NY Review of Books, July 22, 2021 issue
Freedom for Sale
by Fintan O’Toole
In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to
think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.
Reviewed:
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
by Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 857 pp., $35.00
In 1959, after he had given three lectures in the West German city of
Darmstadt on the principle of indeterminacy in music and then staged a
series of concerts across Western Europe, the avant-garde composer John
Cage became a star on Italian television. He appeared on Lascia o
Raddoppia?, a popular quiz show hosted by a man called Mike Bongiorno
every Thursday night at nine o’clock. The program, based on The $64,000
Question, was a manifestation of the Americanization of Western European
culture after World War II. It fused capitalist incentives—lots of
cash—with the display of recondite expertise. A contestant answered a
question on a favorite subject. The questions got harder every week. A
correct answer doubled the contestant’s prize; a wrong answer halved it
and ended the game.
Cage, who was then working in a music studio in Milan, applied
successfully to compete on the show, answering questions about one of
his obsessions: mushrooms. The twist was that he would also perform a
short piece, beginning with his composition for prepared piano, Amores,
and eventually including a collage of random sounds he’d recorded in
Venice. Cage got to the fifth and final week of the game, with more than
five million lira at stake. He was placed in a glass-walled isolation
booth, and Bongiorno asked him to name every type of white-spored mushroom.
There are twenty-four, and Cage had to list them all before a clock that
he could not see ticked away his allotted time. What he could see was
the audience frantically gesturing toward him as the clock ran down. He
proceeded calmly through his answer, reaching the twenty-fourth
white-spored mushroom almost exactly as time ran out. The jackpot, the
equivalent of $6,000, was enough to buy a Steinway piano for himself and
a Volkswagen bus for the dance company of his close collaborator Merce
Cunningham. He also became famous in Italy. The press depicted him as
the archetypal American man: tall, square-jawed, “pleasantly reminiscent
of Frankenstein.” Federico Fellini considered casting him in La Dolce Vita.
All this might prompt the terrifying question with which Bob Dylan
stopped the hearts of critics six years later: “You know something is
happening but you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?” It is easy
to imagine Cage’s five-week odyssey on Lascia o Raddoppia? as a work of
art, a wonderfully outlandish Dadaist happening. The title of the show
translates roughly as “double or quits?,” connecting it to the ludic
method of composition and choreography developed by Cage and Cunningham,
which used the throw of a dice to determine the next note or move. The
random collision of elements—avant-garde music and cheesy game show,
money and mushrooms, capitalist accumulation and artistic vision—is not
so far from Robert Rauschenberg’s contemporaneous development of visual
“combines,” composed of wildly disparate materials.
As Louis Menand puts it in The Free World, his joyous plunge into the
cross-currents of Western culture in the 1950s and 1960s, such methods
were meant to suggest “the coexistence of unrelated stimuli.” The
Italian press image of Cage as pleasantly reminiscent of Frankenstein
could be an ironic counterpoint to his lectures at Darmstadt, in which
he denounced traditional musical scores that require performers to obey
the will of the composer—he said they had “the alarming aspect of a
Frankenstein monster.” The mushrooms might evoke the great terror of the
cold war: the mushroom clouds of nuclear annihilation.
An overeager historian could see this whole performance as a provocative
commentary by Cage on mass media, fame, and culture. In truth, he really
did need the money, which was by far the largest amount he had ever
earned. He really did know an awful lot about mushrooms and liked to
show off his expertise. He had accumulated, according to his biographer
David Revill, “not only mushroom manuals, but a mushroom ashtray, a
mushroom tea towel, a clip-on plastic mushroom and a large tie bearing a
mushroom motif.” Italian viewers knew exactly what was going on—a
charmingly weird American was trying to win a lucrative prize.
Weird Americans winning lucrative prizes was part of a much bigger game.
One of the things that characterizes American art in the years that
Menand illuminates with such dazzling erudition and stylistic brio is
the way the borders between commerce and art became fuzzy. This is not
only about the way certain impoverished outsiders became rich and famous
as an industry of critics, producers, publishers, and gallerists
assigned cultural—and therefore monetary—value to their work. It was
also a matter of ideology. The new generation of American artists began
to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the real avant-garde.
Mass audiences, they realized, had learned to accept the outré as
everyday, long before the critics descended to validate it. Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns worked as window dressers for the high-end New York
department store Bonwit Teller (later demolished to make way for Trump
Tower). There is a photograph of Johns’s groundbreaking painting Flag on
Orange Field as the backdrop to a Bonwit’s mannequin display in 1957
(see illustration above).
That was some months before the painting featured in Johns’s first show
at the Castelli Gallery in January 1958, where, Menand writes, along
with his other signature paintings of flags and targets, it “rocked the
art world.” Presumably hundreds of thousands of people had glimpsed, in
the store window, the painted image of an American flag against a
background that might be a blown-up detail of an Impressionist
landscape, and apparently they survived without having their minds
blown. But reframed as a challenging cultural object, it was suddenly
sensational. Johns the decorator was now Johns the artist. MoMA bought
four works from that show by this previously unknown painter, making him
an instant star. “It was,” the critic Hilton Kramer said later, “like a
gunshot. It commanded everybody’s attention.” Andy Warhol, likewise,
created window displays for Bonwit’s and was a highly successful
commercial artist long before his soup can paintings placed him on the
cutting edge of the art world in 1962. This was less a matter of art
being commercialized than of commercial culture being aestheticized.
The fuse for the explosion of Pop Art in the US in 1962 had been lit in
postwar Europe. Younger artists in the dreary, austere Britain of the
early 1950s began to reject the modernist disdain for the garish
hucksterism of capitalist salesmanship. As Menand writes of Eduardo
Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, and the theorists who helped to shape their
discourse, Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway, “they did not see
consumerism as a blight. They saw it as a stimulus, a source of
pleasure, an antidote to insularity—the future.” This was especially
true of American consumerism. In 1969 Banham recalled the British art of
a decade earlier:
How salutary a corrective to the sloppy provincialism of most London art
of ten years ago US design could be. The gusto and professionalism of
widescreen movies or Detroit car-styling was a constant reproach…. To
anyone with a scrap of sensibility or an eye for technique, the average
Playtex or Maidenform ad in American Vogue was an instant deflater of
the reputations of most artists then in Arts Council vogue.
Hamilton articulated in 1957 the idea of Pop Art as an aesthetic that
aspired to the condition of the consumer product. He listed the
qualities it should have: popular, transient, expendable, gimmicky,
glamorous, and—he used the term explicitly—big business. Such a frank
alliance between avant-garde art and capitalism was made possible by the
cold war. The rivalry with communism gave consumerism an appearance of
depth. It was not, as elitist critics had long maintained, shallow and
meretricious. Consumerism stood for what Harry Truman called, in the
1947 speech that inaugurated the cold war, a “way of life.” Communism
imposed everything from above. But capitalism—in its own
self-image—created infinite choice. Its claim (seldom borne out in
reality) was that it allowed the consumer to make all the decisions.
Coke or Pepsi, Gillette or Wilkinson Sword, Max Factor or Revlon—it’s
entirely up to you. And that is what makes America, and by extension its
allies in the Western bloc, distinctive from and better than its
Communist rivals.
The same idea was at the heart of the American artistic revolution of
the 1950s. The customer is king. It is not the artist but the viewer,
listener, reader, or audience member who creates the meaning of the
work. The aim of aesthetic creation is to make the producer disappear
and leave only the object and the consumer. This was not a new idea. In
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s budding writer
Stephen Dedalus decrees that “the artist, like the God of creation,
remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,
refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Marcel
Duchamp, a hero to Cage and the adoptive grandfather of the Pop artists,
based his creations on the belief that (as Menand puts it) “the artist
doesn’t make the paintings signify; the viewer does…. The art object
itself is empty, inert; it is ‘made’ by the spectator.” But what placed
these ideas in the center rather than on the periphery in the 1950s and
1960s was the way they dovetailed with the ideologies of both
consumerism (the product is “made” by the buyer) and the cold war (this
power of individual choice is what makes us better than them).
In some respects, this idea was wonderfully democratic. Internally,
within the work, it proposed a strict equality among all its
constitutive elements. None was supposed to dominate the others.
Externally, in the relationship between art and audience, its basic
gesture was an apparent humility. Shelley had claimed that “poets are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world”; now the artists would
resign from office and renounce all claims to set the rules even for how
their own work must be experienced. If you look at a Jackson Pollock
painting, you don’t know where to focus—the picture has no visual center
around which it is organized. In a Rauschenberg combine there is no
signal as to which bit matters more than any other. Cunningham decided
likewise that a dance did not have to be choreographed around a single
point: every angle from which it could be viewed was the “front.”
Cage’s music took to extremes the logic of Arnold Schoenberg’s
abandonment of the tonic—the original key of a composition toward which
all dissonance must resolve itself. He essentially dismissed the entire
European tradition as a kind of musical fascism, in which the composer
acted as dictator. Emancipation from the tonic was merely a first step
toward emancipation from this imposition of one person’s intention on
the musical experience. He scolded his listeners in Darmstadt on the
European failure to include enough silence: “When silence, generally
speaking, is not in evidence, the will of the composer is.” In his
vocabulary (drawn largely from Zen Buddhism), will is a very bad thing.
Hence the systematic incorporation of games of chance into the process
of creation. Chance negated volition.
It is easy to appreciate the power of this gesture, especially for those
who—like so many making the art and creating the critical setting in
which it was to be received—were Jewish or gay or both. Nazism was, as
suggested in the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious film of the
Nuremberg rally, the triumph of the will. For Cage and his
contemporaries, the triumph of the unwilled was a kind of reply.
If one were to imagine the precise opposite of the Nuremberg rally, it
would be Theatre Piece No. 1, staged at Black Mountain in 1952.
Rauschenberg’s White Paintings series was suspended at different angles
above the audience. Cage stood on a ladder delivering a lecture
punctuated by long silences. His longtime collaborator David Tudor
played a piano. Rauschenberg operated an old-fashioned phonograph.
Cunningham and other dancers moved through and around the audience. A
movie was being projected at one end of the hall, slides at the other.
Many of these things were happening at once, the duration of each
element determined, of course, by chance. There was no stage, no focal
point, no best seats in the house. The experience was made by each
viewer’s decisions, from moment to moment, about what did or did not
merit attention, which is why such a pivotal event lacks an uncontested
record of what occurred. “That,” as Menand notes, “was the
intention”—though it might be more apt to say “non-intention.”
The open artwork was a correlative of the open society. It seemed to
topple the hierarchical relationship of artist to audience, to take
power away from the all-seeing, all-knowing creator and give it to the
ordinary, anonymous viewer, reader, or listener. But that is not the way
it all worked out. The logic of this broad movement was that the artist
would indeed be refined out of existence. If the work is really “made”
by the consumer, why do we even need to know who provided the pretext
for those repeated acts of creation? Why should we say that 4’33” is “by
John Cage” or that a stuffed Angora goat becomes, when a car tire is
placed around its middle, a piece “by Robert Rauschenberg”?
Why are they not really by “anonymous,” which is to say every one of us,
as we constitute them for ourselves? Because the hierarchy is quickly
reestablished. The dominant point of view does not disappear—it merely
shifts from inside the artwork to outside, to the vast apparatus of
criticism and promotion and institutionalization. Just as the choice
between one brand of lipstick and another is not made in a vacuum of
influence and power, the ideal of the cultural consumer as a free agent
is illusory.
Menand’s great achievement in The Free World lies not so much in his
brilliant descriptions and pithy but profound analyses of individual
artists and thinkers as in his even more remarkable conjuring of the
postwar American “art world.” He cites Howard Becker’s definition of the
term: “Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are
necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that
world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.”
This last phrase is important. A large part of what is going on in the
1950s and 1960s is defining the “something” that is “happening here” as
art—even (perhaps especially) for the baffled Mr. Jones. Why is Cage’s
Theatre Piece No. 1 a historic moment in the history of American culture
while his appearance on Lascia o Raddoppia? (which sounds like a lot
more fun) is not? Because one happened at a liberal arts college famous
as a cradle of cultural movements and the other happened on a TV show
that was, by definition, light entertainment. But also because the
former produced a commodity that was deemed to have permanent cultural
and monetary value.
The White Paintings that were suspended from the ceiling at Black
Mountain now hang on the walls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, their blankness filled not with the autonomous perceptions of the
viewer but with the thought: This is a Rauschenberg. These acts of
definition are performed by the thinkers who shape the intellectual
climate; the critics who adopt this or that artist as an exemplar of
their own theories; the dealers who package, promote, show, and sell the
work; and the museum curators and private collectors who buy it. Without
them, there would have been no American art world in which Johns’s Flag
on Orange Field could be understood as a high-status cultural artifact
rather than a piece of window dressing. But with them, the dream of a
nonhierarchical art in which consumers make their own choices was
impossible.
The great irony of this period is that not only do radical artists not
disappear into their works—they become stars. In the very act of
abdication, they are enthroned. Overnight celebrity is, for them, a
common fate. Consumerism depends on branding, and the artists were
American brands. Warhol cleverly closed the loop by making paintings
from celebrity images and brand logos, but others were drawn into it
less knowingly. The coincidence in 1957 of the unsuccessful prosecution
of the owner and manager of City Lights Books for publishing and selling
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the appearance of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
produced the Beat Generation. It didn’t much matter that the term was
more a punching bag than a useful container. The reliably hysterical
Norman Podhoretz asked rhetorically in Esquire, “Isn’t the Beat
Generation a conspiracy to overthrow civilization…and to replace it…by
the world of the adolescent street gang?”
Nor did it matter much that Kerouac was, as Menand has it, “not a macho
anti-aesthete” but “a poet and a failed mystic.” Fame and infamy were as
indistinguishable as, in Podhoretz’s rhetoric, criticism and
unintentional comedy had become. Once the Beat gang tattoo had been
etched on them, Kerouac and Ginsberg were Marlon Brando in The Wild One
and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
At the heart of the self-image of the West in the cold war was a
powerful but often amorphous idea: freedom. It was, where art was
concerned, deeply contradictory. On the one hand, “freedom” was innately
oppositional: the “free world” was defined by contrast to the
oppressions of fascism that had come before and to the threat of
communism it subsequently faced. These two political terrors were fused,
under the influence of Hannah Arendt, into a single dark force:
totalitarianism. Yet the beauty of this highly political construction of
freedom as the defining virtue of the Western world was that it could
also be considered as freedom from politics. It could fuse with a notion
of art as pure form, liberated from the tyranny of content. “I want
images to free themselves from me,” said Johns. “I simply want the
object to be free.” His transformation of the American flag—the most
crudely obvious political symbol one could imagine—into a purely visual
code is emblematic of a much larger attempt to define the aesthetic
realm as an entirely autonomous world.
As a reaction against the brutal annexation of the cultural sphere by
fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the assertion of this autonomy was both
necessary and exciting. It drew on the brilliant flowering of formalist
thinking in Europe: the “practical criticism” of I.A. Richards in
England, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the
linguistic analytics of the Russian émigré Roman Jakobson, and
ultimately the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida. This gave
it the feeling of being transatlantic without being merely an
intellectual expression of cold war divisions. The methodologies of what
came to be called New Criticism in the US had a rigor and meticulousness
that acted as ballast to the playfulness and apparent randomness of much
of the new American art.
Yet the way in which these new ideas were imported into American
intellectual life was itself highly political. It was driven, in part,
by the institutionalization of literary criticism in the English
departments of rapidly expanding universities. Menand observes that for
teachers in search of a distinctive professional ethic, the idea of the
text as a sovereign realm that generated its own laws and meanings, free
from such crudities as biography, authorial intent, or topical meaning,
“validated academic criticism itself, replacing the man or woman of
letters with the professor as the voice of critical authority.”
Formalist criticism also had the advantage of keeping awkward histories
at bay. The central figure in the Americanization of Derrida’s thought,
Paul de Man, had a secret past as a Nazi propagandist in Belgium. New
Criticism was created in the Old South by a coterie of thinkers known as
the Southern Agrarians—Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Donald
Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren—who shared a nostalgia for
its lost world and a hatred of northern industrial modernity. Warren,
for example, wrote that the “Southern negro” could find only “in
agricultural and domestic pursuits the happiness that his good nature
and easy ways incline him to.” Menand shows how, as the Agrarians moved
into influential positions in northern universities, all of them except
Davidson, who remained a very public and active white supremacist,
“detached themselves from politics” and “largely shed or buried their
political pasts.” The apparent depoliticization of American criticism in
this era was not solely an act of evasion, but it is easy to see how
much comfort it gave to those who had a great deal to evade.
What, in any case, was freedom, and to whom did it belong? The desire
for the art object to be free came easily enough to artists who were
male and white. Menand points out that the intellectual and artistic
world of the 1950s was even more hostile to women than that of the
1920s. In 1920, 20 percent of Ph.D.s were awarded to women and 47
percent of college students were female; in 1963 the equivalent
proportions were 11 percent and 38 percent. Women had a large influence
on the creation of the art world as gallerists, curators, and editors,
but the avant-garde they promoted was essentially a boys’ club. When
MoMA sent its showcase exhibition “The New American Painting” on tour to
Europe in 1958, just one of the seventeen painters (Grace Hartigan) was
a woman. At a dinner attended in 1951 by Hartigan and Lee Krasner, the
vastly influential critic Clement Greenberg was not embarrassed to
launch into what Hartigan called “his kick” about why women painters
were not very good.
Menand, oddly, barely mentions one of the great avant-garde movements of
the era, the astonishing development of post-bop jazz. But he uses the
careers of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and James Baldwin to explore the
tensions within Black writers as they tried to figure out whether the
“free world” could ever be theirs. One aspect of that question was
whether the broadly constituted American art world of the 1950s and
early 1960s was one they wanted to belong to. This, too, was a question
of definition. That cultural nexus had managed to assert that the artist
was free, that having a point of view within an artwork was a bad thing,
that everything in the work of art had equal value, and that
biographical experience was irrelevant. To say that none of those
supposed truths could apply to most Black artists would be an
understatement. Baldwin was, for a time, a successful contestant in the
great game show, winning, in 1963, the jackpot of having his face on the
cover of Time. But in 1973 Time turned down a piece by Henry Louis Gates
based on interviews with him. Gates was informed that Baldwin was
“passé.” Even for the most successful Black writer of the period, a
place in the official cultural constellation was temporary,
uncomfortable, and easily occluded.
The composer Morton Feldman said, “What was great about the fifties was
that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art.
That’s why it all happened.” Menand shows how such a vacuum was created
but also how quickly it was filled, not just with understanding but with
marketing, mythologies, and moneymaking. The Free World is, deliciously,
a great rebuke to the cold war ideology of rugged individualism. Its
artists and thinkers are always embroiled in the means of production,
distribution, and exchange.
Menand’s wit, precision, and skepticism are deployed at every turn to
puncture pretensions and cut through all the accreted clichés. One feels
sure that he could name, if asked, the twenty-four white-spored
mushrooms. But for all his mastery of fine detail, his eyes are always
scanning the horizon for power—who has it and how it is being used. And
yet his book is never merely cynical. Like a great novelist, he creates
a world. Even as he deletes so ruthlessly the self-serving adjective
“free,” he fills the noun of his title with tumult and energy, with
chaos and creation. This world is not so brave, but it is new, and
Menand leaves room for us to wonder that it has such people in it.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for The Irish Times and the Leonard L.
Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. His next book, We Don’t
Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, will be published
in the US in January. (July 2021)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#9606): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9606
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83942735/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
