Aesthetisc and politics after the avant-garde.

Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century by Gerald Raunig. Trans. Aileen Derieg. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. Pp. 320. $17.95 paper.

One of the defining features of art during the period of modernity--the period, that is, when the concept of "art" with which we largely continue to operate came into focus--is its immediate relationship to the political. This relationship is twofold. The autonomy granted to the aesthetic in philosophical texts and social practices alike transformed art into a space of unique critical reflection not only on the traumas of modern social and political life but also on its own problems and incapacities. However, this power came with a built-in limit. Even while consecrated as the deepest expression of the human, the practice of art was defined through its very autonomy as having little real bearing on the direction of social life. This first, limited politics generated what has since come to be the clearest expression of art's relationship to politics: the desire of successive avant-gardes to undo art's autonomy by transforming life into art and art into life--a form of political and social revolution by means other than barricades and palace putsches. The melancholic reflections of the late Frankfurt School, the laments of Guy Debord against the society of the spectacle, and current anxieties about the unapologetic transformation of art and culture into new economic forces (whether explai ned through theories of creativity or exemplified by the weedlike growth of contemporary art museums worldwide), all share a single conclus ion: if revolution ever was possible through the transformative powers of art, that moment is now over once and for all. What …