Review of Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism

Laura Fair-Schulz

October 31, 2025

doi.org/10.63478/1PUSTB0L

Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth

by Adam Turl

Revol Press

2024

Seven horns blowing? An orange devil at the door? In what they make clear is no less than a battle for humanity’s soul, Adam Turl’s must-read Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven & Earth deconstructs capitalist entrenchment in the art world and beyond. Turl is more than an art theorist, and their new book should be appreciated in light of their prolific artistry, Marxist theorizing, and firebrand analysis of culture and politics. They are the cofounder of multiple contemporary projects, including the Locust Review, LALC (the Locust Art & Letters Collective), Locust Radio, the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM), and was also an editor at the former Red Wedge publication. Together with their partner—the activist, poet, writer, editor, podcaster, and artist Tish Turl—they have taken on the causes of labor, revolutionary politics, collective organizing, and art production in Southern Illinois and elsewhere for many years. Quoting critic Laura Mulvey, they note, “moving from oppression and its mythologies to a stance of self-definition is a difficult process and requires people with social grievances to construct a long chain of counter myths and symbols.”¹ That would describe Turl’s own artwork, their efforts within the Locust Review publication, and their organizing work in general, where calls for art and writing seek to draw out and build upon these counter myths and symbols. Gothic Capitalism is a theoretical explication of their own processes and aspirations, and they give us a window seat.

Given Turl’s broad and radical commitments, they are well-positioned to identify dynamics within the art world so as to declare mutiny, calling—through their particular Marxist lens—for a renewed commitment to the promises of spiritual and material progress. Turl illustrates how both the voracious appetites for the next alternative trend so valued within today’s art scene and the apathy and indifference toward high art within the general population are part of a decrepit late-capitalist theatre of damnation—art that is Evicted from Heaven. Without a revolutionary soul (from below), the “art” of the “established marketplace,” the “canonical art museum,” and the “academic avant-garde” become the “historical debris of bourgeois society,” refracting “capital into cultural objects and concepts.”² It is the content-vague spectacle of a “weak avant-garde” that leaves the spectator “starved for anything that actually says something.”³ Turl’s notion of a “weak” avant-garde is quite helpful. Case in point, what does the sculpture “Comedian,” by artist Maurizio Cattelan—–the infamous banana duct-taped to a wall that sold at a Sotheby’s auction for 6.2 million dollars in 2024—actually say? Its price—its commodification—certainly becomes part of the spectacle, supplanting content. Aptly, it is a piece of food that cannot satiate.

Turl goes on to explain the concept of the weak avant-garde thus, “[i]n modern art, conceptual, stylistic, and formal innovation could seem to parallel social progress. [But] we no longer have an avant-garde guiding us with its beacon. It is up to the working class to regain that potential in culture and to emerge from the uneven development of [G]othic capitalism.” The meaning of Gothic in the book runs a gamut of descriptions that may be difficult at times for readers unfamiliar with the concept to pinpoint. Turl became interested in its usage after encountering author China Miéville in Chicago in 2013. The Gothic would seem to include the “ruins of the past” looming large, and the present—anachronistic and dislodged—is a combination of the past and future’s potential and losses. There is so much more to it, and referencing Miéville’s thoughts on the matter is useful; they talk about a Gothic Marxism being a realm where solidarity with the outliers, debris, and monsters produced by capitalism can be a way of advancing a dialectical approach between the rational and irrational. It seems fair to say that, inversely, Gothic Capitalism is where “’dialectics is at a standstill.’”⁴

According to Turl, the United States has become as Gothic as the Old World, “living in the defeats of liberation struggles and within the limits of tyrannical ‘realisms,’” among them “capitalist realism” as examined by the Marxist theorist Mark Fisher.⁵ While their insights are deeply penetrating and intriguing, the reader could always benefit from some further unpacking. At times, they appeal to a very broad readership. At other times, to those who would have a more detailed understanding of art and history, requiring some readers to do more digging—which, obviously, isn’t a bad thing. At intervals, one wants to ask Turl for more detail about some of their historical and theoretical musings. Nonetheless, their clarion points, as will be discussed here, very much deserve to be reckoned with and digested.

…finding no elemental incompatibility between sincere individual expressions of humanity and collective struggle, the book is a call for artists yearning to cultivate meaning, drive articulation, and contribute outside of the riptides of postmodernist complacency to the heart of tangible collective progress—that is, beyond just making Marxist propaganda, to reclaim art from the ground up.

Turl guides the reader through what can be the rather thorny briars of heady art theory, history, and philosophy from Romanticist Dialectics to doom-scrolling and Gothic Bolshevism to Gothic Marxism, as well as the collective subconscious and dematerialized art. Whatever the reader’s familiarity with art theory or appreciation, there is something to be found in reading and re-reading this work. To quote Che Guevara, “at the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love”; like Turl’s artwork, Gothic Capitalism feels like an earnest labor in an art world that tends to look askance at the unironic as maudlin. Its passages churn through a wide variety of writers, arguments, and references, attempting to salvage the arts (via a dialectical excavation) from their disconnection to both the “pre-modern promise of spiritual ascension or transcendence” and the “emancipatory impulses of modernity”—the kind of modernist impulses that gave voice and form to proletarian dreams for a better world and authentic democracy.⁶ It would be useful to discuss the volume in groups, as its topics naturally solicit discussion and collectivity. Overall, the book has the character of patient manuscription in its flux of argumentation: a breath of fresh air in the overly stale latest “late-capitalist” world that is “genuine[ly] mourning for universes and people lost to ruthless novelty” where, “[w]rit large, capital can only reproduce” and be signified but not fundamentally deconstructed.⁷

Calling for the “rapprochement of art” and “mass emancipatory politics,” Turl uses this conjunction to clarify concepts of a worn-out postmodernism and “zombie formalism”—in effect, the ability to conceive of the all-too-familiar “end of the world as we know it but not the end of capitalism.” Their discussion of postmodernism describes its agenda of excluding grand narratives and, thus, Marxist activism. Many arguments in the book loop back to this, underscoring how “art and philosophy have fused in the absence of social revolution, [with] the result [being] a philosophical art-object that is profoundly weak,” reifying “art as a commodity”—to go back to a previous example, Cattelan’s “Comedian.”⁸ For Turl, “[t]he question for leftist artists today is: how do we take the contradictions borne of the individual artistic tendency while simultaneously collectivizing them to help develop critical and revolutionary impulses?”⁹ They suggest there is an ingress and vacancy to be urgently broached and, finding no elemental incompatibility between sincere individual expressions of humanity and collective struggle, the book is a call for artists yearning to cultivate meaning, drive articulation, and contribute outside of the riptides of postmodernist complacency to the heart of tangible collective progress—that is, beyond just making Marxist propaganda, to reclaim art from the ground up. Referring to many artists throughout, Turl turns to the example of South-African artist, theatrical designer, and animated filmmaker William Kentridge, who was able to “assert human subjectivity in an inhuman context,” to claim that “Adorno’s much quoted proclamation about the end of lyric poetry (the famed and often mis-contextualized ‘there can be no poetry’ following the Holocaust) was directly followed by the assertion that literature must resist this verdict.”¹⁰ And Turl is clear: dialectically asserting and resisting is integral to advancing culture.

Photo of Marcello Cattelan's The Comedian. Purchased at auction for $6 million by Justin Sun. Via Die Heute — Photo of Marcello Cattelan’s *The Comedian*. Purchased at auction for $6 million by Justin Sun.
Via Die Heute

Turl echoes the noted art critic Lucy Lippard in claiming the Modernist art movement was rendered impotent by removing its Marxist, critical, and revolutionary character. While not explicitly mentioned by Turl, art critic Max Kozloff’s investigation into Abstract Expressionism provides a pertinent historical example of this sterilization of Modernist art.¹¹ In 1973, Kozloff posited that Abstract Expressionism’s quick rise in the art world was ‘a form of benevolent propaganda,’ in sync with the post-war political ideology of the American government.”¹² It has been long established that the CCF (the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-“Communist” foundation operating in over thirty countries) was sponsoring anti-Soviet artistic events. Historian Frances Stonor Saunders wrote on this “cultural Cold War,” claiming that Abstract Expressionism was indeed a weapon of the CIA for twenty years in this battle.¹³ Irrespective of the political proclivities of the individual Abstract-Expressionists involved, their work was depoliticized, coopted, and promoted as “Modern Art.” Whatever one thinks of the formal aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism, it became politically inert, shifting attention away from the radical artists, movements, and domestic political events of the time in the United States and trending afterward in the art world, as newly centered in New York City. This contributed to the dynamism within Modernism screeching to a halt again, what Turl repeatedly calls the “weak” avant-garde.

Turl deliberates on the nature of “art installation,” be it the total digital installation of our performed or enacted lives online in social media or the potential for the countertotality or counternarrative actions of artistic events like performance art. Among the book’s many strengths, Turl opens up a particularly timely analysis of social media, AI, and the digital age. In that context, they also expand on the concept of the digital Gesamtkunstwerk. Composer Richard Wagner coined the term vis-à-vis opera, where various art forms (from set, prop, and costume design to theatre and music) meet to create a total engagement with the audience. Turl points to the arguments of the theorist Boris Groys (in this case, his “Stalin Gesamtkunstwerk”) to draw out a comparison to our era,

…the ‘socialism’ of the Soviet Union amounted, at least phenomenologically, to a total art installation in which public life became a sort of performance for the state. In the contemporary US (at a minimum)[,] the digital image has come to be part of its own total installation – a collective neoliberal performance…The montage of the digital [G]esamtkunstwerk appears random and decontextualized, but is, as noted, determined by algorithms meant to maximize information and capital accumulation.…We perform how neoliberal capital sees the working-class, as an endlessly exchangeable multiplicity of supposedly ‘unique’… modules…. When we perform our digital selves, we largely curate ourselves…A function of the digital image, as organized by capital’s digital [G]esamtkunstwerk, is to map and commodify our dreams, to foster a neoliberalism of the soul.¹⁴

To reference Walter Benjamin, “the role of the critic is to ‘awaken the world from the dream of itself’” (as capital would have it: vampirically commodifying disposable individuals), which, as Turl acknowledges privileges the critic and the artist. “If anything, the modernist period has shown us that particular awakening is necessarily the product of wider social forces.”¹⁵ The power of “wider social forces” exists in collectives, requiring strong individuals who persist in approaching the world not as static but as a process that is often contradictory and multidimensional. It needs artists striving to maintain and invent dialectical approaches, rather than succumbing to either Vulgärmarxismus (as simplistic “class reductionism…postmodern and post-structuralist notions that cultural signs float unconnected to a material base”) or the idea that everyone can be a genius, or outsider, or artist as long as their work becomes easily monetizable—that is “as long as they are rich or solidly middle-class, or if they aren’t too attached to the idea of eating dinner.”¹⁶

The white cube is part of a general standard for displaying art, devoid of “distraction”—read: relatively decontextualized and sterilized of the ghosts of local or evolved fetishization. These “ghosts”were the inherited and invented passions and meanings derived from a human sense of wonder…

Regarding materiality and economic insecurity in general, art schools tend to draw significantly fewer poor and working-class students because of the economic precarity of being an artist in society—the kind of precarity that the book addresses. Like higher education overall, art schools privilege well-heeled applicants with no dread of being saddled with student debt for decades thereafter. The real world of art has many economic victims—the “art world dark matter,” [sic] the invisible laborers who live beneath the glamor and gloss of art-journals’ luminaries. The world where poor artists, sustaining gallery workers, assistants, and adjuncts—the unsung and unrecognized—live is not meant to sully the world above where the wealthy and bourgeois float unless to pantomime the gritty edginess of the street in an oxymoronically appropriated authenticity. Real “working-class expression” is “‘outside’ of the realm of bourgeois cultural exchange.”¹⁷ Turl explains that “[a]rtists concerned with individual subjectivity and social totality were evicted from the art world. Social criticism was possible, even desirable, but so long as it only went so far[;]” “[M]uch of the bourgeoisie does not want challenging images hanging over their couches.”¹⁸ This is a world where “social criticism” is (at most) tolerated as entertaining theatre in the mania of denial.

Turl further discusses the defanging of Marxist content and analyses and deracination of working-class issues as products of the gentrified, bourgeois nature of the audience, “following art’s fusion with finance capital and gentrification on a global level.”¹⁹ This fusion has changed the auric nature of the work itself—that is, its projection of life force or nature. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s thinking that art itself began with cultic meaning that imbued objects with significance before shifting to “exhibition value,” Turl interrogates the how this shift has altered the political possibilities afforded in the social space where art is displayed — as patronage moved away from the Western church to the bourgeois individual.²⁰ Since the hegemony of Christianity (where the ministry had generally held the purse), art has moved from its spatial connections of public display (murals, altar pieces, and niched relics) to the privatized and entitled parades of easel paintings, collection troves, and the self-aggrandizing images of, say, the Rococo period. “The auric value constitutes an IRL montage where contextualization and human performance shift the meaning of the artwork.”²¹ As art critic John Berger clarified in Ways of Seeing, art, especially oil painting, has served to flatter and project the possessions and stature of the well-to-do.²² In a positive sense of auric value, Turl uses art critic Ben Davis’s example of how Pablo Picasso’s Guernica circulated to raise money for the Spanish Republic, further shaping an antifascist and antiwar message within the imagery itself.²³ “The meaning is projected by the human performances that surround[ed] the painting.”²⁴ Hence, the art object gains its political force also through its dematerialized performance; art objects do not stand alone, but accelerate meaning through their promotion and reception.

Art Gallery of Alberta Photo Credit: Art Gallery of Alberta — Art Gallery of Alberta
Photo Credit: Art Gallery of Alberta

Turl’s takes up the subject of gallery/museum spaces’ “white cubes” (stark, inert, “neutral,” and emptied display areas), by contrasting them to the Berlin Dada Art Fair of 1920 and the Paris Surrealist Exhibition of 1938. The latter two displays “assaulted” the bourgeois nature of the exhibition space. In Berlin, by interposing working-class contextualization (such as German-Revolutionary and workers’-movement slogans scrawled on walls, including objects, like a German soldier’s uniform on a swine-headed manikin and bags emitting coal dust in barely-lit rooms, where viewers strained to see), the viewers’ expectations were jarred in an antibourgeois artistic fashion that reintroduced the ambience of the working class.²⁵ The white cube is part of a general standard for displaying art, devoid of “distraction”—read: relatively decontextualized and sterilized of the ghosts of local or evolved fetishization. These “ghosts”were the inherited and invented passions and meanings derived from a human sense of wonder while experiencing art and artefacts in situ. The sterilized, curated space of the contemporary gallery can officiously elevate the status of a piece in society, whereas art itself has a kind of experiential magic “springing from a “collective subconscious” because of its role in our evolution as a species. Art is how we have made meaning.²⁶ Why, for example, were cave paintings made, and why are we still fascinated by them? The location is a key part of the fascination. We come face to face with what we imagine as the past in a context as part of the significance. But the white cube can refetishize and remythologize the artwork taken away and placed inside of it, at worst, coopting art on behalf of today’s capitalist, neoliberal, and postmodernist values. With reference to an imperialist set of impulses, especially for both non-Western and Western art in the United States, ritual objects can be infused within white-cube spaces with a sense of novelty that we project, which can then be marketed. From a virtually universal shamanism and from cave paintings forward, we can think of removed altar pieces, amulets, or indigenous pieces of ceremonial costuming being put on display in museums—repurposed for our age, to reassure the viewer of their performed Western erudition.²⁷ While the viewer is arguably and necessarily a part of the “art”—inevitably removed in time—we are spiritually and spatially farther removed, “away from the art space as a repository of ‘art for art’s sake’ [which is ultimately our sake] toward art space as attraction or entertainment presented as a kind of social laboratory.”²⁸

They promise an ostensible democracy of activity within the art space and leave the social whole outside. Instead of challenging bourgeois ideology, relational art has brought the museum’s artist values of neoliberal capitalism…such work creates ‘micro-utopias.’ As the patrons who participate in these relational aesthetic experiences are mostly petit-bourgeois and bourgeois persons who already live in their own utopias, it recreates semi-private Elysiums within the artspace…. In this sense, relational art must today be, above all, worthy of photographing and posting on social media.²⁹

Laura Fair-Schulz, once as a Tragedy, twice as Farce, thrice as apocalypse — Laura Fair-Schulz, *once as a tragedy, twice as farce, thrice as apocalypse*.

Turl ends the book with the following incisive and impassioned observation: “recent crises seem to indicate a ruling class that is comfortable with large numbers of human beings, particularly those who are seen as surplus population, being written off.”³⁰ The book is cognizant of these recent crises and peppers them throughout, as it should. There is an essential back and forth between art issues and class analyses that insightfully situates historical and current events. Turl sums up again the role of the artist in conjunction to these crises and our responses as comrades: “The task of the working-class artists is to create counter-imaginaries to the total art of capitalism. This includes the social performance that surrounds our work [because] Western Capitalism has outlived any sense of social development or progress.”³¹ The how of these monumental tasks, of creating and socially performing culturally meaningful work, is left open, refreshingly acknowledging that artists and comrades—as creative problem solvers—must give birth to these “counter-imaginaries.” The difference is a tome written by a practicing artist not just a theorist or historian, and there has to be room in our movements for various approaches to the questions of culture. Also, at the end, Turl repeats how society

has taken on an increasingly gothic hue. The ruins of an industrial heyday are illuminated by digital billboards. The cyber-utopianism of the early Internet has failed, exposing Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic ideologies and economies. Social suffering goes unanswered by the political center, helping produce far-right governments and fascist movements. It is in this context that contemporary artists, as descendants of the modernist avant-gardes, have become institutionalized and weak, eschewing art’s spiritual origins as well as modern art’s emancipatory dreams.³²

In a dialectical fashion, Turl sets the stage to illustrate how art must creatively rally our mutual energies rather than providing a mere recipe book for revolutionary agitprop. They finish with the thoroughly Marxist sentiment: “only the working-class can save us,” mentioning that the “pessimism of [Bertolt Brecht, Antonio Gramsci, and Walter Benjamin] was strategic, designed to engender hope…for the survival of the species as such.”³³ There is resonance, for Marxists to take heart amid this escalating capitalist apocalypse, in Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”: turning hope into action and art into meaning, connection, and solidarity. Far from struggling alone, the book is a touchstone for artists finding a place in the ultimate collective struggle for a better world to win.

art, Art history, Art world, Capitalism, Historical capitalism

Laura Fair-Schulz

Laura Fair-Schulz was born in the 1960s and has lived in Canada, the United States, and Germany. Having taught at various universities and colleges in Canada and the United States, she is a practicing artist and an adjunct art instructor at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Her artwork is figurative, abstract, and has the stirrings of Gothic Marxism.

Review of Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism

Laura Fair-Schulz

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Review of Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism

Laura Fair-Schulz

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Jeffrey Epstein

Fighting the Empire

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