Another Revolution: Building Modern Worlds at the Interface of Art, Culture, and Politics

Another Crisis of Revolution?

To think about “another revolution” in our contemporary moment means to also think about another crisis of revolution. Not unlike the middle of the last century—with its prevailing sense among Western intellectuals that historical revolutions had failed and that, consequently, revolution had largely been discredited as a political concept and project—there is a palpable disillusionment with radically transformative endeavors among progressives around the globe today.[1] For one thing, the past decade and a half saw the exhaustion of a number of social movements that had aspired to bring about deep, lasting societal change—the vanishing of Occupy or the rollback of emancipatory achievements of the Arab Spring are cases in point.

Moreover, the left found itself confronted with an astounding case of what Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, witnessing the rise of “revolutionary” fascism in interwar Europe, had described as brand fraud: attempts of the (extreme) right to appropriate the label “revolution” and attach it to their own reactionary and, in fact, “totally counterrevolutionary” efforts.[2] As if reawakening the dormant prefix “re-” and, with it, the largely forgotten meaning of a turn backwards implied in the term, such efforts have been cast in terms of a genuine re-volution by their proponents and backers. This phenomenon has become particularly visible in the United States where, from the early days of the Tea Party to the 2021 Capitol riot, it seems as if precisely the promise of a re-turn has spurred ardent support—a turning back to a state in which inherited (white) privileges go unchallenged and established power structures as manifest in, for instance, restrictions to political participation along the lines of race, class, and even gender go unchecked. The broad resonance of these self-declared revolutionary movements has left many of those concerned with transformative democratic “insurrections” skeptical, not only with respect to the possibility and feasibility but also the desirability of radical social and political change.[3]

In the wake of these developments, the idea that art and culture are crucial factors in opening up productive avenues into the future has come under scrutiny, too. This is a moment when revolution is in crisis—that is: when it is undecided and, therefore, to be decided if the very ideas of deeply and lastingly changing political institutions, social relations, and modes of perception, cognition, and expression (in short: forms of subjectivity), still has any meaning, value, and promise. As such, declarations by artists or by theorists like David Graeber and Jacques Rancière that emphasize the unique ability of artistic practices to foster a spirit of revolt, to preenact or prefigure new social, political, and economic relations have come to sound hollower with every wishful repetition. It seems hard to deny that critical artistic and cultural impulses, for the most part, have not succeeded in transcending the walls surrounding the artworld, reaching wider audiences, and, thus, effectively challenging the reactionary dynamics of the recent past and present. Additionally, it has become all too evident that such impulses, their initial transformative intentions notwithstanding, can easily be coopted by an infinitely malleable late-capitalist regime. As contemporary commentators have argued, this regime, although it prides itself on unprecedented “innovation” and “disruption,” exacerbates the immanence of global consumerism with its patterns of circulation and, as such, remains immune to “events” that break open its governing rules.[4] To witness how even art practices that once set out to question the status quo are seamlessly integrated into market activities or made to inconsequentially whizz through our ever-more restless mediatized attention economies has contributed to a disappointed running out of breath of discourses on art and revolution, not to mention on art as revolution.

Undoubtedly, there are many good reasons for the politico-aesthetic revolutionary nexus and its discontents. Yet, one might wonder whether the current sense of disappointment can indeed be attributed to actual experiences of right-wing reactionary change and neoliberal stuckness alone. To avoid a reductive reading, one might speculate whether this disillusioned mood, its expressions oscillating between nostalgia, cynicism, and resignation, does not, at least in part, result from certain broadly accepted conceptions and theorizations of revolutionary change. What if models of revolution—in political theory, art theory, and art history—have transported hyperbolic notions of transformation, its visibility and intelligibility? What if these models have raised overblown expectations regarding the character of revolutionary change and the immediacy of its effects in being recognized and becoming majoritarian?

Conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher Adrian Piper’s considerations on political art and its transformative capacities provide illuminating indications in that respect. In her critical rejection of the “anti-originality thesis” in postmodern strands of recent art theory—i.e., the claim that novelty merely consists in “rearrang[ing]” what is “prefabricated” and, thus, another version of the trope of immanentism—she points to the problematic understanding of originality underlying this thesis. For how could any work of art meet the impossibly high standard for genuine novelty implied therein—namely “to expunge all familiar images, ideas, media, and materials?”[5] Leaving aside serious epistemological difficulties (how can the entirely new be cognized at all?) and ethical issues (might the “anti-originality thesis” not be deployed to dismiss original contributions by “minority artists” which “mainstream artists” have drawn upon?) raised by Piper, her discussion not only complicates the value of originality much of twentieth-century modernity is premised upon; it also shows that “rearranging” what already exists on the one hand and, on the other, creating from scratch, hardly constitute exhaustive conceptual, let alone practical alternatives. Rather, they constitute extreme poles on a spectrum of politically relevant forms of artistic originality or novelty. It is with a particular interest in what lies in between these poles that our cluster reconsiders historical and contemporary projects at the interface of art, culture, and politics from around the globe—projects which, albeit realized to differing degrees, have all sought to enable “another revolution,” that is, a kind of revolutionary novelty that is neither an instance of calculable, mundane recombination nor one of an entirely unprecedented, miraculous “event.”

 

A Brief Intellectual History of Politico-Aesthetic Revolution in (and Beyond) Western Modernity

As with all attempts to identify the origins of a concept or the beginnings of a tradition of thought, an element of contingency is also inscribed in any inquiry into the emergence of the idea that art, culture, and politics, in joining hands, are able to build new worlds. With an eye to Western modernity, however, The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism, thought to be co-authored by G. W. F Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin in 1796–97, presents a tentative, yet plausible point of departure for a very brief and highly speculative intellectual history of precisely this idea. At the heart of their revolutionary mythology that seeks to challenge Enlightenment rationalism, they place the notion of a transformative “aesthetic act” that not only complements the “monotheism of reason” with a “polytheism of imagination and art” but also renders the ideas of freedom, of beauty, truth, and goodness relevant for an entire “people” and, thus, overcomes a merely “mechanical” functioning of state politics. In substance, these considerations anticipate the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, of the “total” work of art in the senses of its trans-medial creation, synaesthetic reception, and societal reach.[6]

Despite its fragmentary preservation and contested interpretive history (not to mention Hegel’s own mature claim that art “in its highest vocation,” i.e. as the site of absolute truth, is “a thing of the past”), the text constitutes an Ur-manifesto of aesthetic revolution as political revolution.[7] As such, it is emphatically echoed in the writings of, among others, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche who both shared the conviction that revolutionary projects from 1789 to 1848 fell short and still awaited their cultural-artistic completion.[8] Their vision is “total,” too, in that it is satisfied with nothing less than achieving a substantially new society and “new man” respectively.

As the more speculative, playful impulses of the Idealists and Romanticism are gradually overwritten, discourses on “making” revolution through art and politics not only take on a narrower, more ideological character during the second half of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century; they also cast the figure of the revolutionary artist in an increasingly heroic light. Here enters the ideal type of the artist as “absolute creator,” whose groundbreaking visions, once intentionally and volitionally put into practice, take effect—if not here and now then at least in the near future. Such motifs reverberate in early twentieth-century art and culture, they are creatively appropriated by artistic movements—from the Futurists and “Conservative Revolutionaries” to the Suprematists and Surrealists—with vastly differing worldviews. In these appropriations that seek to realize their own visions of “new men,” the trope of the unique revolutionary potential of art, albeit interpreted and applied differently, is not put into question as such.

Critical interrogations of the view that avant-garde art initiates or, at the very least, essentially complements revolutionary political action only set in once the dangers inherent to their fusion have become apparent in both theory—here, one might think of Heidegger’s identification of total artwork and totalitarian “state work” in the mid–1930s—and praxis, where the case of Soviet Russia has illustrated the institutional stifling of creative impulses in a post-revolutionary order. This new caution is particularly noticeable among Marxist theorists. For instance, Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg acknowledge that seemingly cutting-edge artistic endeavors can collapse into propaganda and overlap with kitsch, respectively. Against this backdrop, they perceive the task of advancing sound criteria for a genuinely emancipated culture and society and for a progressive, liberating politicization of art as opposed to a fascist, regressive, and unfree aestheticization of politics as more pressing than ever.[9] Others, like György Lukács, dismiss outright the avant-gardes as mere expressions of modernism that reflect rather than supersede tensions within bourgeois art and capitalist economy or, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, simply keep their reflections on the subjects of art and of revolution separate.[10]

It is in response to new impulses in art practice that theoretical discourses on art’s transformative potential regain momentum in the postwar period. Importantly, such impulses do not only include works of European and American artists like Le Corbusier or Jackson Pollock but encompass movements around the world—for instance, the Gutai Art Association in Japan or Neoconcretism in Brazil—that breach existing frames and challenge the social and political status quo.[11] In this decentered, transnationally extended conversation on revolutionary art, some more cautionary voices can be heard: Albert Camus, in his Nobel Prize speech, “Create Dangerously,” describes artistic projects with radically transformative aspirations as, on the one hand, equally threatened by an irresponsible detachment from existing political realities and, on the other, by their instrumentalization in the service of power on the other.[12]  Similarly, Susan Sontag not only warns against politically overdetermined interpretations of artworks but, in her reflections on The Cuban Poster, also highlights the long-term educational, and thus reformist rather than revolutionary, character of the medium.[13] The prevalent discourse on art and revolution, however, is one that insists on art as an extraordinary liberating force suited to shake up entire societies with their ideological and cultural systems. Unfolding in the works of Herbert Marcuse or Guy Debord, it culminates in “the revolution of 1968.”

Occasional theoretical challenges notwithstanding, this discourse, in all its variations regarding the kind, scale, and degree of the envisaged transformation, has remained stable and, in many ways, dominant in the decades since.[14] It is only due to recent developments alluded to at the outset that it has become questionable anew whether art and culture can indeed contribute to creating if not an entirely “non-imperial” (Alain Badiou) new world then at least “autonomous zones” or “bubbles” (David Graeber), or, in Adrian Piper’s Kantian register of gradual and approximate revolutionary change, “give form and reality to dreams of betterment.”[15]

Evidently, transformative events and developments in the spheres of politics, society, art, and culture that occurred outside “the West”—in Haiti, Russia, Algeria, or Iran, for example —have time and again crucially inspired theorizations of revolution by thinkers from Hegel to Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Michel Foucault. More importantly, however, such developments and the specific “worlds” they have sought to “build” have been accompanied by their own theorizations, their own formulations of how art and politics may integrate to promote emancipation. As exemplified by the work of Frantz Fanon—who, among other things, engages Marxian and existentialist-phenomenological approaches to revolution while selectively drawing on the literary-poetic Négritude movement—such interventions often forcefully mark what has often remained unacknowledged within, what has repeatedly been denied by the conversations and debates on revolutionary art and politics sketched above: namely the fact that the “great” historical revolutions, despite their universalist appeals to democracy and human rights, to a communist classless society, or to an anarchist freedom from all forms of domination, have failed to stand up for, let alone achieve, racial justice and equality. What is more, Adom Getachew and Karuna Mantena’s recent argument for a thorough “decolonization” of political theory analogously applies to the history and present of politico-aesthetic thought, too. Situated in distinctive “problem-spaces” defined by cultural, political, or normative horizons (such as, for instance, “postcolonial predicaments”), these interventions neither depend on “the verification of a canonical thinker and in terms of an already-existing ideal,” nor are they reducible to a critique of Euro-American theories and practices.[16] What is generated from the vantage points of heterogeneous “problem-spaces” are instead forms of “conceptual reanimation” and “conceptual innovation” that, in their exchanges with artistic and cultural production, are eminently revealing and allow for a fuller understanding of what “another revolution” might entail. The following contributions, especially where they analyze projects of revolutionary “worldbuilding” in China, Cuba, Mexico, or Turkey, thus bear witness to the manifold ways in which Western discourses on art and revolution has been creatively appropriated, crucially expanded, and soundly rejected—or, at times, resoundingly ignored—by theorists and practitioners of art with a political stance around the globe.

Generative—and Generational—Avant-Gardes

There have been other revolutions of course, but nowhere as in the twentieth century does there seem to be such a tight alignment between political and cultural revolutions occurring almost simultaneously around the globe, from China to Germany, Mexico to the Soviet Union, and more recently, Cuba to Iran. This cluster insists that artistic revolutions are neither subsidiary nor subsequent to political acts or philosophical thought, as if they perform a merely decorative or belated function relative to the real, practical work of public manifestos, military coups, or new constitutions. In so doing, it situates itself alongside scholarship that claims culture as itself (at least potentially) revolutionary such as historian Lynn Hunt’s Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution; musicologist William Kinderman’s recent study on Ludwig van Beethoven as a “political artist;” and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s interpretation of Edouard Manet’s “symbolic revolution.”[17] Together with these thinkers, we believe, contra Leon Trotsky, that art is not merely in the baggage train of history, riding behind the engine of civic revolt. Rather, it is itself political and, at times, ideological. As such, it is inevitably entangled or, in the cases that are of interest in our context, deliberately and actively involved in what Arendt calls “worldbuilding.” Through its contributions it (re-)builds “worlds”—understood by Arendt as politically charged “spaces of appearance” for things and for persons. Artistic practices and works of art are decisive factors in opening up newly configured objective conditions, i.e., material and discursive (infra-)structures that enable particular subject positions and intersubjective relations.[18] Indeed, the very sense of artists initiating such “building” and leading the way in society is framed in the military language of the “avant-garde,” the army’s advance guard, transposed in the cultural realm to become spearheads of revolution.

This cluster acknowledges the fundamental work performed by what literary scholar Peter Bürger called the “historic avant-garde” of the early twentieth century, as well as now several generations of cultural analysis to elucidate its moment and legacy.[19] Bürger’s critics, including literary critic Ferenc Fehér and art historian Benjamin Buchloh, famously decry his narrow synthetic argument that the avant-garde’s overarching concern was with the integration of art into everyday life, as well as the sweeping generalization necessary to deploy a single unified theory in relation to groups as contradictory and polyvalent as Dada and Russian Constructivism. All of this is not to mention the many Asian, Eastern European, or Latin American avant-gardes or vanguards outside his purview, with divergent relationships to academic art, publics, states, and social engagement more broadly. Indeed, another section of this introduction could be dedicated to the positionality of nomenclature; philosopher and intellectual historian Susan Buck-Morss discusses the distinct temporal valences of avant-garde as opposed to vanguard, and art historian Lynda Klich makes a case for distinguishing the European avant-garde from the vanguardias of the Americas, on the basis not only of geography, but also of social orientation.[20] Despite its imprecision, “avant-garde” helps us frame a certain subset of artists operating in local circumstances but imagining themselves to be participating in a global discourse of modernism. It is precisely this relationship, and sometimes tension, between regional activity and transnational ambition that concerns many of the contributions to this cluster, including author Wei Ren’s analysis of modern book design in Republican China, or Shannon Connelly’s examination of a provincial Dadaist laboring in Germany’s hinterlands.

Yet, this is not a collection of essays exclusively “about the avant-garde” but about building modern worlds in relation to revolution—one does not necessarily give rise to the other. To take one notable example: cultural anthropologist Nestor García Canclini responds to the claim that Latin America has “had an exuberant modernism with a deficient modernization” by disentangling the two practices, revealing them to coexist in hybridized, heterogeneous forms throughout the region.[21] Furthermore, other groups, apart from the expected vanguard movements, may have just as significant a claim to the goal of modernization, or, more specifically, to rebuilding society. We take seriously the possibility that the often-propagandistic art of the masses, or of the anonymous or once known, might be just as or more revolutionary, not simply on account of its political allegiances, but tout court. Here, we perceive artists and makers acting in class solidarity, despite their frequent personal estrangement from the conditions of labor—and living—that they sought to represent. Caroline Adler’s contribution, regarding Walter Benjamin’s “reporting” on Moscow, offers a vivid demonstration of this paradigm. Evident in John Heartfield’s photomontages, the Works Progress Administration murals, as well as in Soviet filmmaking is an effort to rebuild, to establish a sustainable new world by capturing hearts and minds.

However, lest we forget, what is worldbuilding from one perspective must also be world-destroying from another. The foundational decolonial scholarship of the Andean scholars Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo make this argument of the Americas but it can, has, and should be further extended to smaller pockets of the globe—to the colonized or otherwise repressed populations within so-called modern societies.[22] Coloniality and modernity may go hand in hand—“the two pillars of Western civilization,” as Mignolo calls them—but Europe is not alone in its imposition of either onto traditional lifeways.[23] Certainly “progressive” slum clearance and electric lighting in Haussmann’s Paris meant the loss of thousands of low-income homes (as well as the establishment of barricade-resistant boulevards, new instruments both of surveillance and military display).[24] But in Mexico, too, La India Bonita contests that began in 1921 signaled an exuberant celebration of indigeneity in Mexico at elite levels of society, without the Native population’s political or economic enfranchisement.[25] Further, not all revolutions are emancipatory or egalitarian in nature, nor are their attendant artists, even if they usher in new visual vocabularies and conditions of possibility for aesthetic and political innovation—one need look no further than the Italian Futurists’ commitment to fascism.

Taking account of these lacunae must be fundamental to any contemporary account of artistic contributions to building modern worlds. Nor must new scholarship on global modernisms necessarily continue to refer back to Europe, as refreshing recent South-South or Latin America-Asia comparative cultural studies demonstrate.[26] But current scholarship inevitably inherits a past generation’s approaches to this history as well—it must build upon them, a topic thematized by Meghaa Ballakrishnen’s article for this cluster. Just as a revolution might have generational responses, explored by Rachel Weiss in her discussion of Tania Bruguera’s 2009 performance as a reaction to the Cuban Revolution, so too does its scholarship. With hindsight, it is easy to mark the disenchantment with the avant-garde of the aforementioned Bürger or T. J. Clark, the latter the most visible British Marxist art historian from the ’68 generation, and to recognize the contemporaneous sources of their frustration—the reasons why each perceived the “heroic” avant-garde to have suffered defeat. By the same token, it is not difficult to understand why Americanist Michael Denning or art historian Andrew Hemingway would instead ascribe value to the mass cultural achievements of the 1930s, or art historian Hal Foster to the neo-avant-garde. We are each of us products of our own historical moment, be it revolutionary or not.

It will take time to make sense of creative responses to contemporary claims at revolution, to recognize their contours and character. Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement, and Idle No More are among those progressive, frequently youth-led, often queer- and POC-founded movements who actively draw on the language of revolution. Public murals have perhaps become the social art of the present decade, defined by COVID’s conditions of social distancing and comparative outdoor safety, and urged on by an imperative for scale. We see in these frequently ephemeral street creations a throwback to Mexican muralism: an art that speaks in readily recognizable symbols, that helps to engender a sense of collectivity if not perceptible change—a point acknowledged by David Murrieta Flores in his contribution to this cluster, who sees in the canonized Mexican school of painting certain regressive tendencies with regards to revolution. Again, these paintings are hyper-local, but whereas their predecessors engaged with other creative communities through exhibitions, travel, and little magazines, today they participate in global dialogues almost instantaneously through the sharing of photographs on social media, captioned with hashtags. That is, they act through the cosmopolitan mediascapes theorized by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, redefining community and literally remaking what he calls “imagined worlds.”[27] The site-specific murals and their digital afterlives have this in common with the avant-garde revolutions of the 1920s, recurring again today.

What will the current academic generation’s contribution to the scholarship of the avant-garde and its successors be? The present moment requires neither valorization nor total condemnation, not of its past nor its present. At a minimum, it requires paying closer attention not only to the people and projects that sought to create or design new worlds, but also to the perspectives of those who were imagined to be included in such utopian projects, and, more importantly, to those who were not—to the underprivileged and alienated, to those who clung to the status quo, and to the ways in which such projects might undercut their own revolutionary ambitions.

Revolution Restored: Summary of Essays

Against the foil of the ambiguous political as well as the contested intellectual history of revolutions and avant-gardes, this cluster examines the specific phenomenality of profound, pervasive change at work in selected modern and contemporary constellations—a term deployed by both Caroline Adler and Marcelo Stamm, albeit to different ends—between the aesthetic and the political. By analyzing theoretical models alongside practical strategies and techniques of generating novelty that, whether latently or openly, have been operative in significant cultural and artistic projects over the last hundred years, it especially seeks to tease out the temporal, spatial, and grammatical-linguistic constitution of such change: What is the appropriate timeframe for effective aesthetic-political revolutions to occur—revolutions that do not only trigger upheaval but stretch over extended periods before leaving tangible traces and taking root? What are sites or regions that are particularly conducive to initiating and sustaining them—rural or metropolitan areas, peripheries or centers, actual or virtual spaces, or new spatial configurations that undermine these binaries altogether? What are alternative, potentially transcendent vocabularies that, in image, in word, or in-between image and word, intervene in the established grammar of the well-tried, the everyday—and how do such vocabularies emerge? And is it certain that modernist avant-garde art is best suited to allow for such emergence, to recognize and tackle political, socio-economic, and cultural ills? Or might it be the case that, under certain conditions, other more traditionally, commercially, or otherwise “mainstream” oriented forms of artistic practice and production turn out to be more appropriate to these tasks? Another important set of concerns has to do with what one might call the dialectics of revolutionary “worldbuilding”: what are the highest potentials of such building at the interface of art and politics that, with its underlying modes of individual or collective intentionality and agency, allows for truly livable environments in which emancipated humans can coexist peacefully to come into being—and what, on the contrary, are its darkest implications that end in the marginalization and destruction of lifeworlds deemed obsolete, superfluous?

As these questions are critically negotiated between and repeatedly also within the essays that constitute this cluster, it would be surprising if they came to agree on answers and, thus, to converge on one single meaning of polysemic, contested signifiers like “revolution,” “avant-garde,” or “modernism”—or on one single model of artistic “worldbuilding.” Indeed, some contributors find the art they examine to be avant-garde and others rearguard. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously warns against the set idea that words can be captured by exhaustive, universally valid definitions, reminding us that their meaning depends on how they are used in a language. Since there is an unsurveyable plurality of epochally as well as culturally specific “language games” regarding revolution, examining the various situated uses of the term does not and, in fact, cannot lead to the discovery of one thing they substantively share. What is produced instead is an understanding of “family resemblances,” that is, of the “many different kinds of affinity” between these uses.[28] Accordingly, the conceptions and projects of aesthetic-political revolution discussed here are irreducible to any common denominator. Rather, the threads connecting the essays run through certain thematic foci or key issues concerning, for instance, the spatial and temporal scope of such transformation; the (im-)mediacy of the political role of artistic interventions as well as their effects and legacies; and the ways and degrees in which specific movements aspiring to revolutionary change are touched or shaped by processes of transnational as well as transmedial cross-fertilization.

Three of the essays in this cluster concern precisely such fertilizations as they discuss the importation of “foreign” modernist language into new contexts, complicating claims of derivativeness by way of culturally-specific appropriation. That is, modernist vocabularies were strategically ushered, even shoehorned in, to Turkish, Chinese, and German settings from expected sources like French art and US industry, but they were made to conform to—even create—new worlds through processes of affiliation, hybridization, and even, at times, willful misinterpretation. The artists and the analyses thereof are startling rejoinders to originality and its discontents, from Charles Baudelaire to Piper; a middle path is sought instead. [29] Ahu Antmen’s article analyzes the impact of French Cubist André Lhote on the Turkish d group and indeed upon the generation of the 1928 Alphabet Revolution, who found in Lhote a modernist classicism and “universal” language. Meanwhile, in early Republican China, a new urban middle class became the primary audience for avant-garde art and literature, eager for new forms that would explore themes of selfhood and subjectivity. Ren’s essay examines Jiang Xin’s novel book designs, whose flatness and emphasis on decoration were inspired both by the artist’s cosmopolitan training (in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Paris), as well as aspects of traditional East Asian art. On the other hand, the new language of “rationalization,” with its economic connotations of “scientific” management from the United States, appeared in the Weimar Republic, took on new valences from psychoanalysis—and, as analyzed by Anke Blümm, informed Neues Bauen, a novel form of industrialized architecture discernible in Bauhaus building types.

Another group of essays address responses to existing organizations of space and the creation of new ones. Two of the articles concern place-based ruptures both on the canvas or page, and within the physical environment, thereby highlighting the reciprocity between new formal strategies and modern landscapes, between aesthetics and sociopolitics. Connelly’s essay examines the writing and artworks of Georg Scholz, who worked far from German cosmopolitan centers and methodologically employed “posterliness” to lend a licked, if apparently kitschy, finish to his paintings, which draw from disparate representational registers. Adler’s dissection of Walter Benjamin’s lengthy, unpublished 1927 essay “Moscow” indicates that the author’s literary devices and fragmented style reflect the content of his writing. Benjamin emphasized the extent to which communism affected every aspect of human life, though he subsumed his individual impressions through an experiential enunciation of the collective, offering sensory fragments over narrative and explanation. Another pair of essays within this spatial subset concern revolutionary movements that actively sought to remake urban life, sometimes to relatively conservative ends. Similarly set in Soviet Russia, Aglaya Glebova’s essay focuses on the disurbanist philosophy under Stalin, in which the ideal socialist settlement, unpredictably, would be structured around the individual, not the collective. This framework would result in outward diffusion from urban centers and be responsive to, rather than shape, the needs of individuals. Murrieta Flores analyzes how, at the same time, in Mexico, two avant-garde movements organized under charismatic leaders—Manuel Maples Arce’s Estridentismo and Julián Carrillo’s Sonido 13—sought to respond to urban life, new technologies, and the masses, which had been mobilized by the Mexican Revolution.

In addition to the transformation of space, the drive to build revolutionary modern worlds can also be felt in new conceptions or enactments of time—ones that alternately emphasize the recursiveness and/or notable novelty of their present, or problematize the revolutionary and/or post-revolutionary nature of the cases they analyze. Ballakrishnen’s and Weiss’s essays thematize temporality explicitly, each by focusing on a single artwork. Ballakrishnen unpacks Indian artist Vivan Sundaram’s 2000 montage, which is at once a portrait of the critic Geeta Kapur and an invitation to art historical revolution, titled Marxism in the Expanded Field. The artwork commemorates the 1968 Marxist student movements and 1981, the year of the landmark Place for People exhibition that marked a polemical commitment to radical figuration. Weiss’s article likewise focuses on two moments: namely, the generational struggle represented by Tania Bruguera’s 2009 performance Tatlin’s Whisper, which recalled Fidel Castro’s first address to the Cuban people fifty years prior. Rather than contest the power relationships clearly at play, Weiss, following Bruguera, asks: what is the temporality of revolution? Ultimately, she posits, the performance marks a continuous, ongoing, even repetitive state of revolution, rather than an episodic moment of rupture.

Taking a step back from the analyses of concrete cases, Stamm offers methodological and strategic reflections on how to think about ground-breaking change and, especially, its enabling conditions. To avoid “teleological” fallacies by (mis-)understanding revolutionary transformation in terms of its alleged end-points as well as an overemphasis on “heroic” models of agency, “constellation research” is proposed an as an alternative critical medium. One might wonder whether this constellational lens may illuminate some of the individual case studies included here that engage entirely different places and periods, thereby testifying to the multilinear, contested, and fragmented character of history.

Taken together, these are some of the key issues the contributions assembled here gravitate around, thereby producing more or less strong “family resemblances” between the conceptions of, aspirations to, and attempts at aesthetic-political transformation discussed. Despite the diversity of discoveries among the case studies, they nevertheless converge around the shared perspective that revolution is a creative, productive act, rather than a singular destructive event or repealing of existing conditions. Hence, the artists, artworks, and art worlds examined here all sought to build new worlds—be it in the wake of those that had toppled or those they attempted actively to overwrite.

This cluster may be navigated chronologically, from the early 1920s to the first decade of this century, or on a course geographically. Beyond these and other thematic possibilities indicated above, there are many other ways of parsing this collection of essays; no doubt the reader will find pathways through by, for instance, focusing on montage and collage, some of the techniques most frequently identified with modernism, manifesting a desire to disassemble representations and put them together anew, thereby constructing a new reality. Or the reader might mark a tension between the fine and applied arts, on how each individual or artist collective imagined themselves to be “constructive” or “representational” in their approach to political upheaval and social rebuilding. In this cluster, we have been concerned precisely with “another revolution.” Cultural change, rebuilding efforts, are indivisible from the revolutions they inhabit, participate in, and even lead. It is our hope that these essays open new avenues for scholarship on the avant-garde and modernism, as well as on the relationship of art and revolution.