The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919 - 2009

By Jonathan Harris

An innovative history and critical account mapping the ways artists and their works have engaged with, and offered commentary on, modern spectacle in both capitalist and socialist modernism over the past ninety years.

• Focuses on artists whose work expresses the concept of revolutionary social transformation
• Provides a strong historical narrative that adds structure and clarity
• Features a cogent and innovative critique of contemporary art and institutions
• Covers 100 years of art from Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist ‘Monument to the Third International’, to Picasso’s late 1940s commitment to Communism, to the Unilever Series sponsored Large Artworks installed at London’s Tate Modern since 2000.
• Includes the only substantial account in print of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Montreal ‘Bed-in’
• Offers an accessible description and interpretation of Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ theory

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118316795

Book preview

Introduction

The World in a Work of Art

Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece # 70 (In Process) Global. November 1971:‘Throughout the remainder of the artist’s lifetime he will ­photographically document, to the extent of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner. Editions of this work will be periodically issued in a variety of topical modes: 100,000 people, 1,000,000 people, 10,000,000 people, people personally known by the artist, look-alikes, over-laps, etc.’

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2001 [1973]): 261.

‘This diversification of possible historical life reflected the gradual ­emergence, following the collapse of the great official enterprise of this world, namely the Crusades, of the period’s unseen contribution: a society carried along in its unconscious depths by irreversible time, the time directly experienced by the bourgeoisie in the production of ­commodities, the founding and expansion of the towns, the commercial discovery of the planet – in a word, the practical experimentation that obliterated any mythical organization of the cosmos once and for all.’

Guy Debord, Thesis 137, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books: New York, 1995 [1967, in French]): 100–1.

Global Order, Social Order, Visual Order

For this beginning, consider two artefacts, two artworks, illustrated here by two photographs (Figures 0.1 and 0.2). The first shows a large object placed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London in 2009–10, viewed, and entered, by many tens of thousands of people. The second shows a model from 1919, made a year or so after the Russian Revolution, for a planned enormous tower in Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg), which, given the then available technology, could not have been built. These two constructions, Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is – the tenth contribution to the Unilever series of large artworks installed in the Hall since 2000 – and Vladimir Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third International stand, I shall argue, at either end of an intelligible and poignant history of what I call ‘utopian globalism’ in modern art, culture and society. This is my term for an idea of worldwide social transformation to be brought about within a modernity recognized to be global in its nature and effects; it is an idea that was given visual form and material substance by artists committed to a vision of the world beyond the limits and values of tyrannical government, capitalist social order and acquisitive materialism.

Figure 0.1 Miroslaw Balka, How It Is (2009), Tate Modern Turbine Hall. © Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Notions of globalization and modernism are, by now, reasonably familiar, whilst the term ‘globalism’ is perhaps less so. This Introduction will clarify the meanings that have accrued to these terms and their significant ­interrelation within my argument. However, it may prove difficult to convince you that Tatlin’s model and Balka’s box on stilts represent punctual ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ in such a history. Tatlin’s model for a soaring structure ­symbolizing the communist ideal certainly was the first ambitious contribution to twentieth century revolutionary modernist internationalism – a tradition of visionary thinking and making that was avowedly utopian, gripped by an optimistic belief in the power of materialized imagination. In contrast, Balka’s squat metal container, entered via a shallow-angled ramp and, like Tatlin’s proposed tower, part ‘sculpture’, part inhabitable ‘architecture’, afforded the experience, when I visited it, of a blackening, sinister totality as one proceeded into its interior space – as well as an uncertain, if not wholly disconcerting, physical and social relation extended to the others also ambulant or motionless within the structure.

Figure 0.2 Photograph of Vladimir Tatlin, Model for a Monument to the Third International (1919). From Ivan Puni’s book Tatlin (Protiv kubizma), 1921. Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Tatlin’s model, foundation for a memorial to the ‘Third International’ world communist movement sparked into life by the successful ­Bolshevik-led uprising in Russia in October 1917, disappeared during the 1920s, and since then the only surviving visual traces of his imagined tower have been a number of spectral black-and-white photographs.¹ Given the mythic ethereality of Tatlin’s creation, meaningful comparisons with Balka’s actual, physical box of 2009 – big, perhaps, in relation to many contemporary artworks, but tiny compared to Tatlin’s giant structure which, it was proposed, would straddle the river Neva in Petrograd – perhaps seem far-fetched, even unfair. Nevertheless, I shall claim that How It Is represents a recent poignant addition, as well as a kind of historical conclusion, to the utopian globalist lineage traced within the chapters of this book. Balka’s structure does so in the sense that, along with other works in the Unilever series, it represents an attempt by the selected artists to demonstrate that contemporary art can still compellingly ‘figure’ – that is, give expressive visual and material form to – a politically and aesthetically radical critique of the world’s social order in the first decade of the twenty-first century. My pursuit of this argument will mainly serve, though, to conclude the book – ‘endings’ always being practical necessities in historical accounts, if often also involving speculative claims of their own. For example, I shall suggest as further examples of ‘late’ utopian globalism, in what is now its multinational corporate-patronal phase, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, a yellow glowing disc of light hung at one end of the Turbine Hall in 2003–4, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007–8 Shibboleth, an incision cut into the stone ground of the length of part of the Hall, creating an earthquake-like micro-chasm that has been left to scar the gallery’s floor (Figures 0.3 and 0.4). Both appear to allude to the potential human-made environmental and socio-political catastrophes now facing the earth, its peoples and all of life on the planet.²

Within this account of utopian globalist art of the last ninety years, spanning Tatlin’s tower to the Turbine Hall’s programmatically spectacular array of distracting visions and enigmatic objects, it will become clear that claims relating to modern and contemporary art’s socio-critical purpose have interlocked with its utopian-visionary function in a variety of ways across this era. The development of these modes and practices has, in addition, become seemingly inevitably more closely bound up with technologically dynamic mass media forms of representation and dissemination. For, in this lineage, photography, film, television, video, mixed media installation and now internet communication technologies have become – certainly along with persisting practices of drawing, painting and sculpture – ­constitutive of globalized contemporary art, as well as significant facets of utopian globalist aspiration for transformative social change. Such ­extending and adaptive processes were active within the early twentieth-century ‘modern’, as well as within our own ‘postmodern’ and contemporary, conjunctures. These are the times, spaces, means and forms that link Tatlin’s tower and Balka’s box.³

Figure 0.3Olafur Eliasson,The Weather Project (2003), Tate Modern Turbine Hall.© Gijsbert Hanekroot/Alamy.

Figure 0.4 Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007), Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Anton Hammerl/PA Archive/Press Association Images.

My account in Chapter 5, for example, of a televisual event, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Bed-in’, held in the pursuit of world peace, conducted in late May 1969 at a Montreal hotel, is concerned with such an instance of a galvanizing mutation in utopian globalist communicative process. It will become obvious through this – and the other case studies – that I am not seeking here to claim paradigmatic status for any particular utopian globalist work. Even less am I concerned to argue for any such work’s autonomy from capitalism as a system, from the specific social order in which it emerged, or from the broader forms of western spectacular life generated from the mid-twentieth century’s decades onwards. Tatlin’s unrealized tower does stand, however, in a kind of ideal anteriority to the utopian globalist monuments (and molehills) that actually were built in its historical wake. Their makers’ principles of radical social transformation came to ­differ fundamentally: earlier on in the twentieth century, these were close, or closer, to institutionalized communist beliefs, while others, later, and now in our own time, moved diversely, decisively and self-critically away from these.

I have coined the term ‘utopian globalism’ for a variety of reasons, one of which is clearly to separate my account from the related, but different, orthodox historiographies of politicized revolutionary modern art in the twentieth century. These include studies of, for instance, constructivism, dadaism and surrealism (sometimes termed the ‘historic avant-garde’), as well as of the institutionalized groupings and movements of artists, critics and administrators associated with self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist and communist parties and states, such as in Russia after 1917, Germany, the USA and Mexico in the interwar period, and the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule during the 1930–1950s, the period of doctrinal socialist realism. The history of these early to mid-twentieth century visual arts ‘political modernisms’, driven by increasingly divisive ideological motives and justifications, on both sides of the Cold War (and linked to a number of globalizing projects of their own), certainly intersects importantly with this book’s concerns in many ways.

My account, in Chapter 3, of Pablo Picasso’s time as a member of the French Communist Party after 1944, for instance, would make little sense without knowledge of the Party’s relations with Moscow and the history of socialist realism in art and literature. But ‘Picasso’ functions primarily in this study as a component within my own tracking of the utopian globalist lineage. My book is concerned, that is, with a series of interlinked studies focused mostly on individual artists (sometimes pairs of agents), which chart this distinctive history. My study certainly offers to contribute to the broader history and art history, but it also seeks to divert interest away from some deeply entrenched habits of reference, preference and deference operative within the mainstream historiographies.⁴

To take another example, one of utopian globalism’s mid-twentieth century practices – identified often reductively within art history’s standard taxonomy of styles as ‘conceptual art’ – is considered here in Chapter 6. My account focuses on work by Douglas Huebler which sought both to question and to decrease the visual character as well as the obtainability of its products, to the point where this term ‘product’ itself, synonymous in the art market with saleable commodity, became highly problematic. These products were often, like Tatlin’s tower, unrealized, and sometimes deliberately unrealizable ‘statements’ of utopian globalist intent, such as Huebler’s Variable Piece # 70 (In Process) Global, presented above as an epigraph to this Introduction. This kind of ‘work’, Huebler claimed, existed in its necessary and desirable plenitude simply as a brief, apparently immaterial, textual statement or injunction. Such a questioning of the art product was also, therefore, a questioning of the product of art history.

In a different, seemingly even antithetical, direction from Huebler, Christo and Jeanne-Claude later took utopian globalist artefact con­struction to a level sometimes close in magnitude to Tatlin’s planned scale for his tower, for instance with their Berlin Wrapped Reichstag project (1971–1995), the subject of Chapter 7 (Figure 0.5). I propose in my Conclusion that Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commissions from 2000 onwards constitute a further, ‘incorporated’, adaptive reduction of earlier utopian globalist ideals – ideals already thinned out in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s emotive set-piece spectacular draping projects which, in contrast to the Unilever projects, were always self-financed. My argument is that direct corporate patronage – in this case undertaken by Tate in partnership with Unilever – has highly selectively reshaped that surviving, though radically weakened, radical impulse, in the process threatening to diminish the works produced to the role of spectacularly mouthing corporate globalist liberal platitudes within the distractive spectacularities that the space of the Turbine Hall itself embodies.

Figure 0.5 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin (1971–1995). DPA/Press Association Images.

The term ‘spectacularity’ may be as unfamiliar to you as ‘globalism’, though the roots of both words have clear enough referents. The first, ‘­spectacle’, refers to visions or experiences that dazzle, seduce, entrance and perhaps overwhelm. The second, ‘globe’, refers to the planet earth seen as, or represented by, an actual sphere containing all the world’s lands, seas and inhabitants. In both cases, these straightforward meanings lead quite rapidly to complex historical, etymological and philosophical questions, as their suffixes ‘ity’ and ‘ism’ suggest. These endings raise the terms to the status of abstract nouns: states of being and belief entailing complex relations to other terms, concepts, experiences, arguments and histories. Some of these – ‘globalization’, ‘modernism’, ‘utopian’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘art’, and ‘culture’ – have been mentioned already. Together they constitute the central conceptual system within this study as a whole.

This introduction begins to explain their significance and historical development since the early twentieth century, as well as to map their relation to the utopian globalism in the visual arts outlined here and pursued in the chapters that follow. While the lineage I construct certainly bears on avant-garde historiography and deals with several highly significant and influential modernist artists, it nevertheless stands at some distance from predominant critical and art historical accounts. I am self-consciously assembling, ‘inventing’, ‘hypothesizing’ this lineage, history or tradition; I acknowledge its evident idiosyncrasies, divergent and sometimes obscure plot lines, as well as its inevitable and drastic exclusions.⁵ My account is not offered as ‘comprehensive’ or ‘complete’ – but no account ever actually is. All ‘lineages’, ‘traditions’ and ‘histories’ are concocted on the basis of selective preferences motivated by explicitly stated or tacitly held values, despite claims sometimes subsequently made for a particular history’s supposed inclusiveness or significance.⁶

As the subheading to this first section is intended to signal, this book is concerned with the relations between order, meaning, crisis and change in the world, in society and culture, and the visual arts, over the past ninety years. Though my focus will be mostly directed at artefacts isolated – by a variety of makers, mediators and institutions – within the category of ‘artwork’, the creation and intended purpose of all of them was deeply bound up with a profoundly broad sense of cultural forms, products and social life comprising the world’s modernity. ‘Modernity’ will stand here for this universe of industrially produced goods, services and systems that the capitalist social order had generated since the late nineteenth century, principally in the western societies of Europe, the USA and their colonial or imperial outposts around the world. It also refers to the narrower, yet still enormous, range of things constituting modernity’s specific ‘visual order’. This realm of objects and images, including paintings, sculptures, monuments, buildings, cities, films, fashion trends, television, the internet and much else, is one that itself has helped both to constitute and sometimes question modern existence understood experientially, as a ‘quality of life’ or ‘form of living’, and as a system of socio-political practices, conscious beliefs and ideological frameworks. Included within this visual order’s selective tradition would be Tatlin’s model for his never-built tower (a design for a future ideal world order), the surviving photographs of it, and the archive of documents and historical accounts that exist to mark this artist’s ideas and beliefs formed in the period before and during the early stages of the Russian Revolution, when that hitherto authoritarian society lurched from a variant of dominantly agrarian capitalism towards what the Bolsheviks proclaimed as their own ‘socialist’, and later ‘communist’, system.

This first utopian globalist episode I offer as formative but not, to reiterate, as exemplary, though the Russian Revolution represents an indispensable practical ‘beginning’ for my study, as well as for the historical lineage which devolves from Tatlin. Sometimes later utopian globalists clearly and self-consciously referred to Tatlin, to his tower and its moment around 1919. But despite the tower’s inevitable status here as an ‘origin’, it is equally clear that Tatlin thought himself to be building on the imaginative energies of many earlier utopians – painters, but also poets and ­philosophers – who had also dreamt of a totally changed society and human existence.⁷ While many of these antecedents were not socialists or communists in any modern sense inspired by the writings of Karl Marx or other theorists from the nineteenth century, they shared a burning commitment to an ideal of human collaboration and harmonious collectivity, to a complete ‘revolution’, a turning round, of the social and individual human order.

Modern art’s own revolution in the twentieth century added a restless practice of experimentalism in visual and material form to the dual visionary and socio-critical strands of utopian globalism present in philosophy, political thought and activism. This experimentalism is symbolized by Tatlin’s proposed tower which offered to transcend – but also therefore to undermine – established, limiting categories that divided ‘sculpture’ from ‘architecture’, divided artefacts between ‘contemplative’ (ideal) and ‘functional’ (practical) uses, and finally, divided the social order between a ruling elite above and the mass below. The tower’s simultaneous transcending and undermining of categories, functions and divisions constitutes in itself, and points to, a broader practice of metaphoric globalism. I return to this idea below, within a further discussion of my book’s core concepts. For, beyond the historical and empirical instances vividly exemplified by Tatlin’s model, I shall propose that twentieth-century utopian globalism, understood as a set of ideals, material forms and plans for action in and on the whole world, creatively undermined many rigidly held or reactionary distinctions between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphoric’ truths and realities, offering, beyond these, as my book’s first epigraph from Margaret Cavendish several centuries ago suggested, a fully renewed world and world order better for all humanity.

‘Globalization’ and ‘Globalism’ in Theory and Practice

Since the near-catastrophic crises in the banking systems in the USA, Europe and elsewhere in 2008 leading to worldwide recession and poorer conditions of life for most people, it has become virtually impossible for anyone to remain unaware of the global interconnectedness of financial, economic, communications and political systems, as well as of their fragility. Of course, these structural interdependencies were not created only very recently and previous world economic crises – always related to regional political and social emergencies of one kind or another – have demonstrated that one nation, and even one continent’s nations, could not avoid the consequences of actions and developments beyond their borders.⁸ Conversely, regional alliances, firstly of city-states and then of nations, have, for many centuries, enacted strategies for affecting the status of those peoples, places and zones seen by them as objects for influence, manipulation, control and exploitation. For this reason, the term ‘globalization’ – product only of the mid-twentieth century – is partly synonymous with the older term, and much older practice, of imperialism: the planned, systematic domination of one group or people and their resources by another.⁹

Yet if imperialist projects of varying degrees and durations have been a fact of world development for thousands of years, occurring across the great Eurasian landmass stretching from Ireland to China and the northern Pacific islands, in Africa and the Americas, they have only been for a comparatively very short period the prerogative, or fate, of recognizably modern and western nation-states. These two terms, ‘modern’ and ‘western’, often used in conjunction, indicate the rise, by the sixteenth century, of the southern European powers Portugal and Spain, the first to create empires based in another continent thousands of sea miles away – the ‘Americas’, named after one of their explorers.¹⁰ Northern European nations followed and competed for territories in later centuries, wresting colonies from these countries, and extending radically, as the British Empire had done by the late nineteenth century, into the Indian subcontinent, the ‘near’ and ‘middle’ Easts, North America, Australia and New Zealand, and several regions of Africa. Such names for these territories and regions indicate manifestly the fact of colonization – the terms ‘near’, ‘middle’ and ‘far’ ‘East’ particularly vividly illustrating the colonizers’ sense of the relative proximity of these lands and peoples to the metropolitan home, or ‘centres’, of the European empires. Notice, however, that this geographical idea of ‘­centrality’, of the regions of the world receding from the imperial hub (near or further away from it), operates also in complex relation to the terms ‘west’ and ‘western’. These, too, have accumulated a set of temporal-historical and cultural, as well as geographical, connotations integral to the unfolding of my book’s narrative.

‘Globalization’, given this recent history, is also partly synonymous with a process of ‘internationalization’ traceable back into the nineteenth century, but more usually associated with the formation of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, at the end of the First World War in 1918 and the United Nations Organization in New York, at the end of the Second World War in 1945. ‘Internationalism’, as the ‘ism’ here implies, names the beginnings of an ideal, a principled framework of ideas and a social movement formed in order to bring together sovereign nations peacefully, within agreed legal and moral structures. As such, the term exhibits some important features in common with both globalism and modernism – though in other ways internationalism remains very different, perhaps even antithetical, to the core dynamics of recent globalization processes in which nations have lost significant control over their socio-economic destinies.¹¹

In the English language, the suffix ‘-ization’ has come to emphasize an apparently objective process, development or change happening ‘out there in the world’ – modernization, internationalization, socialization. This usage tends to downplay both the experiential character of such processes as well as the role that subjective beliefs, values and ideologies play within the human organization and response, both individually and socially, to these processes. My focus is on utopian globalism as precisely this: a ninety-year tradition of idealistic and socio-critical beliefs, values and ideologies materialized in visual and physical forms, a culture of art thinking, envisioning and making bound up with the broader culture and society of modern capitalism in the West as well as active, prior to that, within the early years of Bolshevik rule in revolutionary Russia. Nevertheless, it would be dangerously wrong completely to divide global ‘-ism’ from global ‘­-ization’. These two human, social developments have grown up, and perhaps even grown apart, within a single historical process.

All examples of ‘hard’ globalization events and processes have been informed and shaped, that is, by particular beliefs and related objectives – from the strategies of investment banks moving into foreign markets and TV corporations extending their satellite reach, to those of eco-feminists and libertarian-socialists attempting to connect up campaigns around the world against unequal pay, violence against women and polluting corporations. What might be called the ‘temporal relations’ between globalism and globalization are complex but in actual social practice they have always been interwoven. We experience and recognize the realities of ­globalization partly through our developing understanding of it, a process which inevitably includes assimilating elements of globalist beliefs and ideologies. The latter are derived from a variety of sources: the mass media, art, political and social activism, scholarship, daily conversations and meetings, culinary habits, holidays and other phenomena of hugely diverse kinds. These subjective – though collectively, as well as individually, held – perceptions, ideas and rationalizations are only misleadingly separated out from the hard ‘facts’ and ‘figures’ of statistics and social-scientific studies concerned with, for example, emerging world markets and labour migration, the regional and global interactions of national institutions, government agencies and corporations, and worldwide legal agreements regarding trade, communication, travel and tourism.¹²

Two factors in particular differentiate recent globalization from earlier nation-state systems and related internationalization processes, though not from the history of imperialist wars and incursions instigated after 1945, including those conducted by US, European and Soviet governments in, for example, Korea, Hungary, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq and Libya. Firstly, the emergence of truly global, as distinct from merely regional, ambitions within the political, military and corporate forces involved. Strategists from these increasingly interlocked ‘power-elite’ groups in western Europe and the USA have operated, since the early 1950s, within supranational alliances (dominated by the latter, now sole though weakened, superpower) with systematic global aspirations and capacity for action.¹³ Though the onset of the Cold War between the western capitalist democracies and the Soviet Union and its allied ‘eastern bloc’ states might in some ways reasonably be regarded as having operated a brake on globalization, from another perspective developed in my study it actually created two power blocs which, though opposed, together, in an effectively single system of rule, were even more motivated to attempt to carve up the world and manipulate all its peoples and resources.¹⁴

Secondly, although globalization had worked at various times in various regions since 1945 principally through strategic military-political actions – for instance, in the division of Germany and its capital Berlin by the Allies, including the Soviet Union, at the end of the Second World World – a deeper, and now apparently irreversible, interlock between nations, regions and continents occurred within corporate financial-­economic and cultural-communications processes. This was partly based on the support that the governments of individual nation-states gave to large corporate entities including banks, industries such as car producers, armaments and high technology manufacturers which were able to operate more or less with impunity around the world. Though this globalizing process has led to a complex web of multinational corporate ownerships extending across many regions whose local governments have been anxious to attract these businesses because they increase local employment (think of Nissan or Volkswagen plants attracted by US, British and Spanish governments), it is clear that these, and many other states, have also maintained very close ties with particular ‘home’ corporations, especially banks, that have become effectively bound into new nation-state ruling orders – these constitute the ‘nexus’ of state and capital.¹⁵ Globalization has proceeded, since the 1980s, through the corporate and political domination of the world order by a relatively very small number of mostly western nation-states led by the USA. It remains to be seen how China’s and India’s gradual rise to economic superpower status since the 1990s, or Russia’s impact since the demise of the Soviet Union, will alter this situation in the coming decades.¹⁶

The stable-sounding ‘world order’ created out of these processes of global financial-economic, military, political and cultural-communications interlock, however, can quickly weaken and appear even to dissolve – as the 2008 banking crises and subsequent recession demonstrated. Globalization in practice remains a dangerous journey that all the peoples and regions of the world have embarked upon, willingly or not, because no other options seem to have been left available. Its impact on the planet’s ecological systems since the mid-twentieth century is perhaps the clearest sign of the destructive forces unleashed when industrialization, urbanization, mass consumption and modern transport technologies extend across four of the world’s five continents.

However, against globalization’s predictable volatilities and dangers, nation-states have continued to act independently and within the pre-­existing forums mentioned earlier – through, that is, the internationalist organizations set up after the two world wars, the Cold War power bloc alliances led by the USA and the USSR up until the end of the latter’s existence in 1991 and via regional multi-government groupings, such as the European Union and the Organization of American States.¹⁷ Globalization has not simply or entirely displaced previously existing and often influential international, regional and local forms of interaction and collaboration, between peoples, their territories and resources. But while the governments and military forces of nation-states, especially the Western European countries, the USA and the Soviet bloc, acted most powerfully within these organizations and alliances since 1945 – for almost fifty years of that epoch in the Cold War stand-off between western democratic capitalism and Soviet communism – strong arguments for alternative forms of world society were constantly made by non-aligned countries, as well as by non-government groups and individuals, including some of the artists discussed here.

A further issue of basic definition and analysis requires mention. One habitual usage of the term ‘globalization’ itself threatens to reduce the world and also its peoples to a set of known exploited and exploitable resources. The etymology of the word ‘globe’ includes both these senses: it refers to ‘a round body or mass; a ball, sphere’ (from Latin) and ‘a body of men’ (from Middle English). The globe, therefore, is a quantifiable entity that can be mapped and represented in various ways by scientists and planners; it can be utilized or ‘practised’ upon by engineers and workers. Yet contrary to this ‘productivist’ sense, it is also the ‘secreted’ or lived space where life-forms and ecosystems coexist – it is an organism and the place and limit of the human world.¹⁸

The term ‘globalism’ contains within it, as I shall show, a particularly vivid sense of attention to this ‘form of life’, meaning the life of the planet and the lives of the peoples living ‘on’ and ‘in’ it. The cognate term ‘earth’ relates to this complex latter dual sense, involving both distance and embeddedness: the earth is both the ‘ground’ and ‘soil’ upon which humans and other species walk and into which they dig and burrow. The 1960s and 1970s utopian globalist artworks discussed in Chapters 6 and 7 responded in many different ways to this sense of the earth’s physical exploitability and vulnerability to destructive change. Dennis Oppenheim’s Cancelled Crop (1969), for instance, consists of a photograph of a field in Holland that he seeded but whose crop was never processed or sold into the food chain economy. The grain that was harvested in the form of an ‘X’ signalled a form of real and symbolic cancellation.

But ‘earth’ is also a synonym for the totality and autonomy of the globe and names the home for its ‘earthlings.’ Utopian globalist thinkers and artists such as Tatlin in Russia in 1919 and Joseph Beuys in Germany in the 1960s, subject of Chapter 4, cannot but think of the place of this earth alongside others. A sense of earth – the combined physical sphere and all its life-forms – as a distinct whole and totality inevitably draws in questions of its place in space. If the universe is the totality of everything existing and which has ever existed (but which still forms a single temporal-physical system), then the earth is a ‘planet’, from the ancient Greek term for ‘wanderer’, on its path around a star in a moving galaxy: an ambulant grain of sand in the cosmos of time and space. Utopian globalist ideals, dreams and artefacts never stray far from recognizing this wider location: the subliminal universe beyond but including the earth itself; its idealisms therefore more or less inevitably contain spiritual or religious overtones. This claim is perhaps tested most forcibly here in my account of Pablo Picasso’s time and work as an artist of the French Communist Party after 1944, when his activism in support of ‘world peace’ was closely tied to the interests of Cominform (the ‘communist information’ bureau) – the Soviet Union’s puppet organization of world communist parties set up after the Second World War in order to promote the USSR’s proprietorial claims on and plans for international socialism.

Though the term ‘world’ acts as synonym for earth, globe and planet, it also contains a seam of related but distinct connotations that recur in the chapters that follow. Its Germanic formation relates to notions of ‘age’ and ‘life of man’. ‘World’, therefore, refers to a specific place and time, but also to a specific state or condition, not just a location. The term refers to both an overall totality and to a specific, partial instance or singularity. There is, for example, the ‘art world’ and an unlimited number of other ‘worlds’ besides, as well as the single world we all live in. Its human and humane sense is always stressed within utopian globalist discourse, even – perhaps especially – when its referent is globalization: what happens to actual people in the reforming of (the world of) their social relations, collectivities and individual natures.¹⁹ In the phrase ‘the world in a work of art’, for example, all of these senses are condensed. The artwork itself is seen as a singular material entity; its meanings and significance exist for those associated with it in their worlds (the world of the artist and the art world beyond), and it exists in the wider world of social relations, technologies, institutions and politics constituting the locale, nation, region and globalized earth within which the artwork has been produced and is meaningful. So now, with globalization and globalism sketched in outline, it is time to locate these interconnected worlds in a broader historical and theoretical framework.

Capitalism and Communism as (Failed) Utopian Totalities

At around the mid-point in the history I trace in the following chapters, the emergent ‘counterculture’ in the western capitalist societies began to transform the movement of an already existing so-called New Left.²⁰ Antagonistic to both Cold War superpowers, their division of the world into two opposed spheres of influence, and the wars or occupations undertaken by them to maintain this system, the New Left drew on a wide range of embryonic ideas and movements, including ‘libertarian’ socialist perspectives, Third World non-aligned and anti-colonial struggles, civil rights, feminist, ­homosexual and ecological activisms. Lennon and Ono’s combined ­statement/prediction ‘War is over if you want it!’, along with the provocative activities constituting their 1969 ‘Bed-in’, animated the utopian globalist spirit which attended upon, but also contrasted considerably with, the New Left’s simultaneous relatively conventional political campaigning at the time.²¹ What I shall call a ‘radical voluntarism’ characterized pronouncements such as this made by Lennon and Ono – statements that were often bound up with activist demonstrations, sit-ins, occupations, happenings and performances held during the mid and later 1960s.

Such verbal gestures were part of this strand of an emergent revolutionary idealism that pitted subjective imagination against the desperate realities and oppressions of the world, and the heroic capacities of individuals and groups of ordinary people against state power and its barrage of military, security agency and corporate forces ranged on both sides of the Cold War’s ‘iron curtain’. It was in this decade that Beuys developed his own finely honed radical voluntarism of gesture in both verbal statements and ‘actions’, many specifically concerned with the political and ideological division of Berlin, Germany and Europe after the Second World War. Huebler and Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibited variants of radical voluntarism, too, in the works and related events they undertook during the 1970s–1990s.

The term ‘performance’ generated a wide range of meanings in this era, many of which will be explored in the following chapters. While Ono has been credited as a significant early exponent of ‘performance art’, involved, as Beuys was, for instance, in the Fluxus groups active in Europe and the USA during the 1960s, art-historical specializations of sense can sometimes be misleading.²² About thirty years earlier, Picasso, realizing the worldwide significance that his planned painting of the bombing of the town of Guernica in Spain by General Franco’s planes might have in the propaganda battle against the fascists, had organized the photographing of the canvas in several stages of its development towards completion (Figure 3.1). These photographs were disseminated widely in a special edition of the French journal Cahiers d’Art in 1937.²³ Decades before Lennon and Ono’s ‘Bed-in’, Beatle George Harrison’s 1971 ‘Concert for Bangladesh’ in New York, and the later televised rock world campaigns for food, peace and medical provision organized by Bob Geldof, Bono and others, Picasso had understood the role that the arts, combined with international mass media, could play in promulgating a cause. If the serial photographing of Guernica and later paintings made after he had joined the French Communist Party turned their production and public dissemination into kinds of mediated ‘performance’ on a world stage, the still apparently clear distinction, at the time, between original artwork and secondary means for its mass reproduction in and as performance began to break down fundamentally by the mid-1960s.

Figure 0.6Joseph Beuys, ‘Action’ at Aachen (1964). © Gallery KickenBerlin/Estate. Heinrich Riebesehl/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. DACS London 2012.

For instance, Beuys’s 1964 ‘action’ in Aachen, Germany, wherein he and others carried out a series of theatrical gestures on the twentieth anniversary of the attempt by German military officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was screened on national television (Figure 0.6). During this performance, the stage was invaded by people – from political left and right – who were incensed, as orchestrated, by Beuys’s ambiguous though clearly symbolically resonant activities and poses. Pictures of the violent furore that resulted were beamed around the world, turning the action into a ‘media event’ while at the same time somewhat obscuring its purpose and possible significance.²⁴ Five years later, Lennon and Ono pre-arranged their ‘Bed-in’ in collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation which recorded and aired the event, during which a Montreal commercial radio station persuaded Lennon to perform as an impromptu disc jockey (Figure 0.7).

Figure 0.7 John Lennon and Yoko Ono at ‘Bed in’, Montreal, Canada, May (1969). Photo by Gerry Deiter © Joan Athey www.peaceworksnow.com.

As this latter detail suggests, two of the chief representatives of the ­counterculture had entered into a symbiotic relationship with the mass media of the day. Lennon and Ono continued to believe sincerely, however, that it was necessarily through this mass exposure and performance on global TV and in pop music that their utopian globalist message could be conveyed to maximum effect. Beuys had arrived at a similar decision, although he and Ono would also continue to operate in the minority art world of exhibition ‘private views’ and ‘limited editions’ – again partly in order to fund their socio-political activisms. Though also opposed to the USSR’s alliance of dictatorial states, Beuys and Lennon and Ono chiefly ­agitated against western capitalist states. At the same time, they worked within and exploited their resources, wealth and relative but real democratic freedoms of movement and action. It had been within these latter societies, according to Guy Debord writing in 1967, that the techniques of ‘spectacle’ and ‘spectacular life’ had been most extensively and effectively organized since the 1920s. (He later claimed that by the 1980s, however, an effectively singular or ‘integrated’ spectacle had extended across the whole world, overriding and ­subsuming the Cold War political demarcations of ‘capitalist’ and ‘communist’ territories.)²⁵

Russian revolutionary art and artists had themselves come to exist in close if complex relation with the emergence of spectacle. Tatlin’s ideal, unrealized tower from 1919 teeters, symbolically and historically, on the edge of this development. Its presence slips and slides somewhere amongst an apparently concluded czarist-Russian capitalist social order, the institution of ‘War Communism’ by the Bolsheviks in the chaotic fight against counter-revolutionary foreign invasion, the subsequent adoption of a ‘New Economic Policy’ which saw small-scale private trade briefly reintroduced, and the onset, by the mid-1920s, of the dictatorial state’s successive centrally ‘planned economy’ regime. This later conjuncture coincides roughly with, on the one hand, the beginnings of western states’ official recognition of the USSR (by the USA in 1933, for example) and, on the other, emergence of the global geopolitical division which persisted, in varying forms and at varying levels of antagonism and danger before and after the Second World War, up until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.²⁶

The relations between Soviet internationalism, responsibility of the USSR’s earlier ‘Comintern’ (‘Communist International’) organization – the historical roots of which return us to the moment of Tatlin’s tower – and the western capitalist democracies’ anti-fascist alliance against the German Nazi state, were the subject of the American critic Harold Rosenberg’s lament in 1940 on the imminence of world war and the fate of modern art and culture within it. It was only with the Franco-Soviet Pact of 1939, he noted with bitter irony,