In Meg Stoios’s Next Stop (2017), a man is distracted while reading Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto on a crowded tram. His gaze away from the book is not unlike the contemporary relationship with communism, that is largely ignored while remaining in plain historical sight. The recent centenary of the Soviet revolution is in this sense an inconvenient one, more so since the failures of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, and the rise of new right-wing governments around the world. There may be no more pessimistic moment for thinking about leftist revolution than the present.
In the numerous exhibitions that took place around the world to commemorate October 1917, and in numerous new histories of Soviet Russia, this pessimism played itself out in a familiar refrain. Two London exhibitions, one at the British Library and the other at the Royal Academy, concluded with archival photographs of those executed or worked to death in Stalin’s gulags. And even though these photographs included many important artists of the era, somehow it remains a truism that, ‘One of the most beguiling yet misleading ideas in 20th-century art was that the avant-garde had some affinity with revolutionary politics’.1 This from The Australian’s Christopher Allen, reviewing the Museum of Modern Art Heide’s Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism & Australian Art exhibition in 2017.2 For Allen the Soviet avant-garde were revolutionaries of form not fire, their execution and imprisonment beside the point of their art.
Amidst the proliferation of brute simplifications, even Fredric Jameson, the most committed of Western Marxists, has sounded the retreat. He suggests it is enough to be anti-anti-revolutionary, to argue against the counter-revolutionaries because of the difficulty... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
John Nixon, Red and Black Cross, 1988. Enamel and egg shell grit on industrial cardboard, 57 x 57cm. Collection of Peter Jones and Susan Taylor.
IRWIN at Art Gallery of New South Wales and Pier 2/3, Australian Biennale 1988. Courtesy the artists.
