The playwright Bertolt Brecht, in his polemics with the theorist George Lukács argued: "Even those writers who are conscious of the fact that capitalism impoverishes, dehumanizes, mechanizes human beings, and who fight against it, seem to be part of the same process of impoverishment: for they too, in their writing, appear to be less concerned with elevating man, they rush him through events, treat his inner life as quantité negligeable..."
Read moreRed Wedge No. 2 Launch (Chicago + St. Louis)
Red Wedge is proud and humbled to be the only English language publication examining all the arts from a Marxist viewpoint. Our second issue, “Art Against Global Apartheid”, dropped in May, and we want you to come celebrate it with us. We will have copies of RW2 available for purchase, as well as other cool items (posters, pamphlets, etc). If you're new to the publication, a long time reader who wants to show support, or just want to come talk art and radical politics, we expect to see you there.
Read moreThe Realms of the Unreal
The model of “self-taught genius” ignores the social genius of Darger’s Child Slave Rebellion. After all, Darger’s work was shaped by the very real instructors of his life; his kind father, his brutal treatment as a ward of the state of Illinois, the “dead-end” proletarian job that awaited him in adulthood. It is no accident that Darger’s epic illuminated manuscript is, at its core, about a rebellion of child-slaves. Nor are his transgender heroes necessarily a mere accident of individual genius or naïveté. Maybe they are glimpses of the future emancipation that could not yet be articulated.
Read moreSupport Consumer Grade Film
Still from Consumer Grade Film's In Circles demo reel.
Consumer Grade Film is producing a feature-length movie, In Circles, and they need your help. As they write on their website:
Consumer Grade Film is a U.S. Midwestern collective of filmmakers focusing on low-budget, socially-conscious projects. Our current works in progress include the short, Ubercreep, the feature length film, In Circles, and the YouTube channel, VHS Girl. We are open to collaboration with other filmmakers focusing on similar content.
Read moreWriggling Off the Precipice
The experimental hip-hop group clipping. have a new E.P. out. It’s called Wriggle. The group’s M.C. Daveed Diggs has recently become nothing short of a Broadway celebrity lately since winning a Tony for his role in Hamilton. The man is a phenom, an insane talent on the microphone. There’s no question about this. Diggs’ more usual fare with clipping. is, however, of a somewhat different fare. As I’ve put it previously, he’s far more Marquis de Sade than Lafayette, and clipping. fit right in with the insurgence of “industrial hip-hop” we’ve seen over the past few years that also includes the likes of Death Grips. Here’s the title track and lead single from the new E.P.
Read moreA World In Flames: Orlando
The painting is of Jesus Christ on the cross. It’s very apparent, but also quite jarring in its differences from the iconography of European Christianity in the 20th century. Marc Chagall, the Jewish painter, deliberately estranged and defamiliarized the painting’s subject. The cross on which he is crucified does not have a top and is shaped more like a “T” (as some scholars say many crucifixes were). Christ himself is wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl. This is not Jesus as Christian messiah we are seeing suffer, but Jesus as Jew.
White Crucifixion was painted by Chagall in 1938. Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that was officially sanctioned by Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels, had taken place just prior to his starting the painting. It was a plea for the world to acknowledge and pay attention to what was being done to Europe’s Jews at the time.
Read moreRed Mars: Seeing the Future
The following video interview with artist and Red Wedge editor Adam Turl was conducted by the art critic DIckson Beall for the Saint Louisan:
The artist’s narrative conceptual “Red Mars” is a mixed-media installation of acrylic, coffee, meteorite dust, glitter, stickers, wheat paste on canvas, a telescope, LED sign and booklets. His fictional artist/character views the future of a colonized Mars through a backyard telescope. This character views freedom from a very different perspective, as he creates art and invents “Stories” that confront injustice and consumerism.
Read moreLong Live Satie!
There are a great many fun and entertaining ways one could celebrate the 150th birthday of Erik Satie. The Velvet Gentleman seems to cast such an omniscient shadow over modern music that he is almost invisible. This of course isn’t the only paradox he represented. Though Satie was indeed a unique eccentric who sought to explode musical convention, his philosophies resonate in even those most traditional, straight-laced and boring of today’s composers. In fact it is not far-fetched to say that his music is so universal in western composition that we often don’t even consciously identify it as his. Satie’s iconic Gymnopedie No. 1 was, after all, and in very stark contrast to his unorthodox predilections, used as a background lullaby in a BMW commercial.
Read moreThe Art of Primitive Communism
One of the problems of the weak avant-garde is in its tendency to reject the spiritual and existential origins of art itself. This dynamic can be found both among would-be “art entrepreneurs” and among progressive artists (who wrongly believe their role is to demystify art and all that surrounds it). Both, in the end, are the Thomas Gradgrinds of contemporary art.
The Austrian art critic and Marxist Ernst Fischer, building on Frederick Engels’ “The Role of Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,” invoked art’s pre-history in his 1959 book, The Necessity of Art. Largely a polemic against the cultural policies of “communist” Eastern Europe, Fischer attempted to describe how the origins of art were “magic” – the product of a great leap forward in human consciousness. The mastery of tools produced in humans a social knowledge – the abstraction and generalization of the world.
Read moreThe Democratic Image
Adam Turl. Red Mars (2016)
The strong images of the dominant culture offer no way out for the proletarian subject. Likewise the weak images of much of the academic avant-garde offer very little. The solution, for the class-conscious artist, is to connect weakened art and a weakened working-class to universal and totalizing aspirations. In my opinion the strong-weak image is the mode of the popular avant-garde. And historically it has come from outside the art world as often as within it – and sometimes both, in the work of the Wild-Style graffiti innovators of the 1970s and the punk rock DIY posters and zines of the 1970s and 1980s. Raymond Pettibon, highly influenced by William Blake and Goya, was central to the early punk visual aesthetic, producing art for his brother’s band, Black Flag. The tension between “weak” and “strong” inherent to his work was summarized by Pettibon himself when he argued, “I am really asking is for you to look at Gumby with the same kind of respect that you would if it was some historical figure or Greek statue.”
Read moreA Response
Kazimir Malevich: popular avant-gardist
It is sad to see Brit Schulte – a founding editor – part ways with Red Wedge. If there is one constant, however, it is change. Over the past year there have been an increasing number of challenges in maintaining Red Wedge as we had been previously organized – especially as a few editors, including Brit, have been finishing up graduate degrees. More importantly, our ideas evolved in different directions. While we are sad to see Brit go, an open discussion is preferable to papering over differences. There will, we hope, be further opportunities to collaborate – and they will be more productive if we all know exactly where we stand.
Read moreA Resignation
I was frustrated. Like I oft am, I admit. None of the contributions from the conference floor seemed to carry with them a nuanced understanding of aesthetic criticism, of art, of culture (let alone how Marxists or more broadly how the Left could participate in these things). I wasn't alone: there existed a small, equally frustrated community, with an even larger periphery of curiosity and cultural interest.
We endeavored to establish a dialogue, debate, body of writing and eventually a performance circuit that saw itself in the many traditions of: surrealism, constructivism, Marxist cultural criticism, DAdA, the propaganda of Bolshevism, the W.P.A. art campaigns,
Read moreThe Cultural Economy of Star Wars
Star Wars stands out as perhaps the most popular franchise in the history of science fiction and fantasy. George Lucas' original trilogy did what even Stanley Kubrick's 2001 failed to accomplish: it made Hollywood executives look to speculative fiction as a genre worthy of investment and promotion.
One can easily date the origin of Hollywood's current reliance on the genre for the profitability of the industry itself to the original film. With the rebirth of the franchise at the hands of director J.J. Abrams the cycle has come full circle. Abrams’ The Force Awakens is a direct homage to the original film, boasting an almost identical narrative structure keeping with the saga's “rhyming” tendency.
Read moreMonk Time
The world must know. The world simply must know, must be shaken by the shoulders until it collectively acknowledges that something like the Monks can exist. That there can be such a thing as “avant-garde garage rock,” and that it can be played by active American G.I.’s increasingly alienated with the army. It needs to know, fifty years to the calendar month after the release of their only album.
Ten years back there was in fact something of a surge in interest around the Monks. A documentary was made, a tribute album was put out featuring the (International) Noise Conspiracy, the Fall, and a few other recognized inheritors of the garage rock sound.
Read moreThe Communal Order of the Ouroboros #4
The Communal Order of the Ouroboros is written by St. Guillotine and illustrated by Craig E. Ross. You can read this comic from the beginning by clicking here. The Communal Order of the Ouroboros is a highly esoteric yet self-proclaimed open coven for all Communist witches, warlocks, and other magical and/or mystical Marxists. This comic is the magical diary or "Communist Grimoire" told through the first person perspectives of 5 communist witches who start a coven dedicated to using any magical means necessary to overthrow the dictatorship of capital.
Read moreCall to Artists: April First Strike
Photo by Bob Simpson
Red Wedge will be publishing a series of articles surrounding the April 1st strike. These will deal with the impact of austerity on artists, educators and social life, both materially and ideologically; the ongoing neoliberal assault on all that is not of practical and immediate use to capital. We are putting out a call for artists, in the coming two weeks, to make drawings, collages, graphic images, or anything else that might be of use to the struggle. Submit your images to us by March 27 for consideration.
Read moreWords, Actions, and Being "Alright"
There is nothing about that six second video that is not wonderful and beautiful. A diverse crowd of anti-racists – Black Lives Matter of course, but also supporters of Bernie Sanders, immigrant rights and anti-Islamophobia activists – jumping up and down and shouting Kendrick Lamar lyrics in celebration: they just shut down Donald Trump.
Trump supporters and other conservatives – as well as Trump himself – are now whining about “thugs,” and threatening to show up at Sanders’ rallies. Centrists and a great many liberals are wringing their hands about whether Trump’s “free speech” has been violated – as if Trump or his supporters have ever shown such regard for our right to express ourselves.
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