Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (review)

As Allan Antliff notes in his introduction, his new book is an attempt to draw attention to and encourage ‘the study of anarchism in art’ with the intent of foregrounding art production ‘as it relates to historical, philosophical, social, and political issues from an anarchist perspective.’ Drawing extensively on nineteenth-century anarchist writers, such as Peter Kropotkin and Michael Bakunin, Antliff sees in the theory and practice of anarchist philosophy, art, and ethics an antidote to contemporary concerns with the ‘megamachine’ of capitalism. Based on these opening premises I have a great deal of empathy for what Antliff’s project purports to do. There is no doubt that the study of anarchism and its relationship to art production is vastly under-examined, and I have no doubt that if there is to be an alternative to the megamachine of capitalism, the philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics of anarchism should be a vital part of the tool kit of contemporary social and cultural critics. Having said that, I found the book to be a disappointment on a number of fronts, although it does provide some nuggets of historical and art-historical value that help to make this book more interesting to researchers outside of narrow anarchist circles.

Anarchy and Art is broken down into eight chapters, with some of the most interesting analysis and information coming in the early chapters, especially those dealing with Courbet, Neo-Impressionism, the role of the anarchists in the Russian Revolution, and the post-anarchist aftermath to the Russian Revolution. However, these chapters are frustratingly short essays that should receive a far more detailed analysis. Unfortunately, too much space is given to an interview between the author and the anarchist activist/artist Susan Simensky Bietila, which is twice as long and half as interesting as the other chapters. Perhaps the most serious of the book’s flaws is the very unimaginative handling of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism. Whether in the body of the text or ensconced within a footnote, Antliff consistently caricatures or oversimplifies Marxism and its later interpreters, with no effort whatsoever to move beyond his binary simplifications to see where more critical interpretations of Marxism in the twentieth century would not only contribute significantly to the critique of capitalism formulated by anarchism but would even help anarchism itself to evolve and grow beyond its original theorists. There is a perfect opportunity, for example, to discuss the relationship between anarchy, allegory, and the influence of Charles Baudelaire within the work of Gustave Courbet that would allow for a complex interaction with the theory and analysis of Walter Benjamin, as the Marxist-inspired art historian T.J. Clark has done so successfully in his work. The work of other Western Marxists, such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, or other critical voices like those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Slavoj Žižek, among numerous others, provide a rich, complex, and heterodox tradition of radical thought that would enhance the methodology of Antliff’s art history while helping to create a more dynamic sense of development within anarchist theory. An attempt at combining anarchist theory with post-structuralist theory was undertaken by the philosopher Todd May in The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (1994), but Antliff panned May’s book in an article published in 2007, arguing that anarchists would be better off using classical anarchism to ‘interrogate’ post-structuralism. Another example of this closed-minded analysis is the rough treatment given to surrealism, which, like Marxism, is also reduced to a crude generalization, and summarily dismissed, all within one sentence in a footnote.

Ultimately, the reader is left to wonder whether this particular book is a misstep and whether Antliff will demonstrate a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to art history and anarchist theory in the future, or whether his pursuit of an anarchist agenda in art and art history is destined to rehearse...