"In Central Park"

Hal Foster

"The Gates", the orange portals and banners that punctuated many of the paths in Central Park from 12 to 27 February, were greeted with great delight. People were first softened up by the numbers – 7532 portals, 5290 tons of steel, 60 miles of vinyl tubing, 116,389 miles of pleated nylon, 23 miles of trails, $21 million in costs – and then worked over by all the wacky presentations by the Bulgarian-born Christo and his French-born partner Jeanne-Claude (she of the punk-red hair). Contemporary art is big, bright, expensive and eager to please, right? So maximise these qualities, involve as many people as possible (640 paid workers to assemble the gates and 340 volunteer ‘ambassadors’ to open them), and you have a winning formula. Scale of work and size of audience will trump everything else (the hero of the piece might be the head engineer), and the piece will triumph as spectacle. If the actual location of The Gates was the park, its effective site was the global media (including the souvenir market online): that is to say, its site was everywhere.

rwnorris writes:

Vietnam War Conscientious Objector Republishes Memoir

Robert W. Norris, a native Californian and Vietnam War conscientious objector (CO) now living in Japan, understands what many of the Iraq War generation are going through. Thirty-four years after being court-martialed as a CO, Norris has republished his first novel in order to give them an alternative viewpoint.

Looking for the Summer, published January 15, 2005 by Lulu Press, tells the story of a Vietnam War CO's adventures and search for identity on the road from Paris to Calcutta in 1977.

"Children of a Lesser Marxism?"*

Steve Wright, Historical Materialism

Reviewing:

Futuro anteriore. Dai "Quaderni Rossi" ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano
G. Borio, F. Pozzi & G. Roggero

Rome: Derive Approdi, 2002.

La nefasta utopia di Potere operaio. Lavoro tecnica movimento nel laboratorio politico del Sessantotto

F. Berardi

Rome: Castelvecchi. 1998.

1.

While it has inspired more than its share of critical essays and polemics over the past forty years, the political tendency of operaismo (workerism) has been the subject of few book-length analyses in Italy or elsewhere. Perhaps this is less surprising in the English-speaking world, where for whatever reason, Italian workerism has commonly been passed over in discussions of postwar marxism(s).(1)

In Italy’s case this is a little more perplexing, given operaismo’s influence for many years within the local left and labour movement. Back in the late seventies, it is true, there was a collection of papers from a conference organised by the Istituto Gramsci. There leading Communist party (PCI) intellectuals — many of them former workerists — grappled with the tendency’s historical significance, as well as its meaning for their own political commitments of that time.(2)

Interestingly enough, the conference in question also allowed a certain space for contributions from workerist intellectuals deemed ‘to reek of autonomia’,(3) at a time when that movement and the PCI were themselves daggers drawn. In any case, the arrests of 1979 onwards, led by Judge Calogero (himself close to the PCI), both put the final nail in Autonomia as a mass phenomenon, and marginalised operaismo as a current within Italy’s cultural and political life. To use a much-quoted phrase of Primo Moroni and Nanni Balestrini, the years that followed were ones of ‘cynicism, opportunism and fear’,(4) granting little time or space for dreams of a life beyond capital and the state.