/ PAMPHLET AND REVOLUTION /
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Unlike the communiqué, which tends to be confined to legal matters, the pamphlet bases its power on its explosive capacity. The hurtful conciseness that makes it so effective is also what inevitably places it on the borders of demagogy. But this is a risk that it assumes naturally. The calm and blasé gaze of the academic has no place here. The fights from which the pamphlet emerges have not come out of the heads of the learned but from the nervous tension of the conjured. First it was an outburst written on the toilet door, then a few words scrawled on a wall without a lamppost, a banner written with a brush on a makeshift canvas. Finally, the leaflet that will set the streets on fire. Rough, indifferent to grammar, with the ink half erased by the rain, haughty in its arrogance in the face of what they call “strategy”.
George Grosz chose the pamphlet to make his engravings against the war. Imperfection and immediacy sharpened in those hard, rabid strokes, intentionally far from the neatness of the classics. His work was also a spit on easel painters like Paul Cezanne or Henri Rousseau, whom he considered fools intoxicated with holy naivety. How to put Grosz in the Museum? The problem cannot be solved by sleight of hand with linguistic terms. When the people in charge of the exhibitions were called “curators,” it made some sense. Because the natural place to show the pamphlets was not the museums, but the curator's offices. And since the art curators respected the work of the police curators, who zealously treasured the pamphlets seized in their raids, they never moved them from the police station to the museum unless it was as degenerate art. On the other hand, since the people in charge of decorating museums call themselves “curators”, everything becomes unhinged. Putting Heidegger in the curators domain has turned the exhibition of revolutionary pamphlets into something like the exhibition of the dissected skin of strikers. Mummified art has replaced degenerate art.
Conceived as a work of a day, edited in printing presses hidden in clandestine apartments, strewn with ink streaks due to the poor quality of the paper, the pamphlet lives in the pockets of passers-by. And yet, many of them keep their charge active for years, like those bombs that from time to time appear on old battlefields and explode when one least expects it. Twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred years later, a pamphlet appears among the pages of a book sold at a bargain price in the Encants Market. Who hid it there? The surprised reader delicately unfolds it and reads it again, and, for a few moments, feels the harsh breath of an uncompromising struggle. He thus understands, in the simplest and most direct way, that there is no literary work that can compete with that piece of yellowed paper.
He used to write with his big finger in the air:
“Viban los compañeros! Pedro Rojas”César Vallejo