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The Guardian
02-03-2025
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- The Guardian
For a stagnating left mired in pessimism, Milton's radical vision is poetry in motion
'Is this pessimism?', TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. 'Well, yes.' How else, he wonders, 'are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance… and the almost complete failure of left responses to it to resonate beyond the ranks of the faithful?' Published originally in the New Left Review, the essay is part of Those Passions, a new collection of Clark's work. Clark is not a political theorist but a historian of art. A Marxist, much of his work explores the interface of art and politics with considerable nuance and depth, illuminating artists from Bosch to Pollock, Rembrandt to Lowry. The final section of the collection includes more straightforwardly political writing. For a Left with No Future is the weakest of the essays, whether on art or politics. It is nevertheless perhaps also the most significant, for not only does it provide a new perspective to much of Clark's other work, it also addresses a particularly keen question for our time – how should the left deal with its failure? In its pessimism and world-weariness, it seems to speak to many today. The title, Those Passions, is taken from Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias, an exploration of the inevitability of oblivion, a description of a half-buried statue of a once-great pharaoh of a once-great empire: 'Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.' That desolate landscape is, for Clark, a metaphor for modern civilisation, made barren by consumerism and the reduction of all to a 'spectacle'. Even more, it is a poetic description of the terrain in which the left finds itself. 'If the past decade or so is not proof that there are no circumstances capable of reviving the left in its 20th-century form,' he asks, 'then what would proof be like?' It is a pessimism both exaggerated and understated. It is exaggerated because Clark finds the roots of the left's defeat in human nature, in 'the human propensity to violence' and an inevitable 'hankering after evil' woven into our very being. He finds it also in modernity itself, which has created such atomised, unthinking, obedient individuals that they are 'no longer material for a society', a phrase borrowed from Nietzsche. These are not new ideas; but to root the left's demise in human nature and the nature of modernity is to deny the possibility of any resurrection. Indeed, Clark urges the left to abandon utopian ideas and embrace in its stead a 'tragic sense of life'. The tragic vision, which sustains a conservative view of the world, sees in the flawed and limited character of humans a warning against grand social change, insisting that faith, tradition and hierarchy are necessary guardrails against barbarism, a way of acknowledging, in the words of Leszek Kołakowski, the Polish Marxist turned Christian philosopher, 'life as inevitable defeat'. Yet, for all this, Clark's despair is also understated, because today's political malaise is more profound than he envisions – or is commonly acknowledged. It is not just the left that has imploded. Liberal and conservative traditions, too, have become drained of much of their life-force. These three main ideologies of modernity have clearly been antagonistic to each other. Yet they have also possessed a symbiotic relationship, one most clearly seen in the link between liberalism and radicalism. What we call liberal norms – democracy, equality, freedom of speech and association, the right of nations to self-determination and so on – became social realities largely through the efforts of radical movements and working-class organisations, and often in the face of ferocious opposition from liberal elites that sought to limit the scope of these norms, denying the majority of society, indeed the majority of the world, basic democratic rights. It was through the struggles of the dispossessed – of slaves to emancipate themselves, of colonial subjects confronting imperial rule, of the working class organising to improve their lives, of women claiming the right to vote – that liberal norms were made universal rather than remaining the exclusive property of a privileged few. The erosion of that radical universalist tradition has befuddled the left, detaching it from liberal traditions, and from class politics, and leaving the remnants more authoritarian and identitarian. It has also discombobulated liberalism. Without the buttress of radicalism, liberals themselves have become more illiberal, whether on free speech or democracy, and less willing to address issues of social inequality or working-class needs. Conservatism emerged initially as voicing hostility to modernity, and yet adapted to the new world so efficiently that it become a dominant governing force in a world painted largely in liberal tones. Over time, not liberalism but working-class and socialist movements became conservatism's principal enemy, an antagonistic relationship that helped define what conservatives wished to conserve. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion The erosion of the radical tradition has brought confusion to conservatism, too. Conservatives today seem to understand how to rip up the existing order, but have little conception about what should replace it, or what they wish to conserve. And so, we arrive in an age in which it is not just that the left has lost but that the main political traditions of modernity have all become exhausted. The book we need to make sense of these darkening times, Clark suggests, is Christopher Hill's The Experience of Defeat. First published in 1984, it is an exploration by the pre-eminent historian of 17th-century radicalism of the writings of English radicals after the crushing defeat that came with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, barely a decade after the execution of Charles I. The story that Hill tells cuts against the grain, though, of Clark's anti-utopianism. Hill depicts a generation of radicals defeated and subdued; but one that also sustained many who never abandoned their aspirations of renovating that radical tradition. John Milton was their 'prophet-poet' who, in his last great epic poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, most eloquently expressed the possibilities of hope and redemption. Apart from the Quakers, none of the radical groups that throng the English revolution – the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the Muggletonians and others – endured. But their ideas did. The belief in equality, democracy and universal suffrage, the challenge to impoverishment and class distinctions, all became woven into new radical movements in the 18th century. And then, Hill observes, the poets of the new radicalism, from Blake to Shelley, 'turned back to Milton… and the vision of the poet-prophet'. Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
Telegraph
24-02-2025
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- Telegraph
Are all paintings secretly political?
TJ Clark takes the title of his newest work, Those Passions, from Shelley's Ozymandias, in which artistic symbolism, political structures and the ruination of civilisations are intertwined. It's a fittingly intelligent reference for one of the most insightful and energetic art historians of our time. Clark's work in recent years has ranged from The Sight of Death (2006), a book-length meditation on two Poussin landscapes, to 'A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle', an essay published in the London Review of Books in January analysing Trump as not just a 'creature' of the the 'society of spectacle', but its 'master'. This new collection of old essays spans over two decades of writing on the sociopolitical condition, a testament to his career-long exploration of the intersection between art and politics. The earliest, 'Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International', is from 1997, and the most recent, 'A Preface to Pasolini', from 2023. They're grouped into three periods, 'Precursors', 'Moderns' and 'Modernities', uniting such diverse topics as Hieronymus Bosch's 'anthropology', sex and politics according to Delacroix, and Pollock's 'smallness'. Clark, who combines the roles of radical intellectual, academic art historian and self-admitted 'joker', sagely foresees in his introduction that 'those looking for coherence in what follows are likely to end up puzzled, and perhaps dissatisfied'. While his desire for the overthrow of capitalism is a recurrent message here, especially in the essays of 'Modernities', Clark offers no hope that such an event will occur. This is not a manifesto: it is, in his words, 'a path towards'. Clark has written so often about art and politics because he feels that 'in the modern period the two cannot avoid one another.' He adds: 'For good or ill, in the case of art, politics came to play the role that religion had played previously.' But the volatility and uncertainty of modern politics, by comparison with the relatively stable iconography of Christian tradition, have thrown Western artistic practice into flux. Art in the modern age, Clark writes, has 'had to put depth and dignity aside' to address the crumminess of modern life. A few questions in the introduction of Those Passions define the concerns to come: 'Does any art deserve the name 'political' if it fails to interrogate the nature of art itself, and the place of art in a pattern of political action? Are we meant to judge a political work of art by its politics, or by its success in giving a politics convincing form? Doesn't either yardstick just entrench the idea of 'the artwork', when this is the very idea that art-and-politics should be putting in doubt? Shouldn't we judge political art by its effects, not its beauty or truth?' Clark responds to these questions with musings that meander between a conversational tone, akin to notes transferred from a dictaphone or used in preparation for a lecture, and high-minded theorising that in places is so circuitous that several re-readings may be required. Clark can be thought-provoking, but by the same measure he succumbs, wittingly or not, to the fatal flaw of the intelligentsia: the premising of an argument on such a dense labyrinth of cultural reference, complex phrasing and recondite jargon that the core message risks being lost. Clark might desire revolution, but these essays are not for the people. The most rewarding passages thrive on Clark's close analysis of the artworks which is elevated by the wonderful illustrations in this edition. He approaches Diego Velázquez's Aesop (1639-40) and Mars (1640), which were potentially conceived together as part of the decoration of Philip IV's hunting lodge the Torre de la Parada, with a masterful eye for detail and true humanistic spirit. Of Mars, Clark writes: Mars's body – by far Velázquez's most astonishing treatment of the nude – is absurd by reason, above all, of its uncertain age and imperfection. (Recall that the figure is nearly life-size.) The incipient wattles at his neck, the thinness of flesh over his collar bone, the two harsh creases of fat on the belly, the claw-like fingers, the oversize thigh and calf... Is there another body in Western art whose subjection to ageing, to ordinary wear and tear, is treated so relentlessly? Maybe in Titian. Maybe a tortured Christ. But Velázquez's Mars is anti-Christ. And yet, beneath the rapturous analyses and boisterous political rhetoric, these essays harbour a simplistic cultural pessimism that rings hollow. There was no golden age of history, and there is a fallacious exceptionalism to the claim that the problems we face today are somehow more extreme and existential than those faced by our forebears. History is marked by those who have proclaimed the end of the civilised world. Still, where Clark is somewhat po-faced, at least Juvenal was amusing.
Telegraph
16-02-2025
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- Telegraph
‘Britain is just a lapdog of the American Empire'
TJ Clark, the Marxist art historian, is showing me a picture: a view of Stratford-upon-Avon by the French artist Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944), which he picked up in an antiques shop in Norfolk, where he has a second home, and put above the fireplace in his townhouse in south London. 'It's a wonderful painting,' says the bearded 81-year-old Bristolian (and occasional poet), who, prior to his retirement in 2010, taught for more than two decades at the University of California, Berkeley, 'and very much a homage to his father [the Impressionist Camille], one of my heroes.' Isn't, though, collecting art a little bourgeois for someone who later describes 'dear old Jeremy Corbyn' as a 'moderate'? Ah, Clark tells me, 'Marxism is many things, and many of them' – he sighs – 'are appalling, dreary, doctrinaire, and worse.' Yet, says this delightful veteran of the protests of '68, and former member of the Situationist International (an 'ultra-Left' organisation of social revolutionaries that, he explains, 'wanted to bring down capitalist society' during the 1960s), 'I certainly consider myself a Marxist.' It seems that politics – like art, if it's any good – can be rather complicated. Addressing complexity is a hallmark of Those Passions, a new collection of essays about art and politics written by Clark over the past 25 years. With high-minded pieces about, say, the German philosopher Hegel, it's unlikely to become a bestseller; throughout, Clark's references are exacting and lofty, for which he makes no apology: 'Dumbing down always comes across as completely fatuous and phoney,' he tells me. 'You've got to try and write as you think.' For those, though, who relish brilliant analysis of painting – as well as former students of art history, like me, for whom, at university, Clark was a sort of god – Those Passions will be essential reading. Its finest essays engage in depth with painting's subtle minutiae, observing and explaining how tiny touches can contribute to powerful overall effects. A bravura study of Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) is a case in point. (Clark agrees: 'It's one of the best essays in the book!') Likewise, his scintillating exposition of The Lion Hunt (1855) by Eugène Delacroix – a detail from which, reproduced on a French poster which he bought in 1966, dominates his study. For a scholar often characterised as a ringleader of the so-called 'New Art History' – which, around 1970, shifted the discipline away from, as he puts it, 'an exhausted formalism' (i.e., an old-school, connoisseurial preoccupation with style and iconography) to an engagement with wider social issues – Clark seems surprisingly obsessed with art's ravishing material properties. The title of his new book comes from Percy Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias', an unforgettable vision of a once-great civilisation half-sunk beneath the desert. It sets the tone, as Clark excoriates Western civilisation today, especially aspects of internet culture such as our reliance on smartphones and social media, and the veneration of 'influencers'. 'Yes, I hate it,' he tells me, simply. 'We live in a world where more and more of our everyday life is invaded by imagery that is produced and paid for and patronised by the powers-that-be.' So, we're victims of propaganda? 'I think we are. And even more,' he adds, invoking the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis's concept of 'techno-feudalism', 'we're colluding.' Is he a pessimist? 'Who couldn't be pessimistic about the state of the world?' replies Clark, who won't be drawn on Keir Starmer. ('My politics is still American politics,' he explains, although, he adds, 'I do think of Britain as just a lapdog of the American empire.') 'The world is a miserable place, and becoming, in my view, more miserable fast.' Still, he continues, while 'there's plenty of doom, that doesn't mean there's despair' – and he urges 'young people' to 'go into this social-media world of spectacle and endless, exorbitant information and communication, which is out of control, and fight within it, against it. It's vulnerable.' When it comes to art, rather than politics, Clark is similarly trigger-happy with condemnation. One of the best, and most provocative, essays in Those Passions, 'Picasso and the English', is a peppy takedown of this country's genteel contribution to Modernism. 'The Bloomsbury Group was never able to escape from its refined upper-class fastidiousness,' explains Clark, who also has little time for 'performative' 20th-century British artists such as Wyndham Lewis and Francis Bacon. Even Henry Moore, in a memorably magisterial aside in his new book, gets it in the neck as only 'an artist of the middle range'. Yet, Clark is a fan of the work of the 'disgraceful' British sculptor Eric Gill: 'You know, the one who had sex with his daughter? I mean, an abominable character, but, my God, he did some good sculpture.' So, he's no advocate for cancel culture? 'No, I'm not,' Clark replies. 'It's hard. There is cancel culture in the academy. It's not as bad as the Republicans pretend, but it's definitely there.' Often, he points out, 'the most poignant and useful depictions of revolution have come from reactionaries like Delacroix.' According to Clark, 'There are no rules in art. If you're good enough, you can get away with anything.' What does he make of the recent, radical shift within art history towards identity politics? 'All good Marxists are supposed to disapprove of identity politics, just as much as the Right does, actually,' Clark says, 'because it puts the accent on individual and group identity, rather than social position, and displaces the story from class struggle to racial and ethnic struggle.' When I bring up Katy Hessel's bestselling feminist history The Story of Art without Men, Clark says: 'I have time for it, but it's interesting to think, 'How about a history of art without the upper classes, without the bourgeoisie?'' For Clark, 'the history of art is a history of art produced within power structures. That doesn't mean that all art produced within those structures merely parroted the assumptions of those in charge. Or that all male artists produced a male view of women.' Even a seemingly misogynistic painting such as Delacroix's orientalist, quasi-pornographic extravaganza The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) – which Clark describes as a kind of 'ludicrous and disgusting fantasy of male power and murder of sex slaves' – conveys, he suggests, an ugly truth: 'It does, unfortunately, put on show, in a kind of hyperbolic, grotesque way, one side of male fantasy. We live in a world where it's all around us every day.' Still, Clark admires the 'persuasiveness', as he puts it, of 'sophisticated' writers and thinkers on identity politics such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Frank B Wilderson III: 'They're cantankerous and rebarbative, and I don't agree with them, but they have the same kind of passion that drove the great writers and thinkers of the Left in its heyday, who I go on very much admiring.' He mentions Rosa Luxemburg, Georges Sorel, and Frantz Fanon. The trouble with today's Leftist intellectuals, he suggests, is that 'I don't think they've ever faced up properly to the arrival of consumer society.' What about the charge, often asserted by the Right, that they're humourless? Clark guffaws. 'Who could refute it? They are humourless, of course they are! Or most of them. But, partly, it's not their fault. The world is not conducive to humour if you look at it from the point of view of a commitment to the weak, the oppressed, the poor.' As a former activist, what does he make of the recent attacks inside museums by climate-change protesters? 'I understand the impulse,' he replies, cautiously, 'but I don't think it's directed rightly.' Regarding restitution (another intractable issue for museums today), he has this to say: 'It's a mess. There's so much, right? We were a world empire, and we grabbed things from everywhere. Can everything go home? Obviously not. Nor should it. People don't want the world to be re-segregated.' He does, though, believe that the Parthenon Sculptures should be returned – 'because it's the right thing to do.' Why? 'In the end, it just makes such good sense for this particular object to be reconstituted in or very near the place it once was.' Clark's wife, Anne Wagner, the 19th-century sculpture specialist and self-confessed 'motor-mouth' (who also taught at Berkeley), pops her head around the door. 'Don't interrupt, dear,' her husband says. 'He's making me think like hell!' I sense our time is up. Last question. What advice would Clark give to young gallery-goers who want to learn how to look properly at art? He reflects for a moment. 'That it's still possible to stop in front of a picture you don't understand, and ask the question, 'What is this about? And why do I find it puzzling?' Art exists to arrest something in the world, and to make it strange again, and put us back in the position of not knowing exactly what we're confronting. That's a deeply human activity.'
