The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  The exhibition Artists in Exile at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1943, when Fernard Léger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton, André Masson, and so many other European artists had shown their work, had had a big impact on American artists.25 It would be wrong to say that this exhibition changed the course of American painting, but it certainly accelerated a process that was happening anyway. The painters who came to be called the abstract expressionists (the term was not coined until the late 1940s) all began work in the 1930s and shared one thing: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, and Robert Motherwell were fascinated by psychoanalysis and its implications for art. In their case it was Jungian analysis that attracted their interest (Pollock was in Jungian analysis for two years), in particular the theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. This made them assiduous followers (but also critics) of surrealism. Forged in the years of depression, in a world that by and large neglected the artist, many of the abstract expressionists experienced great poverty. This helped foster a second characteristic – the view that the artist is a social rebel whose main enemy is the culture of the masses, so much of which (radio, talking pictures, Time, and other magazines) was new in the 1930s. The abstract expressionists were, in other words, natural recruits to the avant-garde.26

  Between the Armory Show and World War II, America had received a steady flow of exhibitions of European art, thanks mainly to Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was Barr who had organised the show of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Gauguin in 1929, when MoMA had opened.27 He had a hand in the International Modern show at MoMA in 1934, and the Bauhaus show in 1937. But it was only between 1935 and 1945 that psychoanalytic thought, and in particular its relation to art, was explored in any detail in America, due to the influx of European psychoanalysts, as referred to above. Psychoanalysis was, for example, a central ingredient in the ballets of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, who in such works as Dark Meadow and Deaths and Entrances combined primitive (Native American) myths with Jungian themes. The first art exhibitions to really explore psychoanalysis also took place in wartime. Jackson Pollock’s show in November 1943, at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, started the trend, soon followed by Arshile Gorky’s exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery in March 1945, for which André Breton wrote the foreword.28 But the abstract expressionists were important for far more than the fact that theirs was the first avant-garde movement to be influential in America. The critics Isaac Rosenfeld and Theodore Solotaroff drew attention to something they described as a ‘seismic change’ in art: as a result of the depression and the war, they said, artists had moved ‘from Marx to Freud.’ The underlying ethic of art was no longer ‘Change the world,’ but ‘Adjust yourself to it.’29

  And this is what made the abstract expressionists so pivotal. They might see themselves as an avant-garde (they certainly did so up until the end of the war), and some of them, like Willem de Kooning, would always resist the blandishments of patrons and dealers, and paint what they wanted, how they wanted. But that was the point: what artists wanted to produce had changed. The criticisms in their art were personal now, psychological, directed inward rather than outward toward the society around them, echoing Paul Klee’s remark in 1915, ‘The more fearful the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.’ It is in some ways extraordinary that at the very time the Cold War was beginning – when two atomic bombs had been dropped and the hydrogen bomb tested, when the world was at risk as never before – art should turn in on itself, avoid sociology, ignore politics, and concentrate instead on an aspect of self – the unconscious – that by definition we cannot know, or can know only indirectly, with great difficulty and in piecemeal fashion. This is the important subject of Diana Crane’s Transformation of the Avant-Garde, in which she chronicles not only the rise of the New York art market (90 galleries in 1949, 197 in 1965) but also the changing status and self-conception of artists. The modernist avant-garde saw itself as a form of rebellion, using among other things the new techniques and understanding of science to disturb and provoke the bourgeois, and in so doing change a whole class of society. By the 1960s, however, as the critic Harold Rosenberg noted, ‘Instead of being … an act of rebellion, despair or self-indulgence, art is being normalised as a professional activity within society.’30 Clyfford Still put it more pungently: ‘I’m not interested in illustrating my time…. Our age – it is of science – of mechanism – of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage.’31 As a result the abstract expressionists would be criticised time and again for their lack of explicit meaning or any social implications, the beginning of a long-term change.

  The ultimate example of this was pop art, which both Clement Greenberg and the Frankfurt School critics saw as essentially inimical to the traditional function of avant-garde art. Few pop artists experienced poverty the way the abstract expressionists had. Frank Stella had had a (fairly) successful father, Joseph, and Andy Warhol himself, though he came from an immigrant family, was earning $50,000 a year by the mid-1950s from his work in advertising. What did Warhol – or any of them – have to rebel against?32 The crucial characteristic of pop art was its celebration, rather than criticism, of popular culture and of the middle-class lifestyle. All the pop artists – Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Warhol – responded to the images of mass culture, advertising, comic books, and television, but the early 1960s were above all Warhol’s moment. As Robert Hughes has written, Warhol did more than any other painter ‘to turn the art world into the art business.’33 For a few years, before he grew bored with himself, his art (or should one say his works?) managed to be both subversive and celebratory of mass culture. Warhol grasped that the essence of popular culture – the audiovisual culture rather than the world of books – was repetition rather than novelty. He loved the banal, the unchanging images produced by machines, though he was also the heir to Marcel Duchamp in that he realised that certain objects, like an electric chair or a can of soup, change their meaning when presented ‘as art.’ This new aesthetic was summed up by the artist Jedd Garet when he said, ‘I don’t feel a responsibility to have a vision. I don’t think that is quite valid. When I read artists’ writings of the past, especially before the two wars, I find it very amusing and I laugh at these things: the spirituality, the changing of the culture. It is possible to change the culture but I don’t think art is the right place to try and make an important change except visually…. Art just can’t be that world-shattering in this day and age…. Whatever kind of visual statement you make has first to pass through fashion design and furniture design until it becomes mass-produced; finally, a gas pump might look a little different because of a painting you did. But that’s not for the artist to worry about…. Everybody is re-evaluating those strict notions about what makes up high art. Fashion entering into art and vice versa is really quite a wonderful development. Fashion and art have become much closer. It’s not a bad thing.’34

  From pop art onward, though it started with abstract expressionism, artists no longer proposed – or saw it as their task to propose – ‘alternative visions.’ They had instead become part of the ‘competing lifestyles and ideologies’ that made up the contemporary, other-directed, affluent society. It was thus entirely fitting that when Warhol was gunned down in his ‘Factory’ on Union Square in 1968 by a feminist actress, and survived after being pronounced clinically dead, the price of his paintings shot up from an average of $200 to $15,000. From that moment, the price of art was as important as its content.

  Also characteristic of the arts in America at that time, and Manhattan in particular, was the overlap and links between different forms: art, poetry, dance and music. According to David Lehman the very idea of the avant-garde had itself transferred to America and not just in painting: the title of his book on the New York school of poets, which flourished in the early 1950s, was The Las
t Avant-Garde.35 Aside from their poetry, which travelled an experimental road between the ancien regime of Eliot et alia and the new culture of the Beats, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler were all very friendly with the abstract expressionist painters De Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. Ashbery was also influenced by the composer John Cage. In turn, Cage later worked with painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and with the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

  By the middle of the century two main themes could be discerned in serious music. One was the loss of commitment to tonality, and the other was the general failure of twelve-tone serialism to gain widespread acceptance.36 Tonality did continue, notably in the works of Sergei Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten (whose Peter Grimes, 1945, even prefigured the ‘antiheroes’ of the angry young men of the 1950s). But after World War II, composers in most countries outside the Soviet Union were trying to work out the implications ‘of the two great contrasted principles which had emerged during and after World War I: “rational” serialism and “irrational” Dadaism.’ To that was added an exploration of the new musical technology: tape recording, electronic synthesis, computer techniques.37 No one reflected these influences more than John Cage.

  Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied under Schoenberg between 1935 and 1937, though rational serialism was by no means the only influence on him: he also studied under Henry Cowell, who introduced him to Zen, Buddhist, and Tantric ideas of the East. Cage met Merce Cunningham at a dance class in Seattle in 1938, and they worked together from 1942, when Cunningham formed his own company. Both were invited to Black Mountain College summer school in North Carolina in 1948 and again in 1952, where they met Robert Rauschenberg. Painter and composer influenced each other: Rauschenberg admitted that Cage’s ideas about the everyday in art had an impact on his images, and Cage said that Rauschenberg’s white paintings, which he saw at Black Mountain in 1952, gave him courage to present his ‘silent’ piece, 4′ 33″, for piano in the same year (see below). In 1954 Rauschenberg became artistic adviser to Cunningham’s dance company.38

  Cage was the experimentalist par excellence, exploring new sound sources and rhythmic structures (Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was scored for two variable-speed gramophone turntables, muted piano, and cymbals), and in particular indeterminacy. It was this concern with chance that linked him back to Dada, across to the surrealist Theatre of the Absurd and, later, as we shall see, to Cunningham. Cage also anticipated postmodern ideas by trying to break down (as Walter Benjamin had foreseen) the barrier between artist and spectator. Cage did not believe the artist should be privileged in any way and sought, in pieces such as Musiccircus (1968), to act merely as an initiator of events, leaving the spectator to do much of the work, where the gulf between musical notation and performance was deliberately wide.39 The ‘archetypal’ experimental composition was the aforementioned 4 ‘33 “ (1952), a three-movement piece for piano where, however, not a note is played. In fact Cage’s instructions make clear that the piece may be ‘performed’ on any instrument for any amount of time. The aim, beyond being a parody and a joke at the expense of the ordinary concert, is to have the audience listen to the ambient sounds of the world around them, and reflect upon that world for a bearably short amount of time.

  The overlap with Cunningham is plain. Born in 1919 in Centralia in Washington State, Cunningham had been a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company but became dissatisfied with the emotional and narrative content and began to seek out a way to present movement as itself. Since 1951, Cunningham had paralleled Cage by introducing the element of chance into dance. Coin tossing and dice throwing or clues from the I Ching were used to select the order and arrangement of steps, though these steps were themselves made up of partial body movements, which Cunningham broke down like no one before him. This approach developed in the 1960s, in works such as Story and Events, where Cunningham would decide only moments before the production which parts of the dance would be performed that night, though even then it was left to the individual dancers to decide at certain points in the performance which of several courses to follow.40

  Two other aspects of these works were notable. In the first, Cage or some other composer provided the music, and Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, or other artists would provide the settings. Usually, however, these three elements – dance, music, and set – did not come together until the day before the premiere. Cunningham did not know what Cage was producing, and neither of them knew what, say, Rauschenberg was providing. A second aspect was that, despite one of Cunningham’s better-known works being given the title Story, this was strongly ironic. Cunningham did not feel that ballets had to tell a story – they were really ‘events.’ He intended spectators to make up their own interpretations of what was happening.41 Like Cage’s emphasis on silence as part of music, so Cunningham emphasised that stillness was part of dance. In some cases, notices in the wings instructed certain dancers to stay offstage for a specified amount of time. Costumes and lighting changed from night to night, as did some sets, with objects being moved around or taken away completely.

  That said, the style of Cunningham’s actual choreography is light, suggestive. In the words of the critic Sally Banes, it conveys a ‘lightness, elasticity … [an] agile, cool, lucid, analytic intelligence.’42 Just as the music, dance, and settings were to be comprehended in their own right, so each of Cunningham’s steps is presented so as to be whole and complete in itself, and not simply part of a sequence. Cunningham also shared with Jacques Tati a compositional approach where the most interesting action is not always going on in the front of the stage at the centre. It can take place anywhere, and equally interesting things may be taking place at the same time on different parts of the stage. It is up to the spectator to respond as he or she wishes.

  Cunningham was even more influenced by Marcel Duchamp, and his questioning of what art is, what an artist is, and what the relationship with the spectator is. This showed most clearly in Walkaround Time (1968), which had decor by Jasper Johns based on The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even and with music by David Behrman entitled … for nearly an hour, based on Duchamp’s To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour. This piece was Johns’s idea. He and Cunningham were at Duchamp’s house one evening, and when Johns put the idea to him, the Frenchman answered, ‘But who would do all the work?’43 Johns said he would, and Duchamp, relieved, gave permission, adding that the pieces should be moved around during the performance to emulate the paintings.44 The dance is characterised by people running in place, small groups moving in syncopated jerkiness, like machines, straining in slow motion, and making minuscule movements that can be easily missed. Walkaround Time has a ‘machine-like grace’ that made it more popular than Story.45

  With Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp, Cunningham has been one of the most influential choreographers in the final decades of the century. This influence has been direct on people like Jim Self, though others, such as Yvonne Rainer, have rebelled against his aleatory approach.

  Cunningham, Cage, the abstract expressionists, and the pop artists were all concerned with the form of art rather than its meaning, or content. This distinction was the subject of a famous essay by the novelist and critic Susan Sontag, writing in 1964 in the Evergreen Review. In ‘Against Interpretation,’ she argued that the legacy of Freud and Marx, and much of modernism, had been to overload works of art with meaning, content, interpretation. Art – whether it was painting, poetry, drama, or the novel – could no longer be enjoyed for what it was, she said, for the qualities of form or style that it showed, for its numinous, luminous, or ‘auratic’ quality, as Benjamin might have put it. Instead, all art was put within a ‘shadow world’ of meaning, and this impoverished it and us. She discerned a countermovement: ‘Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use,
for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories…. The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. Pop art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so “what it is,” it, too, ends by being uninterpretable.’46 She wanted to put silence back into poetry and the magic back into words: ‘Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted…. What is important now is to recover our senses…. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’47

  Sontag’s warning was timely. Cage and Cunningham were in some respects the last of the modernists. In the postmodern age that followed, interpretation ran riot.

  30

  EQUALITY, FREEDOM, AND JUSTICE IN THE GREAT SOCIETY

  In the spring of 1964, just weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, delivered a speech on the campus of the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor. That day he outlined a massive program for social regeneration in America. The program, he said, would recognise the existence and the persistence of poverty and its links to the country’s enduring civil rights problem; it would acknowledge the growing concern for the environment, and it would attempt to meet the demands of the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Having reassured his listeners that economic growth in America appeared sustained, with affluence a fact of life for many people, he went on to concede that Americans were not only interested in material benefit for themselves ‘but in the prospects for human fulfilment for all citizens.1 Johnson, an experienced politician, understood that Kennedy’s killing had sent a shockwave across America, had been a catalyst that made the early 1960s a defining moment in history. He realised that to meet such a moment, he needed to act with imagination and vision. The Great Society was his answer.