7/23/2019 Film Studies in Intecontinetal Space

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Discussions of the relatively recent notion of activist-art have two common

art-historical frames. The rst is formal: the post-modern move towardscollective or participatory art practices.1The second is critical and historical:that of the revolutionary ambitions of the historical avant-garde and theirfailure or success. This frame made central by !eter "u#rger in 1$%& hasproduced a wealth of criticism.' !erhaps due to this weight of criticismthese two frames are often considered in isolation from one another.(eanwhile the narrative of the failure of the radical avant-garde) pro*ect hasbecome a common one. +owever this tragic historical narrative is far lessclear cut than it is often presumed to be. ,gainst these melancholy readingsof history it is possible to trace another *oyful tra*ectory: a history not ofthe failure of the radical avant-garde but of its success. "ut rather thandefending the success of later neo-avant-garde art this article will

attempt to oer a historical rethining of the frame of radical avant-gardismin the art and writing of Dada and /urrealism by drawing on the ideas ofautonomist (ar0ist theorists such as ,ntonio egri (ario Tronti andothers.&This is a tradition that while still (ar0ist is opposed to thephilosophical 2estern (ar0ist tradition3 to which "u#rger belongs in itsemphasis on the primacy of revolutionary agency over ideological criti4ue.

This reappraisal of the radical avant-garde begins by e0amining the theme ofthe refusal of wor in /urrealism and Dadaism.5 "ut to do so rstnecessitates a critical return to accounts of the avant-gardes use or negationof the autonomy of art alongside an e0amination of their engagement withcultural practices beyond this autonomy.6n /trie against /ociety: ,esthetic and !olitical ,utonomy

7n the bourgeois era as cultural production was enclosed by the maret and artwas increasingly separated from the social institutions which had previouslysupported and conditioned it a theoretical tendency emerged whichconceived of art as self-governing and autonomous from other socialinstitutions: what is usually called the autonomy of art. The ideologicalcharacter of this autonomy which is bound up with bourgeois ideas of a freeindependently rational sub*ect has been accounted for by a number of(ar0ist critics.% +owever in writing on art and aesthetics from the8omantic period onwards this idea also began to appear to celebrate asub*ective freedom to as well as a freedom-from often variously alignedwith radical positions opposed to capitalism. 6ne can sense this tension for

e0ample in (allarme9s ambiguous assertion of arts autonomy via ametaphor of social engagement when he claims that in our time the poet