Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices
Subverting the Avante-Garde: Critical Theory’s Real Strategy
Critical social theory as identified with European Marxism has many limits: it has not integrated the significant contributions of Third World-centered revolutionary theory from Du Bois to Fanon to Mao; it has not adequately addressed gender and, in particular, women’s oppression; it has bypassed the growing ecological debate through which the entire paradigm of built environment conquering nature has been critiqued and rejected; and even where it has broached state power it has not solved the problems of redistributing built environment resources. Nonetheless, the great theoretical debates about totality and heterogeneity, realistic representation and abstract experimentation, and counterhegemony and the unending capacity of capitalist and state socialist culture to suppress and simultaneously co-opt critical cultural practices are of great value to social theorists and culture practitioners, from Bombay to East Los Angeles. The association of this tradition of social theory and socialist practice with a Western, white, male set of thinkers need not lead to a rejection of lessons to be learned from the significant debates that have impassioned the architects of buildings and of revolutions throughout the world.
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The intended subversion of the avant-garde in order to inform a new understanding of critical realism for contemporary social movements corresponds to that of its antecedents, so well described by art historian Paul Wood in his account of the interwar period: one “concept performed an important intentional function in cutting across the divide of social realist and avant-garde views.... This is the concept of proletarian culture.” Within AgitProps, individual visual artists, theater artists, writers, and architects recall the struggles of Lukacs and Eisenstein, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, African American writer Richard Wright, and South African journalist Ruth First, as well as contemporary artists such as Black American poet Amiri Baraka, Puerto Rican painter Elizam Escobar, and White middle-class sculptor John Ahearn, to commit to political organizational affiliations—despite the wrenching of the artistic temperament required and the tendency (or necessity) of left organizations engaged in direct political confrontation to advance master narratives—to understand and accept the revolutionary necessity of collective organization as the only vehicle capable of focusing individual resistance. This brings into current reexamination many of the challenges to Party democracy that plagued the historical avant-garde and that are essential to pursue in the current period of crisis in the international Left. In the words of AgitProps painter Bianca Kovar, “It is a constant challenge to keep my head and heart on the same track as my words.” Thus, the theoretical relationship between dissent and consensus, between interrogation and actualization of critical cultural work are central to the collective experiments. It is this challenge of fusion, and more, institutional affiliation that shapes my commitment to subverting the avant-garde.