What Happens to Revolutionary Art When the Art Fails?

Christopher Hartney Studies in Religion

University of Sydney

•  This lecture is a virtual expedition into the graveyard of the arts of failed revolutions. And perhaps nothing embodies this kind of art more than the ruins of the Vladimir Lenin Palace for Culture and Sport in Tallinn, Estonia. It is from this starting point that we will discover the patterns behind the art of failed revolutions. Was it the fault of the art itself that ensured the failure of the revolution?

Was There a Revolution in Germany in 1933?

•  Hitler leads (The Münich) putsch against the state 8-9 November 1923.

•  In the 1933 elections the Nazi Party attains 43.9% of the vote.

•  Worked in coalition with the German National People’s Party.

•  Enabling Act of 1933 gave the cabinet powers to pass legislation without the Reichstag.

•  President Paul von Hindenburg dies in August 1934. •  Hitler assumes complete power.

Triumph des Willens (d. Riefenstahl 1935) https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=GHs2coAzLJ8

Entartete Kunst July – November 1937

Max Nordau 1849-1923

Degeneration

•  The Twilight of the Nations (inc. drug use/poisoning).

•  Mysticism (inc The Pre-Raphaelites/Symbolism/Tolstoism/The Wagner Cult)

•  Ego-mania (inc. Parnasians and Diabolists, Decadents and Aesthetes, Ibsenism, Nietzsche

•  Realism (inc.Zola) •  The Twentieth Century -

Prognosis

B.A.Morel

•  Graphomania

•  Hysterical amblyopia •  Red = dynamogenous •  Violet = inhibitive

•  The degenerate are ipso facto criminal?

Arno Breker 1900-1991

Brutalism A Nazi Style? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6odhGFIND0

The Origins of Brutalism – The Cyclopean (The Mycenaean)

“Béton Brut” Le Corbusier (Palace of Assembly Chandigarh 1955)

Reyner Banham: Nybrutalism Hans Asplund: Villa Göth (1949)

Albert Speer 1905-1981

Friedrich Tamms 1904-1980 •  Von 1923 bis 1929 studierte Tamms an der Technischen Hochschule München. Er wechselte

mit Albert Speer und Rudolf Wolters 1929 an die Technische Hochschule Berlin. Dort studierte er sowohl bei Heinrich Tessenow als auch bei Hans Poelzig. Nach seinem Architektur-Diplom war er von 1929 bis 1934 Mitarbeiter im Brückenbauamt Berlin und von 1935 bis 1939 beratender Architekt der Reichsautobahn und deren Tankstellen. Auf der zweiten deutschen Architekturausstellung im Münchner Haus der Deutschen Kunst war er 1938/1939 mit Entwürfen zu einer Tankstelle in Breslau und der Nibelungenbrücke in Linz vertreten. 1938 bis 1941 wurde nach seinem Entwurf die Linzer Nibelungenbrücke errichtet.

•  Von 1938 bis 1945 arbeitete Tamms in Albert Speers Behörde Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt, zugleich war er von 1942 bis 1945 Professor für Entwurf und Planung an der TH Berlin. Hitler persönlich ernannte Tamms zum Hochschulprofessor. Als Mitarbeiter der Organisation Todt realisierte Tamms für die sogenannten Führerstädte Berlin, Hamburg und Wien insgesamt acht Flakturm-Paare bestückt mit Flugabwehrkanonen (Flak), deren mittelalterliche Burganmutung Wehrhaftigkeit suggerieren sollte. Weiterhin war Tamms im Arbeitsstab für den Wiederaufbau bombenzerstörter Städte für die Städte Aachen und Lübeck zuständig. In der Endphase des Zweiten Weltkriegs nahm ihn Adolf Hitler im August 1944 in die Gottbegnadeten-Liste der wichtigsten Architekten auf was ihn von einem Kriegseinsatz, auch an der Heimatfront, befreite. Wiki “Tamms”

The Todt Corporation

•  Cathedrals of Artillery •  To shelter is to pray •  True monuments to God and to the eternity of

the German people. •  Tamm’s true ingenuity in designing Brutalism

came from his engineering need to work on bridges and autobahnen.    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5VVpI5uxqI

Battery Tower Jersey

The Devil’s Rock Guernsey

Cramond Island Anti-Submarine Boons

Observation Tower Fliegerhorst Belgium

What is ‘Poetic’ About Brutalism?

•  Grandeur •  Candour •  Arrogance •  Awe •  Unforgivingness •  Protectiveness •  Defiance

But Why Does it Flourish in Both East and West?

Bertelli 1933

Trellick Tower, London, 1966

The Hotel Viru Tallinn Estonia 1972

Moscow Olympics 1980

Dusan Dzamonja: Monument to the Revolution Podgaric Berek, Croatia

Kim Il Sung Mausoleum

Bertelli 1933

Peter Sloterdijk: In The Shadow of Mt Sinai, 2016

•  Total membership is at the heart of Sloterdijk’s thesis in this work and it emerges out of the particular way he interprets Exodus through what he calls the “Sinai schema.”

–  In the fictional primal scene at the foot of the mountain of God, the motivic connection between the breach of the covenant and the summary trial was displayed with archetypal power and made available for transference to any remote context. It supplies the prototype of a ‘connection between deeds and consequences’, to recall the technical term popular among Old Testament experts. With the help of the Sinai schema – the breach of covenant results in punishment by extermination, then the journey continues with the ‘rest’ – is becomes virtually possible to read the history of Israel both forwards and backwards, especially where, as during the Babylonian exile, it was experienced or interpreted as a history of misfortune. While the extermination at Mount Sinai followed the manifest breach of covenant at a brief interval and following a linear logic, later, initially inexplicable ordeals suffered by the people can be attributed only indirectly to what remained a latent breach of the covenant (p.34-35).

•  Thus any slight personal deviation from accepted group norms (the group’s literary covenant) can be seen as potent threats to the group and therefore a sites of deep personal shame.

•  This awareness of the potential threat posed by all members of the group generates what the author calls a “phobocracy.” Sloterdijk relies on Jan Assmann’s 2006 speech Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt where a literary and covenantal attitude of fear and shame overtakes a more relaxed ritual atmosphere in a society that may be seen as more polytheistic, more pagan. This demonstrates the real point of exceptionalism in Judaism and, subsequently, the monotheisms that came after it – each leaving a legacy where there remains “…an insurmountable difference between inside and outside” (p.46). For the remainder of the book, Sloterdijk seeks to demonstrate how this mentality pervades religious thinking in the West and backgrounds the rise of the modern secular state in which religion ceases to be the determining principal behind the “total membership” of the group and is reduced to a subsystem within a nationalist structure. The fact, however, that (monotheistic) religion once guided the parameters of “total membership” means that they remain a “…special problem of modernity” (p. 59).

Our Greatest Nightmare? Being “Sin Plano…” Being Defeated…

•  “An historical crisis occurs when the world change which is produced consists in this: the world, the system of convictions belonging to a previous generation, gives way to a vital state in which man remains without these convictions, and therefore without a world. Man returns to a state of not knowing what to do, for the reason that he returns to a state of not knowing what to think about the world. Therefore the change swells to a crisis and takes on the character of a catastrophe. The world change consists of the fact that the world in which man was living has collapsed, and, for the moment, of that alone. It is a change which begins by being negative and critical. One does not know what new thing to think - one only knows, or thinks he knows, that the traditional norms and ideas are false and inadmissible. One feels a profound disdain for everything, or almost everything, which was believed yesterday; but the truth is that there are no new positive beliefs with which to replace the traditional ones. Since that system of convictions, that world, was the map which permitted man to move within his environment with a certain security, and since he now lacks such a map, he again feels himself lost, at loose ends, without orientation. He moves from here to there without order or arrangement; he tries this side and then the other, but without complete convictions; he pretends to himself that he is convinced of this or that” (my translation). –  Ortga y Gasset: En Torno a Galileo, Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1956, 92-3.

Otto Rank: Der Dopplegänger [The Double] 1914

Still from The Student of Prague (d. Paul Wegener 1912)

•  "Over the coming months Brett will be playing the title role of Shakespeare's Henry V, in a UK-European tour. He's then playing Tiresias in a new version of the Greek myth that he has written for ¡BarcelonaSolo!, - an international festival of solo performance. Next year he'll be back at the AGNW performing a classical concert in the Resonate series. You can stay up-to-date at his website: brettbrownactor.com."