Something just clicked in my head that morning… I literally said to myself, ‘Fuck art. I’ve gotta get out of the basement. I’ve gotta see the world. I’ve gotta make a difference!’7
George Grosz: Fuck art!
Artists are Cleaners
THE GERMAN PAINTER George Grosz decided, at the end of the First World War, that he could not simply stand around sketching the collapse of his society. It gradually became clear to Grosz — as it did to many Euopeans during the ’20s — that the unfinished business of the First World War was about to result in a second. Surely, he thought, as an artist, there was something he could do to prevent this catastrophe. His prewar art training had not prepared him for this at all. He’d learned how to describe, how to decorate and — thanks to Van Gogh and Gaugin — how to express himself. But what the world now needed was art to inflame, art to shock, art that would slap the people on the street in the face, make them realise the danger lurking on the horizon and show them how to do something about it. Grosz’s work took on a cold-blooded objectivity. ‘I considered myself a natural scientist,’ he explained. ‘I spared no one.’1 Grosz’s new art wasn’t pretty — but what good was pretty art? What good was art at all, unless it helped the world? ‘I considered all art senseless,’ Grosz later recalled, ‘unless it served as a weapon in the political arena.’2
By this point, Grosz had become one of the central figures in the Berlin Dada movement. Dada had begun as a night of noise and nonsense in a Zurich nightclub in 1916. The club’s name, ‘Cabaret Voltaire’, signified the movements aims — combining the anarchic spirit of the cabaret with the sharp-eyed skepticism of the Enlightenment. Dada quickly opened branches in Paris, New York and Berlin, adapting to its surroundings wherever it went. In Paris, for example Dada was an absurd, existential protest — a revolt against sanity in a world gone insane. In Berlin, it took a more constructive approach — pointing fingers and naming names. The Berlin Dadaists could have no use for a movement that simply hoped to smash the world up, because it seemed to them that their world was already pretty well smashed. Berlin Dada became a program of action, designed to shake people out of their stupor.
Following the form of other Dada invasions, the Berlin contingent put on Dada ‘revues’ — nights of artistic entertainment — or so the punters thought. ‘They came expecting to see a show,’ Grosz later recalled in his memoir, ‘we simply told them the truth.’ Raoul Hausman would walk out on to the stage, point to the audience, and say, ‘Would you just look at this big crock of shit before us!’3 The Berlin Dadaists threw themselves into the life of the city — chewing it up, vomiting it back out, and presenting it on a plate for the populace. They sliced up the newspapers and magazines and stuck them back together in frightening new combinations, to show people what they were really looking at over their morning coffee.
Not all of Dada’s targets were political or social. Among its countless announcements, broadsides and manifestos came a curious document called Dadaistisches Manifest, authored by Richard Huelsenbeck, demanding an end, not to war-mongering, fascism, racism or any of the other countless problems of the day, but to expressionism. What, Huelsenbeck asks of the German people, have these expressionists done for you lately?
Have the expressionists satisfied our expectations for an art of the present day?
No No No!4
The problem with expressionism, the Dadaists felt, was that it was too emotional. The Dada painter Francis Picabia insisted that painters who use emotional themes in their work (love, heartbreak, tragedy) are guilty of manipulating their audience, and that you, the art-lover, are an idiot if you’ll allow yourself to be fooled by such a cheap trick. Feelings, Picabia wrote in 1920, are a dime a dozen:
You are always looking for an emotion that has already been felt, just as you like to get an old pair of trousers back from the cleaners, which seem new, as long as you don’t look too close. Artists are cleaners, don’t be taken in by them.5
If emotional art is a con, then the whole German romantic tradition becomes deeply suspect. The dadaists mercilessly sent it up in their Pan Germanic Poetry Contest. Eleven poets appeared on stage, reciting poetry at the top of their lungs. ‘They made gestures, brushed tears from their eyes, held hands over their hearts.’6 Who will win? the audience wondered. Who has the greatest sorrow, the heaviest heart, the most serious case of einsamkeit? In the end, the dada judges declared the contest a draw.
Romanticism was bad enough, but expressionism — a kind of uber-romanticism in which emotion becomes the artist’s only consideration — was much worse. Kokoschka painted a whole world viewed entirely through the prism of the artist’s feelings. His portraits of other people were, essentially, self-portraits — an attempt to represent the emotions stirred in him by other people, rather than the people themselves. ‘Therefore,’ concluded Dada theoretician Johannes Baargeld, ‘Kokoschka can now with certainty be considered the inventor of the automechanical leech “self-help”.’7
For the dadaists, expressionism, by peddling art as emotional therapy, was counterproductive. Expressionist art turned pain into an aesthetic spectacle, thereby making it beautiful. The spectator settles into his easychair, confident that he understands suffering. Meanwhile, out on the street, the world gets worse, and suffering continues. Expressionists, Huelsenbeck declared, are people ‘who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street.’8 Expressionist art inspires contemplation, where for Grosz and the dadaists, art — if it was to be of any use at all in the world — must inspire action.
Distress Cries Aloud
EMO HAS A fondness for expressionism — which makes sense, since both represent romanticism run riot, the expression of feelings elevated above every other concern. The very first emo band, Rites of Spring, adorned the cover of their 1991 album End on End with an expressionist woodcut — a perfect visual equivalent for the music inside.1 The sleeve of Saves the Day’s In Reverie also featured expressionist prints. The booklet illustrations show Kokoschka-like femme fatales drawn with violent gestures and a gloomy young man with haunted eyes above sunken cheeks, his mind being slowly strangled by his own heart.2
Expressionism has also proved useful to what Neil Strauss calls ‘the eyeliner punk pack’. The Alkaline Trio promoted their 2008 album The Agony and the Irony by posing for photos in front of what looks like the set from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.3 AFI signalled the beginning of its transition from cartoon punk to gothic revival with an expressionist-style illustration of a graveyard at midnight on the cover of The Art of Drowning.4 Inside is more emotional art — one drawing shows a haunted-looking young man standing in a bleak cityscape wearing a Misfits-style ‘Devilock’ — Munch as a punk. My Chemical Romance prefers a more meticulous, comic-book style of art for their sleeves. But their band logo is expressionist to the core — the letters are formed from violent brushstrokes, as though painted in a great burst of inspiration, or as a cathartic release from some enormous psychic pain. The expressionists talked of ‘the charging of every action with significance and soul’ — everything, from a great triptych to the title page of a hastily written pamphlet — was to be done with passion and emotional force.5 The message of My Chemical Romance’s logo is exactly this: we are sincere, emotional people, everything we do is intense.
My Chemical Romance’s videos and performances also bear a strong resemblance to expressionist theatre — which flourished during the same period as the art movement and began with a play written by a painter — Kokoschka’s ‘Murderer, Hope of Women’. Photos from a production of Ernst Toller’s expressionist play Die Wandlung , staged in Berlin in 1919, look uncannily like stills from My Chemical Romance’s tour film, The Black Parade Is Dead. One image from Toller’s play shows four soldiers in corpse-paint making violent, agonised gestures against the backdrop of a flaming wreck. The figure in the middle, with his shock of white hair, black make-up under the eyes, and panicked expression, could be Gerard Way.6
The story of Die Wandlung al
so has a familiar ring about it. The play tells the story of Friedrich, a young man with a heart full of dreams. His early optimistic view of life is completely shattered by the war. His dreams are full of armies of skeletons marching through the darkness, troop trains full of undead soldiers. Friedrich returns home, and tries to make art. He is busy working on a statue representing victory when he is interrupted by two war cripples begging for alms. This pathetic display shocks our hero into a new conception of life. ‘Fuck art!’ he says, smashing the statue to bits, ‘I’ve gotta make a difference!’ Much soul-searching ensues, until finally Friedrich realises what he must do. He grabs some kind of megaphone and rushes out into the city square, shouting:
You are all of you no longer men and women; you are distorted images of your real selves. And yet you could still be men and women, still be human, if only you had faith in yourselves and in humanity!7
Inspired by Friedrich’s call to arms, the broken, beaten and damned join together and sing a revolutionary anthem. But Friedrich knows that singing alone will not change the world. ‘Go to your rulers and proclaim to them with the organ tone of a million voices that their power is but an illusion,’ he urges. ‘Now march! March forward into the light of day!’8
Toller’s play puts the lie to the dadaists’ assertion that all expressionists prefer their armchairs to the noise of the street. Die Wandlung is just one example of a politically committed variety of expressionism that flourished in the wake of the war. Just like the dadaists, most expressionist painters had their outlook and conception of art profoundly altered by the First World War. Some, it’s true, retreated into themselves — but others believed that the emotional impact of their art could be used to bring about real change in the world. In 1919 Max Pechstein designed the cover for a collection of expressionist statements and manifestos entitled An alle Kunstler! (‘To All Artists!’) A romantic young man, his face gaunt, his limbs straining, crawls out of the wreckage of a smouldering, oppressive city-scape. One hand reaches for the sky, the other clutches his own burning heart, which lights up the picture with dazzling red flames — the hero’s sole guide in the wilderness.9 The message is: the world must be saved, and the artist, having brought the community together with his appeals to the spirit, will lead the way. Three years earlier, Hermann Bahr had written:
Never yet has any period been so shaken by horror, by such a fear of death. Never has the world been so silent, silent as the grave. Never has man been more insignificant. Never has he felt so nervous. Never was happiness so unattainable and freedom so dead. Distress cries aloud; man cries out for his soul; this whole pregnant time is one great cry of anguish. Art too joins in, into the great darkness she too calls for help, she cries to the spirit; this is expressionism.10
This was undoubtedly stirring stuff in 1916. But as the interwar period dragged on, and the prospect of another conflict began to loom on the horizon, the romantic rhetoric of expressionism began to sound suspiciously vague. It was all very well to talk about crying out into the great darkness, or to speak — as the Blauer Reiter group did — of bringing about ‘spiritual renewal’ through art — but what were artists actually doing to help the situation?11 To Georg Lukacs, writing in 1934, such expressionist hogwash reflected ‘a general estrangement from the concrete problems of the economy, a concealment of the connections between society, economy and ideology, with the result that these questions are increasingly mystified.’12 Marxist critics like Lukacs believed — as punk-era critics later would — that it was the task of the modern artist to identify actual problems in society, reveal the hidden causes of these problems, and propose solutions. Ernst Toller realised this. Art and theatre, he felt, could not simply go on saying ‘everything is collapsing, and this is how I feel about it’ Toller felt that art must follow up its emotional appeals by providing concrete ideas for a new society.
But Toller was unusual. Most expressionist art in the interwar period seemed merely to give voice to feelings of crisis and chaos in a time of crisis and chaos. The world is falling apart, and the expressionist says to his public, ‘it feels like the world is falling apart’. ‘Yes!’ says the sensitive aesthete, ‘I feel the same way.’ The result is an army of people full of feeling, but with no real idea how to help the world. This, expressionism’s critics believed, could only lead to trouble.
Rock Stars Are Fascists, Too
IN 1924 A lonely, angry dreamer — a failure as an artist, a failure as a revolutionary — sat in his prison cell and considered what it would take to make his people rise up and build a better world. He came to the conclusion that, while intellectuals and politicians might attach great importance to ideas, what really moved the masses was emotion.
…all great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the world hurled among the masses.1
This, in turn, led him to understand the importance of propaganda. Keeping the people informed would cause them to think too much, and nothing would be done. But propaganda, if used correctly, could stir those ‘human passions’ necessary to bring about radical change:
Its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions, and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.2
In place of rational solutions to the problems of an increasingly complex world, he would offer people feelings, images, myths and symbols. These he felt confident they would accept, because the real choices before them were so difficult.
The author, Adolf Hitler — writing in his memoir Mein Kampf — was using language that we have become quite well acquainted with in this story so far. His preference for ‘emotional sentiments’ over the ‘so-called intellect’ and his belief in the power of ‘human passions’ all have a familiar ring about them, as does his insistence elsewhere on the restoration of myth and symbols as a cure for modern soul-sickness. Nazism, as Bertrand Russell points out, is really just the logical outcome of romantic philosophy applied on a mass scale.3 Nazism sees the romantic worship of passion and intensity, the elevation of the individual genius above the herd, and the feeling for nature and landscape, turned into politics.
This explains why Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda minister, made a serious attempt to cultivate expressionism as a national style. ‘The fascists, with some justification, see expressionism as a heritage they can use,’ wrote Lukacs in 1934.4 Expressionism, after all, was just the latest permutation of the romantic movement — and what could be more authentically German than romanticism? Goebbels was something of a romantic himself; he wrote his doctoral thesis on Romantic Drama, and in 1929 he wrote a sentimental novel set in the Alps called Michael.5 Goebbels recognised in the expressionists’ landscape paintings a similarly sentimental feeling for the fatherland which, he believed, would make them ideal for propaganda purposes. He cannot have failed to see, also, that the rhetoric of expressionist protest art: ‘the world is in chaos; we must unite!’ — was exactly the kind of emotional bait a fascist leader could use to drum up support. The expressionist call to arms bypassed the ‘so-called intellect’ and went straight for the heart.
Although Hitler’s innate conservatism would quickly cause Nazism and expressionism to part ways, Goebbels’ patronage left the style tainted by association for decades to come. David Bowie must have known this at the time he became interested in expressionist art, but had thus far done nothing to distance himself from the work’s overtones. In fact, Bowie, much to fans and critics’ horror, had already embraced fascism. In 1975 he was living as a virtual recluse in Los Angeles, studying the occult and Nazi theology. The following year he returned to Britain after touring America, and made what looked to many like a Nazi salute to his fans waiting outside Victoria Station. Later, while working on The Idiot in Paris, Bowie told Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe:
I’d adore to be prime minister…and yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can rid ourselves from t
he sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial government and get it over with as soon as possible. People have always responded better under a regimental leadership.6
Bowie had a typical Nietzschean artist’s sense of morality in that he didn’t really have one. His duty, to paraphrase Dave Gahan, was always to beauty — it would never occur to him to alter a line in a song or an image in his show because it could be seen as ‘immoral’. If it sounded good, if it looked good, if it meant something to him, it was in. This is no less than we expect of a romantic artist. ‘The artist’s feeling,’ declared the German painter Caspar David Friedrich in 1818, ‘is his law.’7
But Friedrich never played the Hammersmith Palais. Bowie did, and here his insistence on subjectivity took on a new significance. He’d created art in defiance of all moral laws. Now it seemed that there were thousands of people who recognised the truth of that art, who agreed with the things he was saying. Society is going to the dogs, morality is bunk, nothing is true, everything is permitted. ‘Yes, yes!’ said the thousands of Ziggy clones in the audience. What conclusions could he draw from this? Obviously, he was even more special than he thought he was. He was blessed with a unique ability to express the unconscious desires of this community he’d created. It wasn’t as though they’d elected him, and he never had to ask them what they wanted — he seemed to be able to ‘express’ them directly. There was no need for voting or debate or any other boring democratic process. Ideas like his would never survive in a democracy, because they are too bold, too unique. But here he was, with thousands of kids who all seemed to want the same thing in front of him. Imagine what they could do…8
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 30