Stevens reviewed G.B.H. This brought criticism from some who saw it as one-sided and premature. Here STEVE TAYLOR looks for historical parallels to analyse how the left has responded to questions of culture. The most depressing aspect of the criticism levelled at G.B.H was not the uniform hostility with which it was greeted by all sections of the left. It was the political as• sumptions and perspectives which lay at the heart of this criticism. That the left should have universally condemned a seven-part drama on the basis of one screened episode, two at most, is an act of supreme and thoughtless arrogance.
The fact that the conclusions drawn were so definitive, adds Sept. 14, 1991 No. 7 jury. It transforms a general clumsiness and idiocy into something that approaches totalitarianism. The summary trial and conviction of Bleasdale for G.B.H had all the insight, subtlety and self-awareness of a Stalinist show trial. Indeed, the actual language used by the left critics and commentators was entirely consistent with the language employed by the Stalinists in the debates and discussions which followed the October Revolution.
At that time, the Stalinists, proto and embryonic, demanded that all forms of art should Contorm a carry criteria. The conventions of this orthodoxy began as a series of open discussions, where oneset of artistic rules vied for prominence over another. What made these debates intrinsically reactionary was not the profound disagreements which emerged. Instead, it was the insistence, especially amongst the theorists associated with Proletkult, that valid art could only school of thought.
This insistence led inexorably towards the stagnant impasse of a state-supervised culture under Stalin in the 1930s. Imposing a totalitarian regime actually became easier because a dogmatic, ahistorical and inflexible approach to art and culture was already implicit in the terms of reference adopted by so many of the protagonists.
It is worth mentioning that the sides taken in these arguments over culture should reflect, almost to perfection, the later dichotomy between those who supported socialism in one COUNTTY and the internationalists.
Indeed, the most ardent opponent, from within the Central Committee, of an ideologically dictated or determined art was Trotsky. It is ironicthat so many English Trotskyists should be among the most vociferous in the condemnation of G.B H In addition, the left argued not merely from a partial viewing of the drama, but also from word - understanding of art. The concentration by left critics on the surface content of the work ignored the complexities of form and style. Not only in the collision of one type of drama against another, but also in the way in which perspectives were constantly shifted or undermined.
To have arrived at a definitive interpretation of the play, especially in the light of what might eventually transpire, ignores both the dynamic of the plot - things develop or change às a plot unfolds - and the fundamental ambiguity which distinguishes art from propaganAnd if art is not ambiguous, and therefore open to variety of interpretations, then why are bourgeois dealers and their lients willing to pay many housands of dollars for street posters which celebrate the Russian Revolution? It is unlikely that these posters have the same meaning for collectors and commodity brokers as they 1917.
Art is not a formal commodity in which ideology (or value for that matter) is fixed by simple virtue of weight, or materials or size. There is not a simple, linear, declamatory and purely mechanisticrelationship between art and the rest of society. Art is a highly mediated form of production and consumption.
"he interpretation of a piec of work is neither rigid no scientifically verifiable, and neither is it a football match se identified by the colour here the , their shirts. If we demand such conformity from art then we are doing nothing more than demanding the confirmation of our own prediceginnings of a Marxist approach if the left in this country at least bothered to view something in its totality before we open our collective mouth, or perhaps we should only study Trotsky up until 1905?