[Classical dress became popular. against the left and…]

Scan page 7

Classical dress became popular. against the left and the sans:culottes, far outstrips Robespierre's repression in its ferocity and scope.

From that day the republic of proprietors' could stand on its own feet.

The French bourgeoisie found itself unable to separate the revolFi dis sarage rartoon The classic heroism of the French revolution comes from the fact that it joined the revolutionary spirit of two classes.

But the fire they had lit dazzled the bourgeoisie of 1789; they draped their actions in styles and events drawn from Roman antiquity.

Napoleon, their new Caesar, was to spread their revolution across Europe.

But in the wake of his armies there marched a silent ghost the spectre of Communism.

The Ri. Honourable Fdmand Burke MO movement by embracing it in the tentacles of the state.

They seek to offer an independent individual solution as an alternative to mass action.

For a Trotskyist the question of tribunals is not one of reform and improvement but of abolition. A complete boycott of all tribunals is not a matter of tactics but a matter of principle.

SPURIOUS Tribunals do no more than provide a spurious respectability for the employers' right to sack and exploit.

Their role as an state is inbuilt.

An industrial tribunal for example is chaired by a legally qualified person sitting with two lay officials, one of them drawn from the ranks of the employers, the other a trade unionist.

The legally qualified chairman can on occasion turn out to be a Brigadier who has done a little extra swotting.

The "trade unionist" invariably turns out to be annuated hack who foll procceding with some c and occasionally struggles question which will show is with the workers.

MAJORITY

The employers will occasionally be the professions. in unionist shows tendency to worker involved given powers to decision The tribunal Examine cases of adjunct of almost a superows the lifficulty to ask a his heart representative La member of case the trade an unexpected entify with the . the tribunal is reach a majority lowered 10 unfa r dismiss.!.

It is popularly believed that tribunals can stop an employer sacking workers on strike. This is not so. All an employer is required to do is to sack everybody on strike.

Only in cases where such sackings are selective can unfair dismissal be claimed!

These exclusions lead to the unedifying sight of a worker who has been made redundant trying to prove that it should have been someone else who was chopped.

It is as if someone appealing against a prison sentence had to nominate someone else to take his or her place in the cell, should the appeal succeed.

RECORD In the case of equal pay tribunals the record of the first year has been appalling.. The crudest tricks by employers in grading women differently from men have all been accepted.

This reached such a pitch that following the Trico ruling (reversed not by appeals but by a 20-week strike) the bourgeois press started wailing that unless more decisions went the way of women workers the tribunals would become "discredited"

This outcry illustrates what the bourgeoisie require from the tribunals — just enough favourable decisions to keep workers from throwing them out.

In practice the tribunals now act The trade unionist tribunal does not have to be a hack. He or she does have to be a class collaborator.

In one of the minor clauses of the Act governing industrial tribunals the role of the state is expressed clearly.

A Guide to Unfair Dismissals states:

"An industrial tribunal is obliged to dismiss any complaint which is shown to have been necessary to safeguard national security. A certificate signed by or on behalf of a Minister of the Crown is conclusive evidence that the dismissal was to safeguard national security"

In other words when the authority of the state is directly invoked the tribunal must 101 even listen to the complaint Strikes are the weapon of clas war. The history of reformism ha: been to enchain that weapon withir limits, to fetter it with institutions CHAINS Tribunals represent chains tha must be broken to allow thi working class to fight effectively As Lenin wrote in The Stati and Revolution:

"A democratic republic is thi best possible shell for capitalism and therefore once capital ha gained control of the very best shel ... it establishes its power s* ecurely, so tirmly, that no change either of persons, of institutions, o of parties in the bourgeois-demo ashlin man ahala it "

Scan page 8

The Exhibition on Unofficial Art at the ICA which ended on February 27th, reviewed by depicted contented bronzed from the Stalinist stranglehold of workers and granite deifications of the plastic arts.

In sharp distinction to the inven- exhibition is shared with the powertive and lyrical dynamism of the ful, heavily executed oil paintings earlier period, Stalinist Academia is of Oscar Rabin. obedience to the monolithic state. chrome shapes built with a palette The Tretyakov Gallery best knife are combined with fine brushreflects in terms of art, the liberal- work of muted colour within a firm isation' and continuance of Stalin- and accomplished composition. 1950's. solution to the problems of inteA greater affluence has led to grating three-dimensional spacial the demand that art should reach relationships to the two dimenout to the international main- sions of the canvas surface.

1 nus Sergei ! which I Degas, C Matisse, was opel In su art forn were inf political unique experim 1923.

Avan by B! Rodcher sky, Kal Chagall Over fifty Soviet artists who are not united either schematically or artistically, have joined forces in their common determination that art must have greater autonomy from the official dictates than it presently enjoys.

This exhibition shows fruits of their labours.

To understand their art some background knowledge is useful.

The increased development of capitalism in Russia at the turn of the century was made possible by the investment of capital from Western Europe, and especially A by-product of this financial chain was the patronage of the class of Russian industrialists for the European radical developments in art made around the turn of the 20th century by 1914, one muustrialse, shchukin had collection 1._ 1a-...1 ncluded works by Moner, "ezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Kousseau and Picasso, and n to public viewing. .ch a way the revolutionary is of Cubism and Futurism 'used into the revolutionary events to produce the and brilliant explosion of ental art between 1917 and t-garde works and projects Lissitzky, Leonidov, nko, Eisenstein, Mayakovndinsky, Pevsner, Malevich, and the Vesnin brothers, to name but a few, took a vanguard position in that heroic struggle for socialism.

Their common purpose was the synthesis of all productive activity; thus industry, architecture, painting, graphics, propaganda, industrial design, poetry, films and the theatre became forged into an instrument of the revolution.

The creative scope of this period has had a profound but largely unacknowledged influence in every country of the world, as refracted and extended through the Bauhaus of Germany between the wars.

The seizure of power by the bureaucracy, led by Stalin, was the final nail in the coffin for this movement which had suffered from the general exhaustion from the revolutionary period, from the previous famines and disruptions of early Soviet life, and the defeat of European revolutions.

Stalin's policy of 'Socialism Neizuestnu Machine Mar Bronze, 1961-2 cations in • the field of art. Tr concept or une arist-engineer wi replaced by the academic o oil painter, whose job it was, and is, t idealise and propagandise the stat In 1932, all painting and scull ture were placed under the centra ised control of the Union of Artist and isaac Brodsky, an artist traine in the pre-revolutionary Academ and a notorious opponent of a post-Impressionist art, became tr director of the new Academ!

Its chief function, as is that ‹ all Academies, was to aggrandi and perpetuate the status quo. Wit the excuse of "popular art" , wor] Summers.

Lenin and Stalin.

essentially static and dull, glorifying ism since Kruschev's reforms in the stream, gathering pace alongside consumer demands for a greater choice in such things as clothing and popular music.

Such demands for a greater flexibility led this group of artists to attempt to display their works without state sponsorship for the first time in 44 years.

Perhaps the artist best known to the West in this group is Ernst Neizvestny, whose contribution of etchings and sculpture use the human body as the point of departure.

He uses elongated and tortured forms which are somehow neither kind of mechanised biologymore a SURVIVAL Their savage angularity, recalling Picasso's sketches for 'Guernica' are loaded with sexuality - not of the kind associated with the idealised aesthetics of 'soft porn' but more indicative of sex as a part of tough survival.

His forms unite the enduring qualities of Henry Moore and the humanism of Rodin, to express a vision of a humanity born to Historically speaking, the work of Neizvestny is a progressive break ON Galler Tim Neizvestny's dominance of this Bold and high-contrast monoHis works show mature SYMBOL Students of art will be familiar with the fish as a historic symbol of Christianity. Is it in continuity of this tradition that dead fish figure prominently in three ot the paintings on exhibition?

Another work depicting the Crucifixion in front of a bleak industrial landscape suggests an affirmation of this. Such reactionary forms of dissidence find their literary parallel in Solzhenitsyn.

However, two works distinguish this artist from such a position. A painting BATTAITIES nainting called America chows a photo-montaged cat eating a fish on the rooftop of a black and inhuman citvscape. Another shows a woman's torso in the form of an article of clothing hanging on a washing-line.

While this symbol has become banal to the Western public familiar with the book of Germaine Greer, the inclusion of this symbol is a welcome attestation that the struggle for women's equality is not confined to the West.

But an overall impression suggests that where Rabin lays on his paint with a palette knife, he lays on his crude symbolism with a trowel.

Such crude and regressive allegory pervades the work of other artists who lack Oscar Rabin's pictorial talents. A painting by Alexander Rabin contrasts a foreground of a smashed and ruined wooden edifice holding a fallen horseshoe, a crucifix and a ripped playing card against a background of endless blue-grey architectural modernity. Above this desert of a city hangs a portrait of Lenin.

AMBIGUOUS

But some clearly dissenting works are more subtle, ambiguous and interesting, like Ilya Kabakov's presentation a small multifractured mirror held in place by a gigants: thick grey frame. Near the base of this frame, a hand gently holds an egg.

While much of the remaining work is didactically religious this does not mean that the majority of exhibitors are directly ideological.

Most works are a reflection, (if a somewhat pale one) of the major currents in European and American art from, say 1900 to 1960.

Sitnikov and Birger may be described as Impressionists; Kalinin. Kropivnitskaya and Yankilevsky are Surrealists in the most individualistic and idealistic sense; while the more measured work of Kulbak is closer to Magritte.

This exhibition represents diversity of artistic approach, based not on the developments taking place in the USSR, but those outside it. That such initiative should be hampered by the Stalinist bureaucracy is indicative of its general role in fettering development in the Soviet Union.

IRONY It is an irony that the Western modes of art received such great impetus from the Bolshevik avant-garde period, and now should be considered as an exclusively capitalist and degenerate development.

Trotskyists should on one hand recognise that the objective necessity of a break from Stalinism in the USSR will be reflected in cultural controversy; but on the other hand, we should not be diverted from attacking the backward, confused or reactionary elements of this exhibition.

In the 1930s Andre Breton and Diego Rivera put forward a clear Marxist position on art which offers a key to this exhibition:

"Our aims -The independence of The revolution -liberation of art!"