The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: Allan Antliff, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Title: Herbert Read and the Abstract Imperative in Anarchist Art

During the 1930s, Herbert Read drew on the writings of Peter Kropotkin to argue abstract art was revolutionary because it tapped into universal aesthetic principles attuned to nature and, in an anarchist-communist society, could play a role in the transformation of everyday life. At the crux of his argument were two related assumptions. First, abstract art was founded on the physical qualities of nature and the psychological qualities of human perception. Secondly, abstract art was a mode of free expression that would continuously evolve by virtue of its organic relation to the psychology of the artist and nature itself. As such it realized in microcosm Kropotkin’s organic model of the future anarchist-communist society, which would evolve harmoniously in accord with the needs of the people who created it.

Richard Mock is a well-known sculptor, editorial cartoonist and print-maker whose work has appeared in a wide range of North American newspapers and journals, including The New York Times, The Progressive Magazine, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, and the Alternative Press Review. Mock is also an abstract painter steeped in anarchist-communist theory and the discourse of abstract expressionism. I will examine Mock’s paintings in tandem with Read’s political interpretation of abstraction and frame both in relation to contemporary anarchist positions on the revolutionary nature of abstract art. In the course of this analysis I will also discuss the writings of the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman to demonstrate there is an underlying continuum linking Newman’s paintings and Mock’s current work: the anarchist-communist aesthetics of Herbert Read.

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