Aesthetics

Maodada is the old man-child President who says: ‘10,000 years are too long’ and ‘bomb the headquarters’, as if he himself was not inside the headquarters. The Cultural Revolution was the most massive collective political phenomenon ever known in the entire history of humanity. Hundreds of millions of men, women, young people, crossed billions of kilometres on foot, by train and bicycle to rewrite history, to overturn Confucian conformism, to free human beings from the capitalist psychology that remained despite the socialist revolution. This process reached such a point of contradiction that those who rebelled against conformism used the most conformist violence, those who battled for liberation from the psychology of arrivisme were distinguished by the most unbridled arrivisme, those who struggled for equality exalted privilege, those who fought for the new culture spread and publicized lack of culture, those who desired liberty became the unintentional promoters of dictatorship. During this process […] art […] became daily life. When […] the Dadaists arrived on the scene, the first thing they shouted was: ‘Down with art! Down with daily life! Down with the separation between art and daily life!’ In ’77 we said: ‘Dadaism plus Mao’. – Radio Alice

Today the avant-garde is not moral commitment, beautiful soul, ideological militancy, etc; the new realism is rather the testimony of a desperate epoch, constructive punk realism, expressive violence and shaking the techniques of mystification of communication. A single punk fanzine contains more reality than all the novels of Ecco and Orsenna. Disutopia – hope incarnated by that which we know can no longer sustain it – is the line of light for our world. The violence of our experience abstract, directed against us and against others, is the only possibility for producing catharsis, but a continually frustrated catharsis. This avant-garde that the sea of empty rose-colored fables of the ‘prize-winning contemporary novel’ cannot manage to annul. The avant-garde does not lead time, but rather is that which constitutes it radically; it is the definition of the beautiful that we have given and that becomes the conscious motor of production itself. – Antonio Negri