Joseph Tanke with my written example of Robert Barrys Marcuse Piece behind him, right Joseph Tanke speaking before an audience.

On October 18, 2008 the philosopher Joseph Tanke stood on the grass mound, behind a redwood colored podium and spoke about the philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension. Below you will find my brief introduction to the event, describing a speech/action I preformed prior to Joseph’s presentation, an audio recording podcast of Josephs talk, followed by a text interview between Joseph and I on the subject of Marcuse’s protest and art. This talk was the sixth and final event that I produced as part of A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards to Utopia).

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As a way of introducing philosopher Joseph Tanke and to tie the subject of Marcusian Aesthetics, to utopia and art or the gallery - in which this event was taking place, I wrote the following words on the gallery wall with a marker.

SOME PLACES TO WHICH WE CAN COME AND FOR A WHILE, “BE FREE TO THINK ABOUT WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO” (MARCUSE)

I wrote this text on the wall to illustrate a work by the artist Robert Barry, titled Marcuse Piece, from 1970. If you were to see this work correctly displayed it would be placed on the wall with vinyl lettering more or less like this, but with no other artworks around it, perhaps just a couple of chairs to sit in.

This work is called Marcuse Piece because the text in quotes is from the last sentence of Marcuse’s book An Essay on Liberation published in 1969. In the book this quote comes as an answer to a question that Marcuse asks regarding the role of production in a free society or a utopia. Marcuse says that because in exploitative societies people work or produce mainly to earn a living, we are restricted from thinking about work in regards to our instinctual striving for the enhancement and fulfillment of our lives. Hence a free society would allow for the creation of new more fulfilling incentives for work. But what, Marcuse asks “are people in a free society going to do?” As a response he presents a quote from a ‘young black girl’ [Marcuse’s words], who responded to this question by proposing, “For the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.”

It is important here to note and this may seem like a slight digression, that Marcuse believed art was not a revolution in itself but rather a tool towards it. Marcuse said in an interview just following the publishing of The Aesthetic Dimension that, “Art, by itself, cannot under any circumstances change the social condition. That is the necessary and essential powerlessness of art, that it cannot have an effective, direct impact on the praxis of change. I don’t know of any case in which you could say that art has changed the established society. Art can prepare such change. Art can contribute to it only via several negations and mediations, the most important being the change of consciousness and, especially, the change of perception.” 1.

This position I think, should not be read as pessimistic or defeatist. I return to Robert Barry’s piece on this wall for support for this work deals directly with this contention in a very interesting and clarifying way. For Barry the artwork does two things, one it suggests that this space, the space of the gallery is a place of Freedom and fulfillment. And, two, that the artwork places an emphasis back on the viewer, asking them to consider both what the purpose of the gallery is and what their role is within this relationship. In this way the artwork, like many of Barry’s other works, and in agreement with Marcuse, disappears placing emphasis on the space itself and the audience. Like Marcuse the work transcends placing emphasis on the individual to consider their productive relationship to the rest of the world. This is an essential question and has been I think the central question to the A Grass Mound project. I wrote the text on the wall to act as a reminder to the audience to consider, while Joseph was talking, the space, the gallery as a space of potential, and a site to ponder not just form or what the show, or the artwork means, but to “think about what ‘we’ are going to do?”

Joseph Tanke, Aesthetics and Utopian Possibility podcast recording from the talk

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The first sentence from Herbert Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension

This interview between Joseph Tanke and myself was recorded on Tuesday, October 7, 2008, in Joseph’s office at the California College of the Arts (CCA). We began the interview by talking about the art project “A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards to Utopia)” itself. Joseph asked me how the project was going and how it was being received. The conversation then quickly moved into a discussion on pedagogy and learning in this project and in our lives. I have been a teaching assistant in the first year program at CCA this year, and Joseph is assistant professor in visual and critical studies at CCA. Not coincidentally, teaching and learning has been a recurrent theme throughout this project. The topic reappears throughout many of the interviews that I have conducted. All of the performers, it turns out, are teachers and pedagogy it seems, is an important part of any project concerning Utopia for it allows for the education of difference and optimistic possibility. Though much of our dialogue was interesting, I believed it to be a little too rambling and too personal, let alone abstracted from the topic of Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetics which Joseph was asked to speak about, to be of complete interest to the reader. Therefore, the interview transcribed here begins twenty minutes into our conversation at the first mention of Marcuse. Joseph begins by discussing Marcuse’s philosophical strategies, and his attempts at clarity. For Joseph, they are part of Marcuse’s broader effort to conduct his own analysis of contemporary culture, and to bring the history of philosophy to bear his present.

JT: Marcuse is someone who tries to make the thought of the Frankfurt School very clear. Compared to Adorno and Horkheimer, he is obviously the most accessible writer of the school. He is someone who was deliberately engaging with the contemporary moment in which he was living. This, in a sense, might make his thought obsolete; sometimes when you read certain passages they sound very dated. But I think that is a very deliberate choice on his part to extend philosophy to a broader audience. One Dimensional Man, for example, sold millions of copies. It was read and probably understood in a way that a lot of books, which are fashionable to carry around, are not always understood. People understood Marcuse in the sixties; Marcuse’s works were debated by students, workers, organizers and academics. So, much of his thought was built by reflecting on the sixties. Thus, if and when, and to the degree that he was wrong, in the kind of historical analysis that he was conducting, that is to say, of the aspirations and hopes he built into the counter-cultural movements, some of his thought could be said to fall with those movements.

AM: Then how do you talk about The Aesthetic Dimension [a book that has been quite influential on the themes and intentions in A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards to Utopia)]? A book that in many regards seems quite optimistic towards the project of art, but is published in 1979 after the counter-cultural movements certainly did fall.

JT: That is an interesting book to talk about. And this is probably something that I would say in that respect: The Aesthetic Dimension has been interpreted, and I don’t know if this is right yet, as a retreat on Marcuse’s part, as a pessimistic move. Marcuse writes in Essay on Liberation—and he is practically giddy that the revolution is imminent—that by looking at what he calls the “new sensibility,” historical analysis can discern the roots of a subjective rebellion against capitalism. He sees in counter-cultural movements a new sensibility, a new way of feeling, relating to others, and being-in-the-world, which will lead to some sort of massive change. Marcuse was fond of this term, “The Great Refusal”, which he always capitalized. He thought that there was going to be this massive stoppage in society where people would refuse the conditions under which reality had been handed to them and demand fundamental change. He is really excited about this in the late sixties, and when that dream starts to go out the window, when these same people start to get white-collar jobs, begin to move out to the suburbs and buy Hummers he gets very disillusioned. Up until that point he had been interested in contemporary artistic movements and analyzes them from a political perspective. He was interested in “anti-art,” Surrealism, and impromptu street performances, these kinds of things. He gives up on that in the aesthetic dimension.

AM: Sort of, he does not entirely give up on art, he says at the beginning of the book that he is only going to apply it to literature though he thinks that it could be equally applicable to art and music.

JT: But what is the art he is looking at in that book? He is looking at what he calls bourgeois culture, “high bourgeois culture” even, nineteenth century artistic products, which are not immediately political from anyone’s point of view. The book is a strong critique of Marxist aesthetics—I think it’s even in the subtitle, in German at least—by which he means that the hope he once put in the more directly political artistic movements, the more direct engagements that you have in street performances and such, to prompt political change have proven to be false. So, Marcuse revisits the art, literature and other imaginary products of the nineteenth century in order to think about the subversive potential that they harbor.

AM: Which I think is actually very interesting. In the sections where he talks about politics, in art, and the implicit political aims of some art, Marcuse says “There is more subversive potential in the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire than in the didactic plays of Brecht.” He continues, “The more immediately political the work of art the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical transcendent goals of change.”

JT: Very interesting, right? He is saying that art is alienating estrangement. This is a reversal of Marx’s conception of alienation, and Marcuse is here ascribing a positive value to it.

AM: Like Brecht?

JT: Well, not like Brecht. He is critiquing Brecht.

AM: Well, he is critiquing the didactic nature of Brecht, but not necessarily the alienation effect, of breaking the fourth wall.

JT: As I read him, he is critiquing that in this book. He would be very critical of breaking the fourth wall, of merging art and life. Marcuse does not want to do that at this point. Earlier he does. In Essay On Liberation, for example, he is in favor of those kinds of movements. Here, the key concept is “aesthetic form.” This is precisely the preservation of that boundary between the artwork and the audience. This is where the alienation comes from. The work of art must be made to take leave from reality. It must define itself as different from reality. There is a very good succinct quote where he says, “art re-presents reality while accusing it.” The bracketing off of aesthetic form, the systematic estrangement, if you will, is necessary in order to do this. He is deeply influenced by Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Marcuse reads this at a time when he is disillusioned by the fallout of the sixties. He begins to rethink what some might see as the more radical challenges in his aesthetics, this idea of blurring the boundary between art and life. Hence, his interest in Baudelaire and Rimbaud, people who don’t look like they are engaged in politics at all. The ability of these artists to be estranged, to be separated out from reality, is precisely what gives the work of art its political–I don’t want to say political use value–but makes it something which harbors, a subversive potential, or images of past happiness. What do they do? Works of art teach us how life could be different, and that the way in which we practice, form communities, and are forced to work, are fundamentally incompatible with human happiness. Alternative fantasies, dreams of another life are preserved in works of art. They thus serve as the vantage point from which reality can be viewed as unnecessarily alienating, corrupt, etc.

AM: I read it a little bit differently. I thought he was saying that the form could be revolutionary based on two senses. Marcuse defines the first one as representing “a radical change in style and technique” and the second as “by virtue of its aesthetic transformation it represents the prevailing un-freedom and rebelling forces thus breaking through the mystified and petrified social reality.” This is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately. In my conversations with Iain Boal and in the presentation on October 11th, that there are two needs for art, one is for the aesthetic form–the form of the activity–to be radical, pushing against the boundaries of however that form manifests itself, and two, that ingrained within the form is an interest and need to transform, reflecting the problems and conditions that should be fought against in the greater society as a whole. Making the issues apparent without doing it in a didactic way.

JT: I don’t think that is incompatible with what I said. It would probably hinge on what one means by “radical.” For Marcuse, the drawing of boundaries—he talks about the end of a play as I recall—demonstrates that this is play and not reality. It turns the work of art into a vessel, a time capsule, an alternative universe, or to use his expression, an aesthetic dimension, from which we then gain the capacity to be critical of our reality. It’s an old argument that goes back to German Idealism and the formulations of aesthetics that you find there. People like Kant, Schiller, Schelling, as well as Goethe, define the aesthetic as different from our ordinary ways of being in the world and the normal functioning of the mind—what Kant would call cognition. Relating to an object aesthetically is different from relating to an object in terms of whether or not it is good and serves our practical purposes or commercial interests. This is part of where Marcuse is coming from. The aesthetic is the moment when the imagination and the sensibility are freed from the domination of reason, calculation, etc. The aesthetic is autonomous; more precisely, the aesthetic dimension is autonomous. This is not to say that art is autonomous—abstracted from and devoid of life—but that the aesthetic dimension has some sort of boundary to it, which separates it off from reality. And it is precisely this separateness, which gives it force for Marcuse.

AM: I think he suggests that there should be more play within Brechtian ideas; one needs to be able to play with breaking the fourth wall of Brecht and almost breaking it, indicating the wall but giving the audience a choice to break it or not. The plays or performances, which seem to me the most successful after Brecht are ones which utilize this interplay, this space between play and life. I wonder would this be an area that Marcuse would be interested in? I thought that Marcuse was against the more didactic politics of Brecht, meaning the almost patronizing pedagogic, slamming-the-point-home, kind of black and white, politics of his work.

JT: These are the Marxist aestheticians that Marcuse is responding to, those who think that art should be like Brecht, that it should create a mobilizing force, that it should be reflective of the ascending proletariat class, these kinds of clichés. That authentic, he uses that word, that authentic art comes only from the proletariat, the class of the future, and that the bourgeoisie can produce nothing but decadent culture. He rejects that notion. It is interesting in that line that you quote; “There may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht.” It reminds me of something that Jacques Rancière wrote in this journal that he edited that takes its title from a line of Rimbaud’s poem, “Democracy.” The journal that he edited was called Les Révoltes logiques. Rancière wrote in there, and I paraphrase, a worker taking pleasure in composing poetry and rhymes is much more subversive than a worker learning to sing “The Internationale.” It is very interesting to hear you quote this now.

AM: And why do you think that this is important in regards to Rancière? My interpretation of that would be that this does not imply a subjectivity, it does not allow the worker to understand themselves as a being, as a thing that acts, when they are just mimicking Marxist anthems. To understand oneself as a creator, which is a very basic tenet of Marx, to understand that you are a producer of things, that you make the world you live in, I believe Marx thinks that there is real potential in that.

JT: Yes, I think that is part of it. The word you did not use, that I think Rancière would use, is “identity.” Artistic expression pertains to, it changes, the identity of the worker. He is interested in these workers who compose verse because it is the way in which they contest the identity, which, for their contemporaries is assumed to be natural. Workers work from 9-8 then they go home and sleep and they obey these confines of time and space. They are beings not thought capable of anything else. The art of politics is precisely the ability to show up in places and at times when one is not expected. That is one of the things that art does for Rancière. It gives these workers a different identity and it allows for them to appear in different ways. This demonstration of capacity then serves as basis for their claims of equality. For example, in the nineteenth century, when workers want to make demands before a boss, they are often seeking the help of these marginal worker figures who also tend to write poetry, those who form part of “an aesthete working class.” This choice is deliberate, and not simply because they are better writers, but to show that workers too are capable of this kind of thinking, this kind of appreciation, this way of being.

AM: This makes me think of the importance of subjectivity in Marcuse’s aesthetics. There is a passage where he says that subjectivity is the necessary and transformative result of revolutionary artwork.

JT: And not just revolutionary artwork, but bourgeois art—“high art”—like Flaubert, Rimbaud, Cezanne, all these characters.

AM: Maybe revolutionary is a moot point here because Marcuse, at least in the aesthetic dimension, believes that all of this art is revolutionary. Again I will quote from him, “with the affirmation of the inwardness of subjectivity the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society and enters another dimension of existence. This shifts the individuals realization from the domain of the performance principle and the profit motive to that of the inner resources of the human being.” For me, this is key.

JT: In my mind, the target is again the Marxist aesthetician who puts emphasis on works of art that attempt to give us an objective lesson on history or, more simply, works of art that are about social problems. Marxists for a long time had dismissed inwardness. The language takes us all the way back to the nineteenth century, to the critique that Kierkegaard levels against Hegel. Hegel was interested in the objective unfolding of historical processes; in the type of truth that he describes, the subject was secondary. Kierkegaard argues for a kind of truth as inwardness. This is obviously dismissed by Marxists, informed by the Hegelian perspective, as a bourgeois affectation, as the exclusive province of someone who does not have to work for a living. Marcuse rejects this too easy conclusion—which I am not convinced, is actually borne out by the texts of Hegel and Marx—quite strongly. This is where the contrast with Rancière seems to come into existence. I am still too close to both of these philosophers to be able to take them apart in as precise of a fashion as I would like. And I am always suspicious of philosophical work that brings together two difficult thinkers, tries to explain one in terms of the other, and ends up effacing the differences. I am not sure what the differences are yet between the two, so I am hesitant to speak about this. I would want to analyze the ways in which they are different very carefully. But this is one of the ways in which they are apparently very similar. They are both critics of the Marxist tradition in aesthetics. Marcuse is obviously much closer in time to some of these debates. And they both valorize this type of inwardness, to use Marcuse’s word. Rancière understands the importance of aesthetics, in a political sense, as the ability to play the part of the disinterested, casual observer. The way of looking, the way of relating to the world that is found and formulated in aesthetics is something that is very important. It is precisely what workers appropriate as an essential premise in the demonstration of their humanity. I recently followed Rancière’s seminar at Berkeley. There, he frequently quoted this carpenter, Gabriel Gauny, who was fixing up an apartment that overlooked a park or something. Rancier was especially intrigued, has been for sometime, with these reflections in his diary where by contemplating it aesthetically, Gauny takes possession of it and comes into full humanity. This is pretty important for Rancière. Marcuse would call this the aesthetic dimension, the ability to be alienated from social reality, to resist it and reconfigure it through an action of the imagination. That distance, that new relationship with the world, for Marcuse, provides the impetus for social critique.
Maybe the difference between the two of them—just thinking off the cuff here—is that for Rancière this act is already social critique, already active in the transformation of identity and what he calls the “distribution of the sensible.” Marcuse, however, talks about it as the refuge of forgotten values, an image of past happiness that then provides the grounds for social critique. It is more indirect: the aesthetic dimension is just that, a dimension that gives us the incentive to engage in political transformation. Whereas with Rancière it is already part of the process, it is more intimate. For him, one stages, demonstrates, and manifests equality by apprehending something aesthetically.

AM: I also see the following difference: Marcuse writes about revolutionary art as something that precedes revolution. It is necessary that it precedes revolution but it simply aids in it, it does not play a part in the revolution itself.

JT: Right, and it should be said that Rancière is critical of a lot of this Marxist teleology that you still find in Marcuse. There is still the underlying faith that the dialectics of history are tending towards a revolution. This is a word that is, to my knowledge, absent from Rancière, which is not to say that he isn’t interested in emancipation.

AM: I am also interested in how this Marxist notion of base and superstructure which I believe, despite Marcuse’s Marxist critiques, is still at the core of his writing on art. In The Aesthetic Dimension he says, “the evaluation of art is through interpreting the quality and truth of a work of art in terms of the totality of the prevailing relations to its productions…The work of art represents the interests and world outlook of particular social classes in a more or less accurate manner. The truth of art lies in this, that the world really is as it appears in the work of art.” I think it is important to note that what he is talking about is a relationship between art and a material base, between art and the totality of the relations of production. Does this framework through which he is looking at aesthetics still apply now?

JT: Correct me if I am wrong, but I think he is being critical of those notions. He is critical of this strict Marxist relationship between base and superstructure. He is definitely critical of just thinking about art as ideology. And I don’t even know that he would say that the best work, or the truest work, is art that gives us a clear perspective on the prevailing material conditions in society. This need not be what art does. Art has this future leaning quality. It also has a retrospective quality. It looks at the past—memory is an important category for Marcuse—and carries something forward, projecting it into the future.

AM: Yeah, I think you are right. I may have slightly muddled his critique and his theory. But I do think that at the core of Marcuse there is still an emphasis on the material relations, or a base and superstructure relation, or rather he doesn’t stray far from the base and superstructure relation. He talks about art as reflecting what is happening within society in a material way. And I wonder can art be discussed in this way anymore?

JT: Yes, is art now a world unto itself, its own conversation, such that it no longer relates to society, as some would claim? I would turn that question back on you, as a working artist. I don’t think that the way you initially put it is true. I don’t think that art has become an exclusively bourgeois affair, and I don’t think Marcuse would find this to be the case, despite the fact that he uses the word “autonomy” so frequently. Has art, however, become such an insider’s affair that only specialists, regardless of their class, can find it to be meaningful?

AM: Or, on the contrary, have all the tools and structures of art been co-opted or utilized as part of what Adorno’s would call The Culture Industry? But I guess I don’t really believe that either, though it is a question that gets continually asked or even stated as fact.

JT: Yeah, I don’t think Marcuse would believe that either, or he is crushed. He is writing this book as he is dying and he does not want to believe that. He wants to believe that some of the things he takes pleasure in—which I think is his bottom line dollar—and which certain Marxists would make him feel guilty for, like Baudelaire. Baudelaire writes a poem about beating up a beggar with his cane. He gives the beggar a coin only after the beggar gets up and trounces him. Not exactly the art of working class people. Yet, Baudelaire is a lot more rebellious than many nineteenth century poets, both at the level of his text and his personal life. He performed a major act of class dis-identification when he took part in the working-class uprising of 1848. Marcuse is really responding to people who are influenced by Brechtian aesthetics, and Brecht’s idea about what art should do. He is responding to them, near the end of his life, and saying that maybe these things that he has found pleasure in could have been what inspired him to engage in the process of social critique in the first place.

1. Larry Hartwick “On the Aesthetic Dimension: A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse” (originally appeared in a locally distributed publication at the University of California, San Diego, 1978)