How to respond to the current situation in Austria!
For Fluxlist Artists
Collaborationists:
Socio-Poetics since the 1950s
The specter of artists and intellectuals as Nazi or Stalinist
collaborationists has made collaborations-as-experimental art both more
difficult and more interesting, especially during the 1950s and 60s. We
see a similar struggle with a tainted language in the work of Heinrich
B�ll, who "trained in the Catholic Rhine tradition" was disheartened to
acknowledge that the Nazis had transformed his language into "a stinking
quagmire." B�ll, and his generation of writers, "had their work cut out
for them. In order to realize their dreams as artists, they would have to
do nothing less than reinvent the German language." We see a similar
reinvention of a tainted language in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, who
"pointed the way to another approach for a writer to deal with his
language. While Boll worked with a German language contaminated by the Nazi
gang, Vonnegut wrote in the sandy terrain of the mass media in which the
English language had been transformed. During the sixties, he was the
author most read by young people; they realized that he had taken their
tame English and turned it inside out, that Puritan English, smelling of
the sixteenth century, full of pious interjections. He set about equipping
it with the language of the millions of voiceless people. And he did it
with an ingenious alchemy, becoming at the same time a highly intelligent
and concise writer." In the arts, collaboration itself became a way to
transform the tainted languages of mass bureaucratic organizations. This
was no easy task, and often presented enormous risks for artists involved
in reinventing collaborative organization that would neither serve the
nationalist state nor the corporate soviets. My term "sociopoetic"
describes artistic practices that seek to use social situations or social
networks as a canvas. It does not define my methodology, then, but rather
the subjects of my study.
The visual poets and artists involved in many of the
collaborations-as-artworks during the 1950s and 60s used many of the
techniques of modernist poetics. Instead of the moral authority of the
tainted High Modernism, favored by the authoritarian state powers, these
artists work was defined by a tone of smirking seriousness. Their dry wit
made fun of authoritative terms, official-sounding institutional names, and
the trappings of academic research. The Neoists, for example, invented a
name that both spoofed and bettered any effort at riding the wave of the
next new thing or neo-old thing. In reaction to this threat, authoritarian
governments did target artists interested in collaboration-as-art. The
examples of the oppression of these experimental artists and poets are
unfortunately and surprisingly numerous. As a particularly apt example,
the Uruguayan dictatorship jailed Clemente Padin, the visual poet and
mail-artist, for "hurting the morale and reputation of the army." This was
not a trivial offense, and the court sentenced him to four years in jail;
he served two years and three months of this absurdly harsh sentence. His
work in assemblings and among artists' networks often spoke against the
brutality of the dictatorship in his country from 1973 till 1985. The
government's fantasy, that Padin posed a threat to the national security
and moral of the army, reached a high point after Padin staged a "Counter
Biennial" in front of the Latin-American Section of the 10th Biennial in
Paris in 1977. Soon after he staged this event, the police arrested him.
Under intense pressure from an international group of mail-artists
including Dick Higgins and Klaus Groh, the dictatorship released Padin
early. There are other examples just from Latin American governments
reacting to mail-artists as if they posed some serious threat. The
Brazilian military closed the "II International Exhibition of Mail Art"
organized by Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago in Recife in 1976.
Oppressive governments in Latin America imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and
put under house arrest many other mail-artists and editors of assemblings.
Of course, governments' paranoid fantasies about, and corollary oppression
of, these poets and artists are not limited to Latin America.
The Gauck Behoide Archive in Berlin now contains the Stasi
documents from the former East Germany. Stasi was the internal secret
police similar in the scope of their surveillance of their own citizens to
the Soviet Union's KGB. The Stasi was particularly worried about mail-art
subversion, this archive now also contains one of the largest collections
of mail-art in the world. Klaus Groh notes that in his own 250 page file
(not even one of the largest files on mail-artists), the archive has
blacked-out names of other mail-artists; these missing names protect the
former Stasi agents. Unfortunately, many East German mail-artists
co-operated with, and sometimes worked for, the intelligence agency. For
artists in the West, the government's concern about something apparently so
marginal seems misplaced. The Stasi fantasy about the threat from
underground art and poetry networks became the justification for spying,
oppression, and censorship.
The authority's fantasies are often the raw materials for the mail
artists' sociopoetic performances - and that is the crucial aspect of the
collaborative work during the 1950s and 60s. For example, Dick Higgins
recounts how he participated in an international intervention into an East
German bureaucrat's authority. Robert Rehfeldt, a prominent East German
artist, had organized a mail-art conference in Poland in 1989. He needed
to obtain permission for this meeting, but a bureaucrat fearing a big
network of artists and poets decided to deny permission for the event.
Rehfeldt gave Higgins a copy of the official letter including the
bureaucrat's authenticating stamp. When he rejected a proposal, that
particular bureaucrat stamped the request with this identifying mark of
official authority. On instructions from Rehfeldt, when Higgins returned
to the States, he made a rubber-stamp based on the stamp print on the
bureaucrat's rejection letter. He then sent this stamp to the Polish
mail-artists. Higgins also obtained the bureaucrat's address, and bought
subscriptions in the bureaucrat's name and address for a number of gay porn
magazines, as well as Trotskyist newspapers. He heard nothing for a few
months perhaps because it was difficult to get information from behind the
Iron Curtain. Then he received an uncharacteristically typewritten letter
from Rehfeldt. The letter said that Higgins had done a bad deed by using
the rubber-stamp to make it appear that the bureaucrat supported and
approved of art events and projects that he did not actually approve or
condone. Later Higgins received an unsigned hand-written note from
Rehfeldt that said, "Keep it up." The network had used the trappings of
bureaucratic authority to reverse the authorities' surveillance system and
set in motion a disruption of the normal process. This reversal of
perspective is a key element in what I call "intimate bureaucracies" as
well as Situationist strategies.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
