Paradise Postponed

In revolutionary Russia of 1905, even Alexandr Skryabin - not a noted communist, but theosopher, composer, grand mystic and synaesthetician - was, for a moment, tempted to join the proletariat. After studying the writings of Marx, however, he declared: 'I do not want the realisation of something that does not yet exist, but the infinite rise of creativity evoked by my art'.1 With these words, he argued not only against the vague, distant and unrealised, but for the tangible presence achieved by the intensity of art.

It could be said that Utopias are formulations of yet-to-be-realised, ideal social and political conditions. Art, in comparison, wants to create something now. Utopias assume the outcome of a development that history has to wait for; art continues to experiment because of an awareness that you can't know the results of, say, an emancipatory struggle.

But you could just as well twist this apparent antagonism around, and say: Utopias open up the horizon of the imaginable, while art, as long as it is forced to produce objects or is restricted by the parameters of the present, can only encompass the realisable. Then again, you might argue that art is, in fact, the better Utopia, as it attempts to discover a peculiar 'non-site' - a Utopia in the strict sense of the word - in the present, to close the gap between the imagined and the now. There have been times when people thought that art might actually manage to do just that, and it's still debatable whether it was lack of persistence, unfavourable social conditions or a categorical error that was to blame for its failure to do so.

The enhancement of life (Lebenssteigerung) instead of Revolution - this Nietzschean maxim survived until the raves of the late-20th century. Against the paradisiac standards set by political Utopias, art not only had to counter with a pragmatic declaration of belief in living the Now, but it also had to refine it. Total allegiance to the Now was supposed to open up a vista onto a land at least as beautiful as those promised by political Utopias, but immediately accessible. Skryabin composed Le Poème de l'Éxstase (1905) in the tone colours Bernard Herrmann would adopt 50 years later to illustrate the feeling of vertigo in Hitchcock's film of the same name: that was how high one could fly at the start of the 20th century.

Historically speaking, Utopias seem to have something to do with altitude. This can be seen in Skryabin's late plans for a synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk to be performed in the Himalayas, for example, or the Swiss Monte Verita movement of the 20s, a self-realisation colony that attracted the international nobility of the irrational, from Hermann Hesse to C. G. Jung. It becomes apparent, however, that artists who at first opted for instant life enhancement sooner or later had to formulate a utopian framework - deliver a programme later, so to speak. Mostly, such ideological frameworks were cleansed of political residue - but these art religions that restlessly traverse the century, from Anthroposophy to Sufism, reveal their origins as competitors to political Utopias in their concession that paradise on earth is possible. Utopia, whether achieved through art, meditation, discipline or whatever, would no longer be restricted to the subjective experience of chosen artists orÜbermenschen (Superhumans) but was pronounced methodologically attainable. Proto-New-Age.

Utopias generally direct you to live for a later point in time, but what if you want to have your cake and eat it? The desire to live for the moment and taste the pleasures of Utopia in the present, while still not giving up its political and social promise, is seen in the numerous attempts to achieve instant Utopia by portraying it with the artistic means at hand. This is what the Living Theatre group formulated with their 'play' Paradise Now! (while the performance itself remained little-known, the title became a maxim adopted, predominantly since the 60s, by all types of artists). The idea that through mimesis of the desired conditions of liberation you could participate in their realisation wasn't necessarily a magical one. The interplay in Free Jazz ensembles - explicitly with Ornette Coleman, but also Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago or Charlie Mingus - was meant to demonstrate liberated musical structures. Ideas such as the 'emancipation of the rhythm section' weren't simply understood metaphorically, and those who practiced it were thought to revolutionise their subjectivity. Adorno's classic notion of the 'Ideology of Music' - that musical harmony corresponds to social harmony, not only metaphorically but literally - was transferred to the issue of non-hierarchic structures: a different concept of society needs a different concept of harmony (while their ideological relationship may remain intact for the time being).

The Living Theatre and similar theatre groups, or the Vienna Actionists, believed that portraying liberation - and the struggle to achieve it - would teach the performers, and later the audience, to create a liberated society. They achieved a certain degree of success: 'people ripped their clothes off and stormed the stage naked', a Berlin report noted in January 1970 on a performance by Living Theatre at the Sportpalast (a venue at which, 27 years earlier, people reacted just as enthusiastically to Goebbels' call for total war). 2 When, in the same year, the group fragmented into three parts, founder Julian Beck welcomed the split as a kind of cell division. Each member would now take on more specialised tasks: some would do groundwork to revolutionise the individual, others would be involved in direct political action. Retrospectively, it would seem that the original Living Theatre group considered these tasks to be compatible with the artistic act.

Others were less optimistic: Factory star Taylor Mead was already sceptical back in the 60s. When an interviewer tried to sound him out on the subject of revolutionary theatre, he explained: 'They preach anarchism. But they have a really Fascist rehearsal scheme. They are really cruel to one another in the name of art'. (Andy Warhol, responding to the same interviewer - who seemed to be mostly concerned with the utopian nudity of Living Theatre - asked: 'why don't you do the interview naked?') 3

In Vienna, at about the same time, Otto Mühl founded his first commune. The programme was familiar - revolutionising the subject by acting out his or her desires (liberation) and fears (obstacles that can be overcome through expression) - and was to be carried out with well-planned precision. Everyone was nude, shaven and required to reveal themselves. A few years later, bourgeois Wichtel (gnomes) were forced to leave the newly-founded large communes, while the others had to submit themselves to rigorous fuck-schedules - intended to prevent the formation of bourgeois couple relationships - and contribute their possessions to the commune. By the mid 70s, cells of the AAO communes following Mühl had sprung up in all the larger German and Austrian cities. The shaven/liberated had infiltrated hippie communities, their books ubiquitous in student quarters.

The outcome was devastating: visiting the central AAO commune Friedrichshof in the countryside outside Vienna in the 80s was reminiscent of being at a work camp, while Mühl demanded for himself the ius primae noctis like a Medieval potentate. But, by the early 90s, in an act of almost undisguised revenge by the Austrian authorities, and fuelled by heavy right-wing populist pressure, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for child abuse. It was at about the same time that Erich Honecker was taken to court in reunified Germany.

While the line of Julian Beck or Otto Mühl can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century and the Life Reformers, India-enthusiasts and the denizens of Monte Verita, another, older line of artistic answers to political Utopia runs in an opposite direction, manifested in bohemia - the quotidian conditions in the city quarters inhabited by artists. In his 1893 thesis De la Division du Travail Social (The Division of Labour in Society), Emile Durkheim, founder of Modern sociology, classified bohemian artists as one of the potential perils of city life: 'An all too great artistic sensitivity is a morbid condition that shall not be generalised without danger for society'. 4 The 'other' life that they had to lead in the bohemian neighbourhoods was anything but utopian, and, to a great extent, the circumstances of it were born of necessity not choice. It is an open question whether its characterisation as 'adventurous' is due to later romanticising, but it is not only in romanticising descriptions that the struggle of the artists of the bourgeois age, in their neighbourhoods and quarters, structurally blends with their actual artistic activity. The artist-as-experimenter is a figure who can and must always transfer their strategies of action and problem-solving (inventing, faking, super-elevating, reducing...) from one realm - life, work, politics - into the other - art, assertions, poetry. If the idea of artist-as-experimenter is politicised, then a competition with the notion of Utopia as described above comes into being. The most famous blueprint for this is certainly the Situationist International, though it was finally torn up in the conflict between elevating the experimental to the position of highest virtue (Asger Jorn) and escaping into the security of a Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history (Guy Debord). Today, a different world has borrowed the notion of an experimental existence as Utopia: cultural circles of the German managerial elite, for example, hold symposia with titles such as The Artist as Entrepreneur or Art as the Avant-garde of Economy.

But this poor end-of-a-notion turned ideology doesn't necessarily weaken the legitimacy of its intellectual substrate. The experimental character has certainly been able to come upon truths or insights that institutional thinking would never discover. This bohemian did not need to formulate a Utopia, because life itself was utopian. You could argue that the experimental character would never reach the expanse of a true Utopia because they were limited by their pragmatism in dealing with the everyday material of life. But this material is of a much more dialectical nature than some cloudy abstraction. You could also ask what an experimental individual's conclusions are worth if they cannot be attempted in a social group; what can they tell us apart from what poetic solipsism had always told us about the relationship of artistic sensitivity to hostile environment? While it would be possible to reply that the social constellations an individual entered into would be sociologically and politically more instructive than the organised results of groups, you cannot explain away the aspect of unverifiability that ultimately lapses back into the traditional artist's subjectivity, defining life and work exclusively through its own temperament.

There were groups in the 50s and early 60s - certain phases of the Situationists, for example, or Vienna's artist's and writer's circle the Wiener Gruppe - that took these considerations into account. In these cases, the group was an entity that did not 'perform' their Utopia, but manifested it in the way its members dealt with one another on a daily basis. This approach certainly had much in common with the 'Paradise Now!' tradition, but it did not rely on an predetermined idea of liberation (the simple absence of political and sexual repression), and was concerned with developing new ways of living in relation to artistic production. Or, as Oswald Wiener, one of the central characters in the Wiener Gruppe put it: 'the situation [...] no longer allowed you to simply bask in it or go with it, you were forced again and again to go through its details, the possibilities of its interpretation, the interpretation of your own participation in it, the way it appeared and its possible meanings, anticipating the possibilities of change. The transcripts of many conversations would be incomprehensible as the correlations could only be maintained by fast shifts in the focus of attention, and ideas tipped over in a way that was not always visible in the words [...] you went from the coffee-house into the unknown. Those who were not able to do that, but still wanted to be more than administrative staff, became material.' 5

The intensive self-observation of an heightened artistic sensitivity is redirected into a group situation in a Vienna coffee-house. The experiment reaches the unknown not in a distant Utopia but around the corner. Yet this moment of success for the group was the origin of its biggest problem: exclusion. For logical reasons, the group has to define itself as different from others - otherwise it would again be about the individual/world relationship. But even if the criteria for affiliation were 'objective' (which they can't really be), they would change depending the level of 'success' the group has - the loser who can't follow will either be excluded or becomes, as Wiener suggested, the material of cruel experiments. The history of experimental artists and intellectual groups (from Bataille's College de la Sociologie Secrète to the Situationist International) is full of exclusions and sacrifices. On one hand they serve as validation and legitimisation of the group's 'state of development'; on the other, they create a sense of cohesion, a criteria of differentiation from the outside that they share with the crimes of initiation certain gangs expect from their novices.

That the group situation itself becomes the subject of utopian fantasies projected into the reality of the present has become a commonsense of communication technology. Today, the new paradigm of the Net is changing art and its very different sibling - political utopian thought - and the way they relate. All today's utopian and dystopian discourses circle around the idea of the Net as a place of potentially boundless access, availability and democracy on one hand, and of boundless surveillance, consumerism and technological repression on the other. Both fantasies discuss the form of communication, but not its subject-matter and scope. This is a characteristic that the non-commercial, alternative, hippie-structured part of the web, in their attempt to reach new territory through multiplication, intensification and structural transformation of communication, has in common with the old coffee-house leap into the unknown. Generally, the Net-heads share more with the experimental, self-observing group situations of the 50s and early 60s than with the liberation Utopias of the late 60s and 70s - it's just that great leaps of elevating intensity are no longer possible, as the necessary self-reference and confinement of the group situation is now unavailable. Exclusion, whether through the group dynamic or by heuristic means, can't cut it anymore.