Re: Marxism and Art (all over the place)

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 6 Dec 1995, Scott Marshall wrote:

> But I do disagree with some about 'socialist realism' and what I like to
> call 'heroic poster proletariat art'. The problem is not with most of the
> art that comes under these headings - I love it, it's uplifting, pro-human
> and worker, and it's mostly bright and vibrant with color - the problem is
> with drawing a definition of art that is so narrow as to ignore the other
> great contributions to our centuries of art heritage that also meet great
> standards of human acomplishments.
>

Louis: Scott is completely right on this question. Alan Wald is a very
perceptive and important literary critic at the University of Michigan.
He was in the SWP and is now in Solidarity. He wrote a long series of
articles on "Does Trotskyism have a future?" for Against the Current
magazine.

He has written about the need to get past the orthodox Trotskyist
hostility to artists in the CP orbit. He speaks on behalf of Mike Gold
and others as authentic voices of the oppressed who were creating
memorable art.

The Trotskyists who led the charge against "proletarian art" in the
1930's and 1940's did so from the standpoint that art has an integrity
that supersedes any value it may have as a progressive institution. This
led them to identify with the avant-garde in literature and art and
become early advocates of abstract expressionism.

Of course, the Partisan Review eventually dropped the Trotskyist baggage
as the cold war began, but continued to hype all sorts of artistic and
literary experiments.

The relationship between abstract art, anticommunism and the corporate
world is an exceedingly complex one. For those who want to explore the
subject in greater depth, I recommend Serge Guilbaut's "How New York
Stole the Idea of Modern Art". Guilbaut's point simply put: the State
Department used the work of Jackson Pollack and others as an ideological
battering ram against the stultifying art of the USSR that was fixated on
tractors and hydroelectric dam landscapes.

When I was a cultural rebel in the early 1960's walking around with a
copy of some Albert Camus book in my corduroy jacket, this was the kind
of appeal that anticommunism held for me. Over here we have abstract
expressionism, James Joyce and 12 tone music. Over there they have
tractor paintings, novels about 5 year plans and Shostakovitch. (Now, it
turns out that Shostakovitch is the greatest composer of the 20th century
while most of that 12 tone stuff is a faded memory, but that's another
story in itself...)


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