American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  American writers appeared more distressed than authoritative about such complexities. More often the delegates retreated to the high moral ground, but as a refuge from hard thought rather than a place for deep analysis. Many years earlier Henry James had complained, in The American Scene, of the “thinness” of American life. Bellow in 1963 had sensed continually in modern literature not “the absence of a desire to be moral, but rather a pointless, overwhelming, vague, objectless moral fervor.” At the PEN Congress the moral imagination as well as the understanding of many of the American writers appeared thin, vague.

  Over the whole proceedings, for the foreigners at least, hovered the ghosts of the American “greats.” Said a Swedish novelist, “You don’t have any truly great writers.” Said a German, “The strongest impact still is Faulkner.” Said Amos Oz, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read an American novel that evoked gutsy passion in me.” Said South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, “There was a time when one sensed through Hemingway and Mailer the American manhood. Then, such authors as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison explored the black experience, and Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow gave a clear sense of growing up Jewish in America. But now, except for maybe William Styron, nothing like that is being attempted.” When she drove past mobile homes in upstate New York, said South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, she wondered, “Who are these people?” She did not meet them in American fiction. To many of the writers from abroad, American novels of the past twenty years appeared to be filled with the personal, the trivial, with “tiny fictions” untouched by history and environment.

  While the power and gore of the “literary mob” were most visible in Manhattan and in the big publishers concentrated there, fine university presses and small publishers were dispersed throughout the country. The nation’s profusion of writers created their works wherever, at home or abroad, they could find a desktop for their lined yellow pads, their typewriters, or—increasingly—their word processors. Actors, on the other hand, wanted to be near Broadway or off-Broadway, although Hollywood drew its share for movies and later television. The creative people most concentrated in New York were the artists, who needed access to the city’s art galleries, dealers and patrons, museums, while they lived in lofts and cold-water flats. It was in New York that there had emerged after three centuries, in John Russell’s words, “an independent, self-generating and specifically American art.” The formats and materials used by the “First New York School” were not new. What the artists now did with them was.

  During the nineteenth century, American painters had found it necessary to study in Europe and to paint like Europeans if they were to sell in their own country. Even so, wealthy American collectors tended to buy European art. During the first part of the twentieth century, Europe was still Mecca but there and in the United States Modernism was emerging in such forms as Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Orphism, Cubism, as well as Futurism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. Spilling into America, these forms converged after World War II as Abstract Expressionism, and with this style American art came into its own.

  Formidable artists gathered in New York: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and many others. What a profusion of styles they created—the tension lines and stresses in a Pollock, the spatial relationships of a Mark Rothko, the touch and feel of fleshed-out cloth in a Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg’s “Giant Toothpaste Tube” that resembled a reclining woman, the serried rows of Coca-Cola bottles in a shocking Andy Warhol, for whom preformed subject matter was a condition of his art, the sensitive Helen Frankenthaler’s freehand drawing with paint that, John Russell wrote, “was allowed to stain its way into the canvas rather than to sit, like a skin, on top of it,” Roy Lichtenstein’s dramatic “Drowning Girl” in comic-strip style complete with cartoon balloon—“I don’t care! I’d rather sink—than call Brad for help!”

  Serious art during the latter half of the century revealed three aspects that characterized other sets of American ideas and attitudes. It was ephemeral. It was commercial. It was eclectic. “New, Newer, Newest,” wrote critic John Simon as technology combined with the rise of a literate and art-conscious public to speed the flow of new art styles. The different, the outrageous could not be produced fast enough. A style might grow to maturity and decline in a single decade while the market went on to the next fad. Something called Kinetic Art referred back to Futurism and forward to Op Art. Pop Art connected with comic books but had roots in Dadaism and the work of Marcel Duchamp earlier in the century. Minimalism now emerged as a rejection of Abstract Expressionism and was taken up by some of its practitioners. Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings epitomized what was “perhaps the most difficult, embattled and controversial art ever made.”

  Gallery visitors gaped, politicians scoffed, buyers coughed up. A phrase, the Tyranny of the New, became current. This tyranny was aided not only by the press but by the rapid emergence of new techniques and electronic devices such as video and television that gobbled up material as fast as it could be produced and ravaged the past to satisfy its voracious appetite. High Culture and Mass Culture, once considered mutually exclusive, merged so as to become almost indistinguishable. What had been called High Culture was increasingly being supplanted by an expert culture, according to sociologist Herbert Gans, “dominated by cultural professionals: creators, critics, and especially academics.”

  A handful of Manhattan critics were alleged to hold immense influence over public reaction to new or newly disinterred paintings. Artists, gallery owners, collectors, and museum curators waited in trepidation for their reviews. But of course the arbiters quarreled with one another. Time art critic Robert Hughes derided New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer for being obsessed with left-wing conspiracy. “Let the New Museum put on a show called ‘Art and Ideology’—stuffed with works so banal or impenetrable that their appeal as propaganda is close to zero—and he goes into his war dance about cultural Stalinism.”

  Hughes criticized Kramer for so deeply loathing kitsch as to blame it on camp subversion rather than on the “free-market capitalism he admires.” That free market was booming in art by the 1970s. Buyers for large banks and corporations bid up the prices. Heavily promoted by the titillated media, art was becoming big business. “The change from the small, rather compact ‘art world’ of the 1940s to the explosive, hustling scene of today,” wrote a former gallery owner, “is surely one of the most radical changes in the history of the art market.” Russell called “radically wrong” a world in which “works of art which are part of our universal inheritance can be hidden in vaults until the bankers’ consortium which owns them can make a sufficient return on its investment.” Yesterday’s canvases began to sell like old masters. In 1983, at an auction at Christie’s, Two Women by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning sold for $1.2 million, the largest sum paid to that date for a work by a living American. Surely this was market capitalism at its finest.

  At the opposite end of the economic spectrum, thousands of artists, neglected by critics and well-heeled connoisseurs in the excitement over “big names,” survived by moonlighting in academia or in odd, routine, often distasteful jobs. Still, many artists admitted they “never had it so good.” Support from federal and state agencies and private foundations was at unprecedented levels. Small galleries proliferated. Colleges and universities built art museums and competed for prestigious shows. Rich or poor, artists were drawn increasingly into the wider political arena. Women and minority groups—especially blacks—organized to become a more visible part of the art world. The New York Art Strike of 1970, organized by the artist Robert Morris, who, protesting the Vietnam War, had canceled his own solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, produced a series of demonstrations. To enable all artists, rich and poor, to share in the profits when their work was resold, Edward Kennedy introduced remedial legislation in the Senate.

  By the mid-1960s, a kind of free-for-all had e
rupted as artists abandoned the idea, which had survived and even thrived under the rubric of Modernism, that the work of art—the painting in its frame, the sculpture on its pedestal, the oil on canvas, the carved stone or cast metal—deserved special and unique status as an object. For their materials, artists found and transformed—or did not transform—natural and man-made objects and even their own bodies. The traditional materials of art were turned against themselves with an irony of form or subversive allusions to the icons of art history and popular culture.

  “Art today,” wrote Susan Sontag, “is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.” Many of these attacks on tradition, going under a panoply of labels (Performance Art, Process Art, Conceptual Art, Earthworks, Pop Art, and more), could be traced to the work of Marcel Duchamp. His “ready-mades,” as he called them—exemplified by a urinal he bought from a plumbing supply warehouse and exhibited unmodified but signed— raised by means of the object itself a question about its status as art. Duchamp’s influence persisted in the latter part of the century in work by the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Vito Acconci, and many other artists, including Alice Aycock and Dennis Oppenheim, who produced mechanical works that in an electronic age seemed in some ways nostalgic.

  Much of this art was an attempt to jettison the object and to bring a pure idea of idea to the foreground. But the work of art as object remained. The 1980s saw a Neo-Expressionism played off against a new Minimalism. Art in general had become a kind of “tolerated pluralism.” It could include philosophy, postindustrial technologies and information processes, linguistics, mathematics, social criticism, life risking, jokes and other kinds of “narratives.” Anything went—including outright appropriation of the works of other artists. On this open field, art had ample room for play, for humor and irony, for serendipity and nostalgia, and the spectacle of movements scrambling pell-mell for their fifteen minutes in the sun was itself amusing. But critic Arthur Danto noted, “When anything is allowed,” the point of “doing whatever one chooses to do is lost.”

  No longer neatly framed by those old adversaries, High Culture and Mass Culture, art as well as literature appeared to be changing, if not vanishing, in clouds of self-referentiality, of circular and abstruse discussions of the nature of art. The situation was mirrored in such fashionable intellectual movements as Structuralism, which attempted to do without the author in deciphering the text or object. Structuralism’s child, Deconstruction, was even more radical, for here the text disappeared and only readers remained. In this scenario, the construction of relations with a text (object) was taken to be bound by self-reference. Though the progression from Structuralism to Deconstruction was not linear and practitioners disagreed heatedly among themselves, a string of high priests emerged, from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Jacques Derrida.

  A third artistic-critical movement, and in some respects a product of the other two, was Postmodernism, which appeared most vividly at first in architecture and architectural writing. With its references to various pasts, Postmodernism appeared nostalgic, ironic, and playful all at the same time. In its self-consciousness it reflected the mood of America, which seemed in some sense not to be entirely serious, yet anxious and equally various.

  Other arts in America also provided a mixed picture. Broadway pulled out of its sharp artistic and financial decline of the early 1970s and off-Broadway continued to play a vital role, but much of the excitement in the American theater a decade and a half later was generated by British imports and by revivals of O’Neill and Miller. The technology of music making and distribution was changing so rapidly as to make prediction impossible; even a college jazz ensemble could assemble onstage not only musicians and their instruments but a Model 2000 Pitch Reader, a Digital Delay, a TX-7 Yamaha Synthesizer, two television sets, a video recorder, and a Yamaha SPX-Bass-effects Generator. Conceivably the seventies and eighties might best be remembered for the creativity, iconoclasm, and originality of the nation’s cartoonists and comic-strip creators, especially in their willingness to take on errant Presidents, from Herblock’s formidable assaults on Nixon to Garry Trudeau’s graphic explorations of Ronald Reagan’s brain.

  The Conservative Mall

  In December 1980, a few weeks after Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency, the American Enterprise Institute—at the time the paramount conservative think tank—staged a week-long victory celebration. The leading stars of the right speechified; politicians who had before kept their distance were there working the crowd; and a politician who had not kept his distance, Ronald Reagan, his face wreathed in smiles over his black tie, paraded in while the band played “Hail to the Chief.” The President-elect quickly made it clear that he would not forget his conservative friends. “I just want you to know,” he told the delirious crowd, “that we’ll be looking closely at your observations and proposals.” Even better, key AEI staff people were already headed for the White House. “This kind of working relationship with AEI is one the next administration wants to maintain during the next four years.”

  A century earlier a gathering of conservatives had met with equal cheer to honor another hero of the right, Herbert Spencer. If the conservative celebrities of 1980 hardly rivaled in eminence those present at Delmonico’s in 1882—not only Spencer but Carl Schurz, Andrew Carnegie, William Graham Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher—the 1980 gathering at least hosted a President-elect, while it doubtless would not even have occurred to the men of 1882 to expect Chester A. Arthur for dinner. Presidents had not been very relevant to the men at Delmonico’s, whereas the new President in 1980 was of enormous importance to the crowd at the celebration. During the few weeks before his inauguration they would have time not only to celebrate but to cerebrate, to machinate—and to hope.

  Fifty years of frustration going back to Hoover’s repudiation made the conservative victory taste all the sweeter in these transitional days. In 1952 the American right, backing Robert “Mr. Republican” Taft, had lost to a nonpartisan general who governed as a moderate broker between congressional Democrats and Republicans. In 1960 they had lost with a promising young California conservative who had cornered Alger Hiss. Four years later they had lost with the stoutest heart of all, Barry Goldwater, against a Democrat who exploited JFK’s memory and brandished promises of peace. In 1968 they had won with Nixon, who soon established price controls in Washington and, along with Rockefeller’s man Kissinger, toasted the Chinese reds in Peking before he lost the whole shooting match at Watergate. Jerry Ford had been just another namby-pamby moderate Republican in the White House who had used his presidential perquisites to beat out Reagan for the 1976 GOP nomination and then had managed to lose to Carter.

  But losing had not been the worst of it, at least for conservatives accustomed to putting principles before pragmatics. Almost unbearable had been the complacency and effrontery of liberalism during the long period of its intellectual and political rule. The left, they noted, simply wrote off much of the right as neurotic, paranoid, or at least extremist, operating far outside the rational consensus. Viewing the right also as politically impotent, liberals proclaimed the death of conservatism after its every defeat. Following Goldwater’s rejection, William F. Buckley, Jr., complained that liberals were holding “that the electorate had once and for all spoken on the subject, and that therefore the only realistic thing a conservative could do was to fold up his tent, and hitch-hike along with history.”

  Behind the complaints lay the fear that perhaps the liberal complacency was justified, perhaps liberalism did command a central fortress from which it could not be dislodged, perhaps the liberal establishment was as truly established as any state or church of old. That establishment, charged the conservative author M. Stanton Evans, “is in control. It is guiding the lives and destinies of the American people. It wields enormous, immeasurable power” by controlling popular opinion. Most mortifying of all to literate conservatives, liberals of various stripes w
rote the books about conservatism that won the most respectability. Cornell political scientist Clinton Rossiter, taking a “hard look” at American conservatism, taxed it with being impotent in the realm of ideas. Harvard scholar Louis Hartz appeared to reduce conservatism to Whiggery and reaction. Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter pictured the radical right as rootless, dispossessed, paranoid, and not really conservative. Unkindest cut of all, a former editor of conservative journals, Alan Crawford, published in 1980 an exposé of the New Right as a movement, in the words of Peter Viereck, of a “lawless, rabble-rousing populism of the revolutionary Right,” that threatened the authentic conservative heritage of Edmund Burke and John Adams. But now, in the same year that Crawford published his book, the ecstatic crowd was celebrating its presidential victory, and some of the celebrants were the very “extremists” that liberals and moderate conservatives had attacked.

  There would be many explanations of the rise of the conservative movement from the political slough of the Goldwater and Nixon years to its triumph in the 1980s: the exhaustion of liberal ideas, energy, and agenda; the reaction to the leftist “excesses” of the 1960s; the failures of Democratic Administrations; the revived cold war in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and turmoil in southern Africa and Central America. But the main reason for that rise was rather remarkable in an age when change was so often attributed to the uncontrollable collision of events or the blind turnings of history. The conservative triumph stemmed to a marked degree from a considered and collective effort of rightists of various schools to build their intellectual case and to use invigorated and broadened conservative ideas as vehicles to political power. They would build not the mythical “city upon a hill” but a formidable citadel of ideas as a foundation of the conservative effort. This strategy was based on the idea that powerful ideas themselves were the most steady and dependable propellants of political action. “Ideas Are Weapons,” said the liberal Max Lerner. “Ideas Have Consequences,” wrote the conservative Richard Weaver.