Revolution I Love You

FOREWORD
Maja and Reuben Fowkes

‘Revolution, I Love You’ is a slogan from May ’68 that recalls the exuberance, deep desire for change and belief in the possibility of freedom illuminating a precious moment of universal revolt.   The exhibition investigates 1968 as an interlude of liberty and global resistance, focussing on the interplay between the politics of the street, radical philosophy, and the explosion of creative responses in the period. It considers the modalities of the unrest across Europe against the backdrop of contrasting economic and political systems in East and West.

One of the most significant aspects of 68 was its translocality and it can be considered the first global protest movement with insurrections, correspondences and acts of solidarity across the world. Opposition to the war in Vietnam mobilised thousands on both sides of the Atlantic, while student revolts spread through campuses demanding greater freedom and fairer social systems. The formation of workers councils during factory protests were brief exercises in direct democracy experienced from Renault Billencourt to Fiat Turin and Skoda Pilsen. In Czechoslovakia the lifting of censorship raised hopes for the dawning of ‘socialism with a human face’ that challenged both the Eastern Bloc and the western capitalist model.

The revolutionary year of 1968 is also synonymous with a radical philosophical shift. Theorists were deeply involved with the protest movements, either on a practical level or through the intellectual response that the uprising demanded. The Praxis group of philosophers from Zagreb, for example, brought together leading neo-Marxist intellectuals from Marcuse to Fromm to discuss the new meaning of revolution. In France, political theorists had to move fast to keep up with the revolutionary practices emerging on the Parisian street. The interchange between philosophy, protest and art was a notable feature of ‘68, just as the fusion of theory, action and art is a powerful force today.

The exhibition Revolution, I Love You brings together works created in the immediate aftermath of 1968, more recent artistic responses to the legacy of that world-changing year, as well as current approaches to contemporary social and political struggle. Several of the works in the show investigate modes of insurrection and ways in which radical politics seeks to contest state control of public space. In this sense, Oliver Ressler’s Globalising Protest examines the use of wooden barricades as sites for graffiti and slogans by protesters at recent G8 summits. Comment on the methods of social control and creative tactics to circumvent them can be found in Tamás St.Auby’s celebration of the resistance of the Czechoslovak people after the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovak Radio 1968, as well as in Heath Bunting’s navigation of oppressive bureaucratic systems in The Status Project.

The transfer of radical political ideas into different languages and cultural settings is central to 1968 as a transnational phenomenon. Miklós Erhardt shows his Hungarian translation of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, while Fia Stina Sandlund follows the Way of Socialism from an original Mao song to updated versions commissioned by the artist in Chinese and Swedish. Jean Baptiste Ganne’s Specchio revives anti-work slogans from the Italian partisans in red lipstick.

A critical attitude towards the legacy of the 68 protests, as well as awareness of the way in which 1968 was itself appropriated by spectacular society, can be found in Nancy Davenport’s May Day screensaver, as well as in Marko Lulić’s homage to the cult film WR: Mysteries of the Organism in Disco Wilhelm Reich. Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s Untitled (The Remake) takes us back to the era of the Greek dictatorship of the late 60s and reminds us of the technological origins of public television and techniques for mass manipulation.

The enduring power of insurrectionary symbols is explored in The Fist Collection, with the desire that the resulting archive might act as tool for future struggles. Kwiekulik’s Shades of Red explores the ubiquity of the ideology symbolized by the colour red and its close links to real life, while Mladen Stilinović attributes the slogan ‘Work is Disease’ to Karl Marx, drawing attention to the capitalist and socialist system’s shared concern with productivity. The screening of Csaba Nemes’s Remake on the rioting in Budapest on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution brings out the hybrid forms of contemporary protest.

The exhibition publication considers the interconnection of art, politics and philosophy in 1968 across a divided Europe. It is a mosaic of interviews, statements and essays by prominent theorists, historians, curators, cultural workers and artists that shows the multipolar and interrelated experience of that extraordinary year.

 Kostis Kornetis sets out to identify the common denominator in protest movements that took place in different national contexts. Discussing the forms of revolution, Katja Diefenbach sees a shift in 1968 away from the Leninist model of insurrection towards a molecular and minoritarian approach, while Jens Kastner researches the appeal of the guerrilla form in the visual arts at a time in which the dream of reconciling political vanguardism and avant-gardism seemed close to realisation.    

Revolts in specific countries and key phenomena of 68 are placed in a comparative perspective. Krunoslav Stojaković considers the philosophy of Praxis as a science of liberation in Yugoslavia, while Łukasz Ronduda examines the relationship between 1968 and the visual arts in Poland through Socialist Conceptualism. Simon Ford discusses the rise and fall of the Situationist International in the Parisian May against the backdrop of advanced capitalism’s power to resist, repress and subvert radical threats. Viktor Misiano re-examines the experience of 1968 in Russia and Eastern Europe. Among the more personal accounts, filmmaker Rajko Grlić explains why 1968 is a benchmark in the life of a generation, while Gaspár Miklós Tamás remembers the Day in August when the Soviets entered Prague. Maja and Reuben Fowkes compile a retroactive Glossary of 1968, while further contributions come from the participating artists.

Revolution, I Love You is the second in a series of projects investigating the revolutionary moments of the twentieth century and their ramifications for contemporary art and culture. The exhibition is accompanied by a number of special projects, including the SocialEast Seminar on the Legacy of 1968 at Jagiellonian University Krakow and a programme of films about 1968 at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.