‘Temptation to behave is terrible’ (Brecht) 

Clean & Tidy is a practice-led investigation into Brechtian montage, estrangement and critical spectatorship within contemporary visual culture.  

Emerging from the doctoral research project PREFAB: Dissident Art-Making Against the Capitalist Common Sense (2022), the project extends this theoretical research as a means of making political art politically. Using Brecht’s political modernist purview, this series of drawings, collages and montages opposes therefore the prevailing orthodoxy – culturally and pictorially speaking – of both the capitalist common sense and the ‘art for art’s sake’ ethos of the formalist avant-garde. 

Foregrounding production through a democratising use of the significatory power of ‘low’ materials such as note paper, biro, Sellotape, Tippex and photocopy – this critically-conscious and dialectical art-making repurposes Brechtian techniques of denaturalising and distanciation as a way to counter bourgeois ways of seeing, knowing and telling.   

Framed in this way, Clean & Tidy proposes a contemporary reconsideration of Brechtian montage: not as an illustration of existing theory, but as a practical enquiry into how appropriation, juxtaposition, interruption and contamination might produce critical spectatorship beyond the theatrical apparatus. It also returns to Brecht’s own engagement with photography, newspaper imagery and collage as evidenced in the War Primer (1955), asking how his visual strategies might help to repurpose the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. 

Further to this, the project takes Brecht’s anti-identitarian position, as per the pluralist conception of ‘complex seeing’. This theory-in-method approach aims to lead the viewer/reader through to a preferred field of polysemic possibility (ideological positioning) and interpretation of the material exhibited and narrated. Framed in a sociologically-poetic way, Brecht’s multi-linear montage method – ‘each scene for itself’ – informs an attempt to lay bare the causal networks – the forces and relations of production – shaping our lived experience. 

In this way, Brecht’s notion of ‘crude thinking’ or plumpes Denken is repurposed for a form of 2D image-making which simultaneously resists explanation or the often-deadening hand of political didacticism. Through this dissident bourgeois viewpoint – in which meaning emerges — or fails to emerge — through repetition, collision, humour and ambiguity, Clean & Tidy draws from the dialectical theatre, a form of left surrealism, outlined in Brecht’s later writing. 

In addition, Brecht’s critical realist purview is deployed as a way of opposing the conventions of post-modern deconstruction and its apolitical signifiers. Rejecting the cultural logic of late-capitalism, the work signals the emergence of a neo-Brechtian aesthetic attuned to both the multi-accentual and non-linear. This dialectical approach – ‘each scene for itself’ – counters the ‘things as they are’ of received wisdom with the ‘things as they really are’ of Brecht’s deviationalist approach. 

Rejecting both the neoliberal status quo and its pernicious myth of progress, the project opts instead for the anti-progressive worldview of Brecht’s erstwhile chess-partner Walter Benjamin, for whom the history of civilisation is nothing less than a ‘document of barbarism’.  

So defined, the blunt force nature of the works—in Brechtian terms, a ‘showing the showing’—may recall the words of another radical theatre-maker – Antonin Artaud, who, upon finding himself in a world defined increasingly by individual and institutional acquiescence to State violence, wrote:  

‘If there is one truly accursed thing in our times it is our constant dallying with forms, rather than being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames’.

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