Art and Leninism

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I read a book on Monday which referred to a split within the Bolshevik party over Art around 1924.

The argument was between some of the older members, Lenin included who favoured High art and wanted a special council set up to preserve art.

And the other side wanted to sweep away the idea of high art and encourage the working class to create their own art and create a working class art.

I was wondering if Leninism entailed a certain theory on art. I myself find the second policy much more close to my own beliefs than the first.

What are your thoughts?

[which doctor]

A key read on this subject would be Trotsky's Literature and Revolution in which he discusses the roles of both 'high' and 'popular' art in a proletarian revolution.

As for my opinion, I think some of the 20th century's greatest modernist art came out of Russia just after the Revolution. Later, after Stalin came to power, there was a dramatic shift towards 'socialist realism,' which, at least in terms of literature was pretty weak, probably due to the fact that you had to toe the party line even when you were making art. Another good read on this subject is the book Aesthetics and Politics which includes the correspondence between Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Georgy Lukacs on the subject of what is revolutionary art.

http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/%7Ekaleigh/film/images/artdoc1.jpg
http://rebeccareilering.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/constructivism.jpg

[which doctor]

I'd like to elaborate on my book suggestion of Aesthetics and Politics published by Verso Books (publishing wing of the New Left) which probably gives the most cogent account of the debates on the subject of 'revolutionary' art. The book is set up with a series of letters between the aforementioned four people where they debate the revolutionary character of art, mostly literature.

The Georgy Lukacs in the book is the Stalinist Lukacs. Lukacs of the teens and twenties is the better Lukacs (in my opinion) when he wrote Theory of a Novel and History and Class Consciousness, books which he later refused to have republished because he thought they were garbage, but they're actually quite good. and At this point, Lukacs argues against modernism and for 'socialist' realism. He referred to James Joyce's Ulysses as a 'stinking pile of worms' or something to that effect because he thought it epitomized bourgeois individualism. Whereas Adorno saw Ulysses as representive of the atomized, fractured, and alienated nature of man's modern existence. Both Adorno and Lukacs were fans of Thomas Mann's realist novel, The Magic Mountain. There's actually a character in The Magic Mountain based on Lukacs, and Mann's Doctor Faustus, which is a fictionalized account of the modernist composer, Arnold Schoenberg, includes some passages that Adorno actually wrote himself.

Bertolt Brecht was a German playwright who eventually defected to East Germany where he staged many of his plays for a proletarian audience, which were apparently well received (or at least Brecht says so), but Adorno counters this by saying that there really weren't any other options to see in East Germany. Key to Brecht's aesthetic is something called the alienation effect, in which something once considered to be natural and always existing is actually revealed to the audience to be historically constructed and thus subject to change.

Walter Benjamin was half revolutionary Marxist and half Jewish mystic who also was a proponent of modernism and some of his favorite works include those by Kafka, Baudelaire, and Proust.

Adorno, like Benjamin, was also a proponent of modernism. Some of his favorite works include those by Kafka, Proust, Beckett, and Schoenberg. He was concerned with what he saw as the transition from the high modernism of the early 20th century to standardized, mass-produced, so called 'popular' art of the mid and late 20th century. He often speaks despairingly of what in most translations is called 'jazz.' Many readers interpret this as racist, but he was actually referring to big-band and swing music of people like Benny Goodman, which was the 'pop music' at the time and not to the Jazz of people like Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane. Despite Adorno's favorable view of modernist and avant-garde works, he also was a fan of realism, which he saw as able to portray the 'totality' of society. However, he was not a fan of the 'socialist' realism which became the standard during Stalinism, which he saw as lacking any artistic value and little different from the standardized, mass-produced 'art' of the capitalist West.

[Comrade Anarchist]

Considering he was creating an oppressive regime harmful to individual minds i can see why he would want to preserve art b/c the creation of beautiful art stops in ussr.

[RadioRaheem84]

Whatever....:rolleyes:


By the look of the art posted, it seems like the art of that day was very Futurist. It came from Italy and it had a lot to do with picturing progress and a future that embraced urban architecture. It was called Vorticism in the UK and the works of Fascist sympathizer Percy Wyndham Lewis reflect this style of art.

It was closely connected to proto-fascist movements of early twentieth century. It was popular in Bolshevik Russia too.

[whore]

all art is, to varying extents, political. personally, i think making the distinction between "proletariat" and "bourgeois" art is stupid though. (and the same between "high" and "low" art, or "high" and "popular" art, though admittedly i find most "popular" culture to be pretty shit).

instead, i would suggest a better distinction would be between "radical" or "revolutionary" art, and "status quo" or "reactionary" art. that is, between art which challanges the way things are, and art which glorifies either the present or the past (or religion).

in this way, we can say that dada and surrialism was "radical", while in the soviet union what past for "art" was not (it reflected merely the party line, and did not seek to challange the status quo, or dissent).

as the topic was more specifically about leninism, perhaps i shouldn't have replied at all. but, i do think that seriously revolutionary movements should promote revolutionary art (which can be either "high" or "low", you can have a revolutionary painting, play, music, comic books (tintin anyone (http://tintinrevolution.free.fr/pages/image001.html)?) etc.).

[which doctor]

Considering he was creating an oppressive regime harmful to individual minds i can see why he would want to preserve art b/c the creation of beautiful art stops in ussr.
Do you know anything about Lenin or the Russian Revolution?