Stuart Hall
In his collaborative installation titled Marx Lounge, Alfredo Jaar has collected and made available to the public dozens of books that showcase the current influence of Marxist thought. Unfortunately, such thought has been very affected by the historic disgrace with which his ideas were put into practice in Russia—during the beginning of the 20th Century by a semi-feudal country with a strong authoritarian tradition—instead of in the most developed capitalist countries as Marx had predicted. The constitution of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia, based on a teratological development of content present in the original Marxist social program, led to an official dogmatization of this current of thought. In a letter to French workers—the first to use the term Marxism—Marx himself expressed that he opposed the term as he affirmed that he was not Marxist: he had not created a system, but a method to be applied in a different manner that depended on each specific problem.
Stuart Hall, one of the most influential Marxist-based contemporary thinkers with an active social posture, could add something to that. The works by Marx himself and by innovative and anti-dogmatic Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, Luis Althusser and Raymond Williams framed Hall's intellectual and social position. Of particular influence on Hall's work were the Gramscians concepts of hegemony, subalternity and popular culture. He was associated with the British magazine Marxism Today, and alongside this periodical he fought the dogma of traditional Marxism according to which culture is directly determined by its material base; something that Federico Engels had already denied in letters written at the end of his life. Hall also founded in London with Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson the very influential magazine New Left Review, in which he remained very active.
This influential intellectual was born in Kingston, Jamaica, where he lived and studied until the age of 19. In 1951 he moved to the UK to continue his studies and lived there until his death in London. He studied at the University of Oxford and became part of today's legendary Centre for Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham, and was its Director from 1968 to 1979. Perhaps Hall's most important contribution was the development of cultural studies, which opened a new window into the analysis and comprehension of contemporary culture, a field in which Hall became one of the central figures. His innovative studies and ideas on popular culture and mass media exercised a very positive influence that expanded into other fields, the visual arts among these. His emphasis in the active role of the receptor of mass media—which far from being assimilated by the mass media establishes its own decoding—became very fruitful. Thus, the determinism of reception is broken in favor of proposing an active and dialec
tic interpretation by the public, where the idea of an agency of the subaltern subject—of extreme importance in post-colonial studies—is expressed.
From 1979 to 1997 Hall taught at the Open Studies University. He published numerous books and essays on cultural issues, identity, race, modernity, gender and other highly theoretical topics framed in social and political issues that were translated into many languages but, unfortunately, not that much into Spanish, as would be necessary. Some like Questions of Cultural Identity as, Representation and Visual Culture (1996), edited with Paul du Gay, and Visual Cultural (1999) dealt directly with visual culture. His work had a great influence beyond academia, which was accompanied by their social activity. Hall is an example of the weight of intellectuals and artists from countries of the former British Empire in the UK, and the international impact. The importance of Hall's critical discourse for the visual arts c...
