Four essays on art and anarchism

The relationship between art and anarchism has a long but often hidden history. Artists as diverse as Courbet, Pissarro, Signac, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Gris, and many others, have been positively identified as being anarchist, or having sympathies with anarchist ideas. But, as Michael Paraskos suggests in the course of these essays, there is an argument to be made that anarchist ideas are at the heart of all acts of artistic creation. From this Paraskos argues that we need to reconsider what it means to educate artists. He questions the usefulness of putting art students through an inherently uncreative university art education system and advocates instead an organic and open-ended network of ’table-top art schools’. Each of theses, he suggests, would be centred on small groups of practising artists and have its own identity and interests. After considering the often controversial work of the Savoy Press, Paraskos ends with a discussion on a small group of collaborative artists in Cyprus, which included his father, Stass Paraskos, who decided to re-conceptualise their painted canvases as shared anarchist communes. The result was a radical new form collaborative painting. Although dealing with the serious matters of art and political anarchism in the cultural sphere, Paraskos’s light touch and generous writing style is filled with humour and personal anecdote, and is a pleasure to read.