Q has many amusing touches and one that particularly tickled me was the device of having the anti-hero of this anti-narrative constantly change his name, so that according to an incomplete list that appears on page 373, he has been ‘Metzger, Niemanson, Jost, Boekbinder, Lot’. Gustav Metzger is a key figure within auto-destructive art, and the recycling of his name as an alias of Blissett’s anti-hero is not an inconsequential joke but rather a pointer as to how Q should be read and understood. These two Metzgers link the past and the near present, the religious iconoclasm of Protestantism and the cultural iconoclasm of the twentieth century avant-garde. One of the many things Luther Blissett’s deliberate and repeated invocation of very specific tendencies within the avant-garde does, is force the comprehending reader to reconsider where they stand on the issue of the status of art in relation to Hegel’s system and its subsequent supersession by dialectical materialism (that is to say, as one ascends through what Hegel theorises as Absolute Mind, and moves specifically from romantic poetry upwards to theory/philosophy, does art wither or does it still have a role to play in the full unfolding/realisation of wo/man?). The specific debates being invoked stem from discussions that occurred in the 1840s among those most immediately connected to Ludwig Feuerbach’s re-establishment (at a higher level) of the notion that ‘man is the measure of all things’. At first glance it would appear that, like the situationists, Luther Blissett stands within the ranks of those who believe ‘art is dead’, but there is a radical ambiguity at work here. Let us not forget that the Young Hegelian circle to which Feuerbach belonged also included both Marx and Max Stirner. Alongside an obvious relish for the negative, there are inklings that Luther Blissett might also view the artist as a deformed harbinger of the realisation of our species’ being in communism. read more
IMAGE: Caroline Mackintosh
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