The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: Jerry Zaslove, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada
Title: An Exiled and Mutant Anarchist of Many Colors* – What is ‘Left’ of Herbert Read’s Modernism Within the Ruins of the Avant- Garde?

The author can never turn over his whole self and his speech work to the complete and final will of addressees who are on hand or nearby (after all, even the closest descendants can be mistaken), and always presupposes (with a greater or lesser degree of awareness) some higher instancing of responsive understanding that can distance itself in various directions. Each dialogue takes place as if against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue (partners) (Cf. The understanding of the Fascist torture chamber of hell in Thomas Mann as absolute lack of being heard, as the absolute absence of a third party.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and other Essays


Given the avant-gardiste intention to do away with art as a sphere that is separate from the praxis of life, it is logical to eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient.

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde

Herbert Read may very well have been the most prolific of the essayists of his generation. He was certainly one of the most knowledgeable English essayist in the clarity, range and understanding of movements, traditions, and major and minor figures of English and European art and writing. He crossed so many boundaries of art, literature and culture that his thinking – if not for certain prejudices against him – could have been called modernist-Dada – because he was opposed to nationalisms and authoritarian culture bearers and their philistinism. His openness to all forms of inventiveness in art making and his attachment to anarchism was puzzling to almost everyone. . After he died in 1968, his work fell into neglect – his legacy as an envoy of what could be called “exiled modernism” disappeared. But the avant-garde died too. Or did it? What is left of it?

In 1993, the year of Herbert Read’s centenary, the Leeds City Art Gallery installed a collection of paintings that represented his legacy: “Herbert Read’s Vision of World Art”. A catalogue entitled A British Vision of World Art edited by Benedict Read and David Thistlewood accompanied the exhibit. The catalogue contained substantial, original essays on Read and a chronology of his work. Several years later (1998) David Goodway edited a collection of seventeen essays, Herbert Read Reassessed - a collection that ought to have enabled Read to regain his rightful place in the history, practice and theory of international modernism in art and literature. Nothing of the kind occurred – the collection was barely reviewed and the exhibit received only mild recognition. In my own contribution to David Goodway’s book I asked why what is “left” of Herbert Read today may not surpass his unique combination of intellectual and aesthetic voices. His search was dual: on the one hand for an anarcho-modernism, in which art-making maintained a foundation for the aesthetic education of the individual who was not reducible to the society itself; and on the other to find how to express the ways in which any radical value in art would contribute, that is illuminate, the horizons of agency and experience. Herbert Read made art into a myth, and then that myth into artistic labor against culture and authoritarian institutions, in particular the state as the arbiter of violence that sanctioned war, violence, exile, refuge and invisibility.

My contribution to the conference will be to briefly review the contributions of David Goodway’s book in order to show how a range of sympathetic “Readians” understood Read’s radicality, which I see grounded in his critique of “culture” – the one continuous feature of his work that joins his many-sided anarcho-modernism. Since the thirties Read always recognized and condemned the mobility of capital and the machine world, which lead to the industrialization of our inner landscape (our inscape), In addition he saw and criticized how the combination of machine and mobility of capital created our desire and taste for monuments, the new, and more and more art: so why has his work failed to be as famous as, say, Walter Benjamin’s, Terry Eagleton’s, Peter Bürger’s or Pierre Bourdieu’s? And if we agree that he meticulously charted how the dismantling of the social institutions and consensual structures failed to protect the face-to-face reciprocity and individual aesthetic perception in which individual creativity and critical feelings could be grounded in his version of “a natural anarchism” (John Doheny), why has his work failed to become canonical or paradigmatic in our epoch of academic socio-critical left-wing criticism and post-avant garde, post-dada deconstruction? Approaches to his modernism should try answering these questions.

Answers for me involve understanding (1) that we have failed to recognize the depth of his own feelings of exile and his identification with European exiles in his vision of the present. This attitude of ‘exile’ might explain his feelings of loss, solitude and isolation as a modernist after the war; this sense of failure may explain why British pop and language artists of the ‘fifties jumped on him as a paragon of the establishment. And (2), the triumph of Marxism or post-Marxism in academic circles, perhaps saliently illustrated in Walter Benjamin’s heterodox anarcho-Marxism, has not come to terms with the “ruins of the avant-garde”.

There are other reasons too related the these: facing the tensions between the failure of the hopes for dada and watching how montage has become a common art style; the triumph of cultural studies as such; restlessness about any cosmopolitan culturism; how Read’s cosmopolitanism puts him outside certain controversies about race and identity; and Read’s maintaining a psychoanalytic view of the subversive nature of beauty is not amenable to many psychoanalytic approaches to art, literature and film. .

*Herbert Read, A Coat of Many Colours, 1945.

This page hosted by

---

Visit Geocities'