The theoretical basis for Art and Revolution comes from the distillation of the core elements of Hardt and Negri’s post-Marxist epic Empire, an essential reference point in current discussions of the revolutionary potential of contemporary art. Revolution should be understood not as a ‘one dimensional attempt to take over the state apparatus’, but rather as a triad of ‘insurrection, resistance and constituent power’. Gerald Raunig takes issue with celebrity theorist Slavoj Žižek’s mischievous campaign to rehabilitate Lenin and the tactics of the October Revolution, which throws a Bolshevik spanner in the smooth, tripartite ‘revolutionary machine’ theorised by Hardt and Negri.  Art and Revolution is a considered intervention in the delicately poised debate on the relevance of post-Fordist theory to art by a Viennese philosopher who is himself a leading figure in the field.

The author proposes the notion of the ‘concatenation of art and revolution’ as a means to avoid confusion with totalitarian attempts to integrate and homogenise the masses using art. The book therefore does not address attempts to unify art and life, but concentrates instead on instances of the ‘concatenation, overlap and transition’ between art and revolution that stop short of total synthesis. We are presented with examples of sequence, hierarchy and juxtaposition in the relationship of art and revolution. The ‘sequential concatenations’ he proposes include the transformation of Gustav Courbet from an artist into a politician during the Paris Commune and the ‘continuous passage of the Situationist International from the art field to the political field’. He discovers a ‘hierarchical concatenation’ of art and revolution in the Soviet Proletkult movement of the 1920s, while the main example of ‘juxtaposition’ is the Viennese Actionists messy foray into revolutionary provocation in 1968. A tantalising fourth possibility is that offered by ‘transversal concatenation’, which he identifies with the overlap between contemporary art and protest politics in the anti-globalisation struggle since the mid-1990s.

The Situationist International’s seamless transition from art to politics in 1968 marks for Raunig the achievement of an ‘opening into the complex and unpredictable space of the revolutionary machine’. One of many interesting speculations he makes is that the buildings of the new universities created a favourable ground for the spread of student protests; the ‘endless cement walls’ of the ‘repellent university architecture’ providing ideal surfaces for S.I. slogans such as ‘Never work’ and ‘Regard your desires as your reality’. At the same time, for Raunig it was ultimately questions from the field of art, such as the practice, function and potential of the situation, which propelled the S.I. into the context of revolutionary theory and political action.

The situation was very different in Austria, where attempts to link artistic actionism and student activism ‘failed in an unproductive clash.’ The Vienna Actionists infamous teach-in on ‘Art and Revolution’ took place in an occupied university lecture theatre on 7 June 1968 and involved self-inflicted wounds, nakedness, the drinking of urine, defecation, masturbation, the singing of the national anthem, and projectile vomiting.  The Actionists’ chaotic happening reportedly left the humourless audience of student politicos cold, and provided a pretext for the demonization of the group in the press and their subsequent criminalisation by the authorities. Raunig has a great deal of sympathy for the predicament of the Actionists, whose strategies of representing ‘all kinds of tabooed processes’ scandalised both the forces of order and the radical left wing, pointedly drawing attacks ‘as soon as they dared to move even slightly outside the realm of art’.  

It was not until the 1980s that the first wave of ‘transversal’ projects appeared, understood as ‘lines of flights, ruptures, which continuously elude the systems of points and their coordinates.’ Raunig traces the emergence of the Volxtheater in a Vienna squat and its reorientation towards the problem of European migration policies in the late 1990s, climaxing with the No Border Caravan project. This saw a convoy of colourful cars and vans process through towns and villages to draw attention to the growing racism in Fortress Europe. The pivotal description in the book is of the gratuitous brutality meted out to the peace-loving Caravan theatre group by the Italian riot police at the Genoa G8 protests in summer 2001, an act of state violence that brings home the high political stakes in countering the spread of transversal activism.

Raunig gives us little cause for optimism in this account of the history of the intertwining of art and revolution from the Communards to the Genoa G8 protests. Each attempt eventually fails, primarily as a result of state repression of anyone straying into the danger zone between art and revolution, but also because of a lack of sympathy for art activism from a conservative art history concerned primarily with rigid canons, art objects, and ‘absolute field demarcations’.  Activist practices are allowed to feature in   artistic and political narratives only if they are ‘purged of their radical aspects, appropriated and coopted into the machines of the spectacle.’ Raunig notes that since Genoa, the anti-globalisation protests have to some extent taken on a reified form, with the media-driven expectation that the climax of each will be an insurrectionary battle with the police. This can be seen as a retreat from the revolutionary concatenation of resistance, insurrection and constituent power that was prefigured in Seattle in 1999. Sounding a warning note about the proliferation of activist art practices, he points to the many instances in which ‘actors in the art field instrumentalise social transformations as spectacular conditions just to finance their art.’        

(Reuben Fowkes)