The art of George Grosz (1893-1959) provides bitterly satirical and haunting grotesque caricatures of the world in which he lived. Emerging out of the First World War, Grosz’s drawings display absolute disdain for capitalists, military officials and politicians alike. A leading figure in movements such as German Expressionism, Dadaism and New Objectivity, George Grosz was a controversial figure who was denounced by the Nazis as ‘Cultural Bolshevik no.1’. A member of the German Communist Party from 1919, George Grosz was nonetheless a controversial figure in the party itself. His biting satire seemed unable to fit in any institution or organization. Following the rise to power of the Nazi party in 1933, George Grosz emigrated to New York where he became an anti-Stalinist, while his art confrontationally responded to New York’s consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. In many ways, the art and life of George Grosz displays a unique and challenging engagement with the social upheavals that surrounded him.
In this session we are joined by Barbara McCloskey. She is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books include George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (1997), Artist of World War II (2005), and The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order (2015). In this session she will be joining us to discuss  her work on George Grosz, his provocative art and the context in which he lived.

Podcast 24: The Art And Life Of George Grosz (audio only)

In this Podcast, we were joined by lifelong revolutionary activist and writer, Ian Scott Horst to discuss his recent book, Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia (1969-1979). This book tells the story of the 1974 popular revolution of Ethiopia, exploring how events such as the American Civil Rights movement, the fight against imperialism in the Vietnam war, and figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong inspired Ethiopian revolutionaries. 

This was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group, who meet fortnightly to explore art , culture and ideas. The sessions take place on Zoom (and sometimes in person too). The events are free and open. If you are interested in being involved in future events message me explodingappendix [at] gmail.com or check out our website at http://www.explodingappendix.com/exploding-appendix-avant-garde-art-reseach-collective-related-events/

Podcast 29: Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara!  Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia w/ Ian Scott Horst

According to Leon Trotsky, “even a successful solution of the elementary problems of food, clothing, shelter, and even of literacy, would in no way signify a complete victory of the new historic principle, that is, of Socialism. Only a movement of scientific thought on a national scale and the development of a new art would signify that the historic seed has not only grown into a plant, but has even flowered.”  For  Trotsky, and a range of very different figures such as Mao Tse-Tung, Alexander Bogdanov, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Oscar Wilde, Adorno, Horkheimer and Jean-Luc Godard, a Marxist revolution required not merely a political and economic transformation, but also a cultural revolution. In this session we will be joined by Shalon van Tine and Doug Greene, who are currently collaborating on a book on Marxism and Cultural Revolution in order to discuss themes and issues related to this topic.

Shalon van Tine is a PhD student in cultural and intellectual history at Ohio University and an adjunct professor in the humanities for University of Maryland’s Global Campus.

Doug Enaa Greene is an independent communist historian, who is the author of Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution and A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism.

This session was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group on the 9th March 2021. If you would like to be involved in future sessions send me a message at explodingappendix [at] gmail.com.

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Podcast 33: Marxism and Cultural Revolution w/ Shalon van Tine and Doug Enaa Greene

We are joined by poet and scholar Keston Sutherland to discuss the poetic language used in the works of Marx. In an essay entitled ‘The poetics of Capital’,  Sutherland contrasts Marx’s use of language with that of Henry Mayers Hyndman’s bungled translation of Marx’s Capital, published in 1881, as England for all. As Sutherland notes:
“Marx assaults his reader with the image of beloved limbs ripped up and darling heads crushed flat. Hyndman softens the mental lighting so that these same beloved bodies instead more agreeably just ‘fade away’, ephemeral as an enchanted fairy in a forest dim by Keats. The workers who in Marx are crushed, sucked out, laid waste, decertified, elasticated, tortured and distorted into human specks, stumps and fractions, are by Hyndman regenerated in the language of literary respectability as lyric poets, ‘who now rejoice in the gleam of a transient prosperity, only to be cast into a deeper despair on the next stagnation.”

Keston Sutherland, ‘The Poetics of Capital’ in Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image. Aspects of Marx’s Capital Today.

It isn’t simply enough to understand the intellectual and critical content of Marx’s writings. To fully grasp Marx’s ideas we have to understand Marx’s poetics. As Sutherland notes, Marx’s “Capital is both critique and poetics at once”.

Marx and Poetics: A Live Conversation with Keston Sutherland

The Situationist International (S.I.) was a political and social movement that ran from 1957 to 1972 that attempted to synthesise elements of Marxism and anarchist themes with ideas from avant-garde art movements such as Dada and Surrealism.  Although the Situationists cannot be reduced to an avant-garde art movement, Tom Bunyard notes that their “unabashedly utopian goal was to infuse lived experience with the passion, creativity and imagination that had previously only been articulated within the cultural realms of art and poetry.”

“For the Situationists, whose political goals had developed from their early concerns with avant-garde art, the modern revolution would afford a ludic, creative relation to lived time: art would cease to function as a means of representing and commenting upon life, and would instead become one with life itself. This would be achieved through using society’s previously alienated technological and creative powers to consciously create the ‘situations’ that compose lived time. Within modern society, they claimed, all such situations are dull, rationalised components of the spectacular social order; the all-encompassing revolution that the S.I. envisaged would, however, afford a social existence within which these moments of experience would take on more festive qualities.” (Bunyard, p5)

The Situationists imagined a revolution where the line between art and life would disappear. Rather than experiencing the world as passive spectators, we would become active agents engaged in shaping our own history.

Due to their utopian ambitions and deployment of aesthetic devises, the Situationist International has often been seen as an art movement, and their seminal text, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), is frequently viewed as a piece of media theory. Tom Bunyard challenges these assumptions. Although the Situationists emerged from a set of concerns with avant-garde art and culture, the ideas and ambitions of the S.I. extended far beyond the arts; Likewise, The Society of the Spectacle’s claims are not reducible to the contention that advertising and mass media constitute  pacifying spectacles. Bunyard argues that The Society of the Spectacle is more generally a book about time and history, in the sense that it “describes a society that has become detached from its capacity to consciously shape and determine its own future.”  In his book Debord, Time and the Spectacle, Bunyard provides an impressive reconstruction of Guy Debord’s political thought that centres around Debord’s preoccupations with temporality, and which demonstrates its connection to the writings of Marx, Hegel and Hegelian Marxism. In this session, we will be talking to Tom Bunyard about his work on Debord and the Situationists and exploring connected themes of avant-garde art, Hegelian Marxism, strategy, history, spectatorship, revolution and temporality

Guy Debord and the Situationist International with Tom Bunyard

On August 9th 1969, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian broke into the gated home of the actress Sharon Tate, which she shared with film director husband, Roman Polanski. Sharon Tate was eight and a half months pregnant and spending the evening having a small party with friends. The group broke into the house, murdering them and using Tate’s blood to smear ‘PIG’ on the wall

The next day the group broke into the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, brutally murdering them and scrawling  ‘DEATH TO PIGS’, ‘RISE’ and ‘HELTER SKELTER’ around the living room and kitchen. Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Kasabian were members of commune-cum-cult, ‘The Family’, led by criminal, con-man and musician Charles Manson

Drawing upon Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), the Scientology of L. Ron Hubbard and the Beatles’ White Album, Manson had set out to incite an apocalyptical race war. Set against the context of a thriving counter-culture committed to love and peace, these murders seemed to jar

The humanitarian spirit of the sixties counter-culture had been upset by a dark and haunting intruder. Yet this ‘intruder’ seemed somehow to have emerged from the counter-culture itself. Manson had been living in the Haight-Ashbury area, home to many radical communes and counter-cultural dropouts, and his influences seemed to emerge from similar origins

Charles Manson and the Tate/LaBianca killings seemed like mythic renditions of the darker side of the Sixties dreams of Love and Peace. Fifty one years after these murders we will be joined by James Riley to discuss the darker side of sixties counter-culture

James Riley is the author of The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties, which tells the story of the 60s through a plethora of references covering Charles Manson, the British Beat scene, Timothy Leary, LSD, Kenneth Anger, Jeff Nuttall, Peter Whitehead, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Roman Polanski, the Beatles and many more

Riley is Fellow of English Literature at Girton College, University of Cambridge, working on contemporary literature, popular film and 1960s culture. He has lectured internationally, makes film and performs spoken word shows

His blog
https://residual-noise.blogspot.com/

The Bad Trip: Charles Manson and the end of the Sixties with James Riley

"…there is a trade union version of entryism also being practised. And I think where C.L.R. James even turns away from that, and also turns away from Trotskyism and Leninism, is that he truly does something that we are trying to name our podcast after, which is this thing where he faces the autonomy of the working class. He recognises that the working class, they express themselves autonomously, they express themselves on their own, in self-manifested groups, and they don’t need a party bureaucracy, they don’t need a union bureaucracy and, in fact, a lot of those old left formations do a lot to suppress the free and unsuppressed and autonomous expression of working class politics."
Zara Richter, Podcast: Who are we and what is Facing Autonomy? https://facingautonomy.com/podcast/who-we-are-and-what-is-facing-autonomy/
 

The Facing Autonomy collective take their name from both the 1956 book Facing Reality, co-authored by, amongst others, C.L.R. James and Cornelius Castoriadis, which brought together anarchistic ideas of organisation with Marxist theory, and Italian Autonomist Marxism, which emphasised the political strategy of workers self organisation independently of unions and party bureaucracy. In this session we will be joined by Facing Autonomy to explore worker self-organisation, especially in relationship to C.L.R. James, Italian Autonomist Marxism, Left Communism and Anarchism, and to explore what it might mean to us today.
https://facingautonomy.com/

Facing Autonomy: Autonomist Marxism and Worker Self-Organisation with Zara Richter

The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai with Anna Warren

In January 2021, Exploding Appendix published the first volume of the Exploding Appendix Dossier. The volume focused on the triad of themes REVOLUTION*ART*MANIFESTO and was comprised of manifestos, music, illustrated poetry, a podcast, personal reflection, creative essays, art history, photography, film, prose and short fiction.  

In this special episode, Robert Jones leads an informal discussion with readers, contributors and the team behind the issue in order to discuss themes in the volume, catch up with contributors and share work. 

Part party, part conversation, part variety show.

Check out the dossier: http://www.explodingappendix.com/2021/01/10/dossier-revolution-art-manifesto/

REVOLUTION*ART*MANIFESTO The Exploding Appendix Dossier #1.0


    “Solidarity means changing the way the world works with those in crisis.”
    – Dr Ahmed Kamal Junina, The Guardian, 19 August 2025.

Despite the deliberate devastation of educational and healthcare infrastructure, the purposeful denial of vital resources, and indiscriminate bombardment, scholars in Gaza continue to learn and to create knowledge.
In this session, we will be joined by Dr Ahmed Kamal Junina, Head of the English department and Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at Al-Aqsa University, alongside student representatives of his international education initiative, RECONNECT, to discuss the meaning of solidarity in the face of siege and occupation.
This session creates space to learn of the scholarship and art being produced in Gaza, including a special issue of the CHASE-funded journal Brief Encounters (forthcoming), and to think collectively about how to defend Palestinian culture and protect access to education as an inalienable right.

Attendees are asked to consider making a donation to Taawon’s ISNAD programme, which aims to enable 15,000 students to resume their studies remotely by providing funded scholarships and covering the cost of tuition fees.
To sponsor one student for one semester costs $535, which is roughly £395. To sponsor one student for an entire academic year (two semesters) costs US$1,070, or about £790. You can listen to graduate student Hadeel describe how the ISNAD programme has supported her academic journey.
To make a donation, please visit the following link: https://www.every.org/taawon/f/support-university-students.
Taawon is a Palestinian-led non-profit civic organisation which has supported the lives of Palestinians by preserving their heritage and identity, sustaining their living culture and building civil society since 1983. The lives of more than one million Palestinians are positively impacted by their work every year.

Scholars in Gaza Under Siege: Defending Education, Resisting Erasure

When Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970 it caused controversy. Arguing that the oppression of women lay in women’s biological capacity to reproduce, Firestone saw nature as a central barrier to woman’s liberation. Her solution was a fundamental transformation of nature itself, through the creation of artificial wombs, to free women’s bodies from the process of reproduction. Integrating the work of Marx, Freud, De Beauvoir and Engels, Firestone created a radical vision of gender liberation and utopian cybernetic feminism. Alongside influencing feminism, The Dialectic of Sex was also influential on Science Fiction literature, especially Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel, Woman on the Edge of Time.

In this session, Bradley Tuck is joined by Victoria Margree, Principle Lecturer at the University of Brighton and Author of Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone. In her book, Margree argues for the continued importance of Firestone’s work. In this session we will discuss her book and Firestone’s, exploring its pertinence today.

The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone: A Live Interview with Victoria Margree

In this session, we will be joined by Lucy Jefferies (Quiet Down there), Susie Deadman (Sew Fabulous), Jenny Staff (artist at the Phoenix), Kasia Zermon (The Rose Hill) to have an informal discussion about arts and culture on London road and what we do about it

Lucy Jefferies, director of Quiet Down There, a charity that focuses on helping people express and develop their creativity outside traditional arts structures. Since 2021, Quiet Down There has been running Harriet’s Press at the Open Market, offering people without access to affordable laundry services a free wash and dry, a hot drink, and the opportunity to engage in creative activities. This exciting and innovative initiative not only addresses practical needs but also encourages creativity in everyday spaces

Jenny Staff, M.A. is an artist and educator with 20+ years of experience working with many diverse groups. She is a process based artist who uses materials with an inherent integrity and playful, mindful approach to support people explore accessible, creative methodologies to find their voice in a supportive and friendly environment. She is inspired by the stories of others and how combining internal and external worlds through the act of making can release and reveal tacit information to create meaningful art works. The power of the creative act constantly amazes and inspires her to investigate new materials and ideas to support the curiosity, well-being, resilience and confidence of all involved. She has her own walking/drawing/performance practice in which she investigates the power of walking, solo and communally to process ontological experiences. She works with many institutions including The National Gallery, The National Maritime Museum, Articulate, Culture Shift and Phoenix Art Space

Kassia aka Bunty is creative director of The Rose Hill, an artist run venue in the heart of Brighton co runs The Rose HIll Record label. She is an experimental vocal artist and looping pioneer best known for her solo work as Bunty and lead singer for UK dub act Resonators. She has been an active facilitator/ artist for over two decades working for the ground breaking Dome programme Miss Represented for many years as well as working for other establishments like Battersea Arts Centre, Art Angel and Brighton council. She is part of new Ecomusicology project in Stanmer park . She is also part of Inkibit a female and gender minority collective working in new tech with a focus on social punk VR.

Susie Deadman – I am the founder and director of Sew Fabulous, I like to work on socially engaged participatory arts projects with textiles, process based photography and pottery. I’m part of Social Circles – a socially engaged arts group alongside Jenny
Sew Fabulous is a sustainable sewing and textiles studio based in Brighton Open Market. We run a weekly program that includes:

7 x kids and teens classes, 1 x Friday DIY repair drop-in, 3 x adult sewing courses

We also provide school holiday activities for families and collaborate with other organisations on various projects throughout the year

One of our major projects is the production of Brighton Sustainable Fashion Week (SFW), an annual event that brings the community together to explore sustainable fashion solutions

We work in collaboration with QDT/HP on placemaking projects including our latest work

The Layers Of London Road, funded by Sussex University co-lab

The aim of this session is to bring people together to think collaboratively about how we can strengthen arts and culture in Brighton and Hove. As with all sessions in this series, we take a broad view of culture, integrating the arts, education, sport, social life, and community organizing into our vision for a thriving city.


Defending Arts and Culture in Brighton & Hove #4: Creativity on London Road

In this episode of the Exploding Appendix podcast, Bradley Tuck will be joined by Walter Benn Michaels to discuss the relationship between neo-liberalism, capitalism and equal opportunities. Why are capitalists committed to diversity in the workplace, and will this make any difference to increasing inequality? 

Walter Benn Michaels is an English professor at The University of Illinois at Chicago.  He has written numerous books such as Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism,  The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, The Trouble with Diversity: How we learned to love identity and ignore inequality, and The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy.  

In this podcast you will hear a clip from a Starbucks Advert about diversity 'A look at what Diversity looks like at Starbucks', Ta-Nehisi Coastes discussing the book Racecraft with Barbara Fields. A clip from Wife Swap Season one episode two, Karen E. Fields discussing her book Racecraft in In Conversation: Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields and Michel Foucault's lectures on The Culture of the Self delivered at UC Berkeley on April 12, 1983.

Podcast 12: Diversity Capitalism: Walter Benn Michaels on Neoliberalism and Equal Opportunities.

"We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car with a hood that glistens with large pipes resembling a serpent with explosive breath … a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."
F. T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

From as early as Marinetti’s Manifesto from 1909, the avant-garde has been drawn to speed and acceleration, and in the case of Italian Futurism, willing to tear down anything that stands in its way. In this session, Bradley Tuck will interview Benjamin Noys about his 2013 book Malign Velocities, which charts the darker history of the avant-garde, focusing on its embrace of the cult of speed, technology and capitalism. Tracing the story through Italian futurism, communist accelerationism following the Russian Revolution, fantasies of integration with the machine, the cyberpunk phuturism of the ‘90s and ‘00s, the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis, and the negative form of terminal accelerationism. Drawing upon a miasma of references, Benjamin Noys critically challenges this tradition, calling instead for a new politics that challenges the supposed pleasures of speed without simply countering acceleration with the desire to slow down.

Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester and author of books such as The Persistence of the Negative (2010) and Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2013).

Podcast 15: Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism: A Live Interview with Benjamin Noys

"The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticisation of everyday life.”
– Mark Fisher ‘Acid Communism (unfinished introduction)’ in K-Punk, Repeater, 2018

Before his untimely death in 2017, writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher had been working on a book entitled Acid Communism. Rejecting the idea that the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan was inevitable, and that the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies would merely lead to a culture of narcissistic consumerism, Fisher sought to recover the radical promise of sixties counterculture, the term signalled the fusion of psychedelic mind-expansion with radical politics.
Outside of Fisher’s own work, the concept continues to be developed and explored, not least with the emergence of the term “Acid Corbynism” that links themes of countercultural radicalism to current Labour activism. The podcast #ACFM has been at the forefront of Acid Communist and Acid Corbynist research, exploring topics such as collective joy, consciousness raising and the weird left. In this session, Bradley Tuck is joined by Jeremy Gilbert, a member of the #ACFM team and friend of Mark Fisher, to discuss these themes and topics. Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at University of East London, his books include Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, and the Politics of Sound (1999), Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (2008), Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (2013), Twenty-First Century Socialism (2019), Hegemony Now: Power in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and The Last Days of Neoliberalism: Politics, Culture and Society Since 2008 (2020).

Podcast 17: Acid Communism: A live Discussion With Jeremy Gilbert

1968 was a year that heralded revolution and revolt across the world. Whilst we have become accustomed to in-depth analysis and cultural nostalgia for these upheavals in relation to America and Western Europe, the  radical mobilizations that emerged throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Central America can often be forgotten. In this session we attempt to move some small way towards readdressing this.  Focusing on Japan, we will be joined by Gavin Walker to discuss the New Left political organization, thought and aesthetics that emerged in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Gavin Walker is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan  (2016), and translator and editor of  Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (2020). In this session, we will be discussing his forthcoming edited volume The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (Verso Books). Drawing together questions of radicalism in politics, thought and art we will explore Japan’s role in the construction of sixties counterculture.

Podcast 19: The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 w/ Gavin Walker

Art & Research Group led by Bradley Tuck dedicated to exploring the history and future of avant-garde and radical counterculture.
📍Brighton, UK & Online

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