ... Today there are doubtless a thousand things to learn about the Orient ... but it is also necessary, leaving aside vast regions of darkness (capitalist Japan, American acculturation, technological development), a slender thread of light search out not other symbols but the very fissure of the symbolic. This fissure cannot appear on the level of cultural products ... The author has never, in any case, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of ÒflashesÓ ... afforded him a situation of writing. ... And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing: it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence.^[xxxix]

 

Where does this bring us, or leave us?

First, I do not think there is an unbridgeable chasm between critical theory and French theory in the 1970s and since (which is sometimes sloppily called critical theory as well). From Adorno and Marcuse I would draw out that art, or the invented image, is both a representation of the realities shared by the producer and the consumer of the image; and a critique of it, in some cases, in a utopian mode, through relocation to a far-away realm onto which another, better world is projected. The aim is not to escape the dire reality but to reassert that it is not the only reality available.

 

But the production and reception of art are always coded, employing a language which art mat break but inevitably reconstitutes as form. This, at least, I think is Marcuse's position. Some more recent art may claim to break away from that reconstitution, in a non-coherence or outsider status. But even graffiti, as anti-social behaviour in some contexts, is reintegrated in mainstream art by Tate modern's summer show in 2008, 'Street Art'. I do not wish or have space to go into that here, but the point is that the histories of modernism seem reproduced in postmodernism, in as much as departures from the mainstream are always co-opted back into it, with increasing rapidity, in the service of market interests. While art requires validation as art, in the absence of a super-natural authority as previously provided by religious institutions, it is only art's institutions which can confer this, with whatever complicity they demand. There is, indeed, no more here than a system of difference. This art differs from that art, often in quite minor ways which are yet adequate to discern a movement or a tendency. In the shift to a fusion of art as the exercise of a creative imagination - able to imagine new orders of society as well as pictures - proposed by Joseph Beuys (whom Fuller regards as a fake - above), the category art ceases to be useful. And that may be where the path of engaged art necessarily leads. But whether that is the case or not, Barthes' idea of the fissure seems to correspond loosely with the rupture or fracture of the dominant reality which Marcuse sees as wrought by art as a critical practice, for which he sees its autonomy as the precondition.

 

One difficulty this poses is that art's autonomy is itself not autonomous, but one of many products of a historically specific system of differentiation, in this case of a specialist, non-useful but significant field of human activity and communication, of which verbal language offers the most accessible model (and was used as such by Darwin in his theory of the evolution of biological species). In language, the use of words in ordinary life reconditions the structure of a language, while the structure generally conditions (but not seamlessly) the uses of words. What matters here is that new words do arise, and meanings do change. Perhaps this is not only a model for evolutionary theory, but also for an art seeking to critically intervene - obliquely, in code, not in situations but in the categories through which situations are narrated, or by which their radical potential is denied when subsumed into conventional meaning.

 

This may seem to be a minor agenda, in a period of economic uncertainty, the evacuation of the political in a universalised centralism (in effect a mitigated neo-liberalism), empty gestures of social justice in a world of widening inequalities, and the looming advance of climate change - perhaps the only certainty. What can be done? On the cover of an anarchist magazine in 1969, Fill the Prisons, Be Ready to Die. I can't do that. I want to live a long time yet. My situation is the University. An artist's situation is the art-world. In these arenas perhaps coded intervention is all that is available.