ABSTRACT
Modernist art might even be regarded as an enclave in which anarchism has been kept "on ice" and given symbolic expression during periods in which it lay politically dormant. A cultural climate hospitable to synesthesia in perception and "mixed media" in the arts understandably stimulated the expectation among artists that an exciting aesthetic revolution was to be won with an imminent social one. The Utopian impulse which had long expressed itself in religion by the attempt to resecure an earthly paradise, found its aesthetic cognate in the refusal to acknowledge any limitation or boundary to aesthetic activity. The religious heresy which seeks heaven on earth and refuses to divide tribute between the city of God and the city of Man finds its aesthetic equivalent in the idea that "anything you do can be art. Aesthetic revolutionaries quickly become indifferent to any political activity lacking expressive style.
