Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 9780226923321

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Radical Coherency

selected essays on art and literature, 1966 to 2005

Radical Coherency

David Antin The University of Chicago Press chicago and london

David Antin is professor emeritus in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. A poet, critic, and performance artist, he is author of several books, including Talking, What It Means to Be Avant-Garde, and i never knew what time it was. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-02096-9 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-02097-6 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-02096-7 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-02097-5 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Antin, David. Radical coherency : selected essays on art and literature, 1966 to 2005 / David Antin. p. cm. Includes index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-02096-9 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-02097-6 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-02096-7 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-02097-5 (paper) 1. Art criticism—United States. 2. Art, American—20th century. 3. American poetry—20th century— History and criticism. 4. Experimental poetry— 20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. ps3551.n75r33 2011 700.9⬘04—dc22 2010020381 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.481992.

for Charles Bernstein that keen and generous poet critic thinker without whose friendly insistence I might still be dawdling over this book

Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

Art Essays

Literary Essays

Warhol: The Silver Tenement 15

Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in Modern American Poetry 161

Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation 22 Jean Tinguely’s New Machine 31 Lead Kindly Blight 35 “It Reaches a Desert in which Nothing Can Be Perceived but Feeling” 46 Art and the Corporations 61 Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium 78

Some Questions about Modernism 197 radical coherency 227 The Stranger at the Door 239 The Beggar and the King 258 “the death of the hired man” 271 fine furs 292

Have Mind, Will Travel 98

Wittgenstein among the Poets 305

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel 123

john cage uncaged is still cagey 331

Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder 135 Allan at Work 143

Credits 345

Index 347

Preface

The essays in this book have been selected from a body of work largely created between 1966 and 2005. It’s a long book and could have been a longer one, but I have omitted all short reviews and selected from the longer essays, those that collectively give a reasonable idea of the range of my work and resonate most strongly with the unresolved issues of our time. It’s been a long time in the making, probably because of a certain diffidence I felt about looking backward when I was so much more interested in going forward. And it might never have gotten completed in spite of the encouragement of friends, most notably Marjorie Perloff and Jerome Rothenberg, if not for a conversation with Charles Bernstein. It was Charles who, standing on a wintry corner of Mercer Street in February 2008, convinced me of the necessity of putting the book together; and it is accordingly dedicated to him. But I also want to express my thanks to the editors of ARTnews, Artforum, and Art in America; to John Ashbery, Betsy Baker, and Max Kozloff; and to the shades of Tom Hess, Harris Rosenstein, and John Coplans, for putting up with my idiosyncrasies as an art writer and my risky play with deadlines. Many thanks also to Bill Spanos for opening boundary 2 to my work as a literary critic and poet. And to my gone friend Leonard Michaels for his questions to me in that issue of Occident that is now impossible to obtain but will find a home in this book, that Alan Thomas of the University of Chicago Press has waited so patiently for so long.

Introduction

How I Became an Art Critic Some time in the early sixties I ran into Nicolas Calas at a Robert Mangold opening in the Fischback Gallery. Nicco was the tallest Surrealist I ever knew. A handsome, energetic man, he began his career in the twenties as an avant-garde Greek poet, moved to Paris in the thirties, where he became a close friend of André Breton, and migrated in the forties along with a large part of the French art world to New York, where he became a very active art critic, a passionate advocate of the most contemporary art of the time. We got to talking about a recent Allan D’Arcangelo show that I thought had been very inadequately received. Reviewers had treated it as another variation of Pop Art, which was fair enough, but ignored its significance as the representation of a new American landscape. Nicco thought I should write a review of it. He knew me as a poet and translator of some of Breton’s poetry and figured those were just the right credentials for an art critic. He said he would show it to John Ashbery, who was then an editor for Art and Literature. At the time I was working on a doctorate in linguistics and supporting myself on a generous fellowship and intermittent scientific translations. Still I finished the piece pretty crisply and John accepted it. But by that time Nicco had a new assignment for me. Frank O’Hara had been writing the “Art Chronicle” for Lita Hornick’s magazine Kulchur. Frank was tired of it and Lita needed a new art reviewer. Nicco decided that was me. So he arranged a lunch meeting for me at her apartment. It was in one of those luxurious Park Avenue buildings with doormen and elevator men, and I was let in by what appeared to be a French maid in a short black dress with a little white apron out of some pornographic movie. She left me in the anteroom and then Lita appeared. I had been to a couple of her parties but had never really met Lita before. She was a sumptuous blonde woman in her middle thirties with the heavily made-up, enameled look that seemed appropriate for one of the

great salonnières of the sixties, a designation she was entitled to as publisher of the radical literary and art magazine Kulchur since 1960. And appropriately, her very spacious and conventionally designed apartment was filled with a large mix of big paintings by such sixties notables as Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Al Held, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. Our lunch was at a dining room table under a Tom Wesselman nude with very red nipples. I don’t think we talked very much about art or my ideas for the “Art Chronicle.” She spent most of the time talking about deadlines and how her distributor was complaining. How much she loved LeRoi Jones anyway, who was her main editor but sloppy about deadlines, and the difficulty of holding together a magazine with so many talented and imaginative people. Meanwhile the maid popped in with soup or salad or, after some strange writhing movements by Lita, to carry off our empty plates. As our conversation was winding down and we were just about ready for coffee Lita started writhing again with the near desperation of someone with an uncontrollable itch. I looked down as she sank under the table and found the buzzer that she must have kicked out of reach. She stepped on it, the maid came in with coffee and our meeting ended. I wrote two issues of the “Art Chronicle,” numbers 18 and 20. I missed the deadline for number 19. Meanwhile John had become an editor of ARTNews and he wanted to set up a meeting for me with Tom Hess, its chief editor and publisher. I thought this might be a little awkward since my first “Art Chronicle” essay contained a harsh criticism of a piece Hess had written about Duchamp, the main point of which was apparently that Duchamp had been a mediocre painter. I took issue with this on the grounds that he had not only not been a mediocre painter, he’d been a terrible painter, and that his paintings were irrelevant because painting was the least important part of his art. I suspected that Tom knew this, but having cut his critical teeth on Abstract-Expressionism, he assumed that painting was the central genre of art and the model for all art making. But John assured me that just because Tom had come up with the Abstract-Expressionists he was used to the heated arguments of the Cedar Bar and was probably more amused by my attack than disturbed by it. John was right, Tom was witty and gracious. He was himself a graceful critic of painting, but as an editor and publisher his main interest was in lining up a stable of fluent art writers, most of whom he recruited from the ranks of the poetic or artistic avant-garde. All he wanted to know is who I wanted to write about, since almost all the essays in the magazine were tied to museum or gallery exhibitions of individual artists or groups  •

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of artists. Knowing neither of them were enthusiasms of his, I said I’d write on Robert Morris and Andy Warhol. Warhol had been treated scornfully in reviews by the standard art press and Morris had received very little attention at all. All Tom wanted to know was how long it would take me to do it. The Morris piece came out in April 1966 and was a kind of theatrical and psychological critique. It was precisely the kind of view that led Michael Fried from a position 180 degrees to the south of it to attack Minimal Art one year later in his brilliant essay “Art and Objecthood” as inherently theatrical and anti-Modernist. I felt confirmed because I regarded Fried as a perfectly designed compass that always pointed due south. But my Morris essay must have made Warhol nervous because he dispatched Ted Berrigan, who volunteered to take over the assignment. I thanked Ted for his generous offer and told him to tell Andy to relax, the essay was already half done and he was looking pretty good in it. When “The Silver Tenement” was published that summer he looked so good that I became a sort of instant celebrity for the Castelli Gallery. At least it was the only reason I could think to explain why Leo, working his dandyish way up the East Hampton beach that summer in his trim little bathing suit, leaning over, meeting and greeting people, stopped at our blanket to greet me as the savior of the Castelli Gallery. While this was a harmless piece of flattery, my publications did give me access to gallery back rooms and got me set up as correspondent from the New York art scene for several European magazines. They also got me a Warhol cover for the Vietnam issue of some/thing, the poetry magazine I edited with my old friend Jerry Rothenberg. Though the cover was not without its difficulties. When I went to see Andy I showed him our previous issues and told him about the Vietnam issue we were planning, he said, “Great!” What he’d really like to do was a Vietcong flag. But I said, “What we’d like you to do is take a prowar slogan like ‘bomb hanoi!’ put it on the cover as a button, and fuck it up any way you like.” So Andy said, “Great!” and I thought it was settled. But over the next two weeks I ran into Gerard Malanga twice in the Eighth Street Bookshop, and he told me Andy would really like to do a Vietcong flag. Finally I said, “Look Gerard, I don’t know too much about the Vietcong, and neither do you or Andy. But what we do know about are the American warmongers. So what I want is for Andy to take one of their idiot slogans and fuck it up any way he likes for our cover. That way any member of the American Legion could pick up a copy on a news stand and maybe read it.” Andy finally did it with the image of the bomb hanoi button repeated over and over again on a cover that Introduction

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functioned as a page of grungy looking stamps you could tear apart along the perforations and if you felt like it glue on a wall. When I gave Allen Ginsberg his copy, Allen’s jaw dropped and he said “What’s this?” Then he turned it over, saw his name on the back and said, “It’s all right, I’m in it.” That summer of 1966 I was finishing an essay on Fuseli, Blake, and Palmer for the summer issue of ARTNews when I had to go over some minor changes with John Ashbery, who was editing it. His voice was shaking as he told me that Frank O’Hara had just been run over by a beach taxi on Fire Island and was dead. That was also the summer of Allan Kaprow’s East Hampton Happenings, when Elly (my wife, the artist Eleanor Antin) got recruited to be in GAS, the event Allan staged at the Montauk Bluffs, where he had fire trucks pouring foam down the bluffs onto the team of people he had crossing the little shelf of land below. The people, carrying staves like some unlucky Israelites trying to escape from Egypt, had to cross from one tepeelike, black plastic-covered structure to another about thirty yards away, and made it about half way when the foam came down and engulfed them, completely covering smaller folk like Elly before it rolled out to sea. We had gotten to know Allan back in 1964, when he drafted me and Jackson Mac Low to play the role of poets sitting on stage and reading our poetry during the performance he was directing of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera Originale, and by the summer of 1966 we had become good enough friends for Allan to encourage Sue Thurman to hire me to replace him at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where he was currently serving as educational curator. In fact I can blame Allan for my entire curatorial career, because two years later he persuaded Paul Brach, who was trying to lure Allan out to teach at the relatively new University of California campus at San Diego, to hire me instead, to serve as gallery director and teach art criticism. For the ICA I would usually drive out to LaGuardia Monday or Tuesday morning, park my old Caddy that had Allan D’Arcangelo landscapes painted on the two front doors, take the shuttle to Logan, spend three or four days in Boston, and fly home. My jobs turned out to be very various and irregular, depending on what needed to be done and how I could make myself useful. More regularly I gave talks on the current shows, went out to talk about contemporary art to schools and other institutions, listened to the complaints of local artists, arranged special events, and served as liaison to the New York art scene and as general backup for the exhibitions. At one point the ICA had committed itself to a one-man show honoring the work of Ivan Chermayeff for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Chermayeff was an elegant graphic designer but his new graphics were  •

Introduction

already being deployed in the subway system. Sue, our director, who had probably arranged the show, hoping as usual to make new connections in the affluent financial community, finally began to worry that an elegant graphics show on the wall would leave our Newbury Street gallery looking like a deserted Bauhaus studio. So she arranged at great expense to have a complete mock-up of one of the new subway cars brought in. That improved things slightly but it just lay there like a beached whale. Sue had persuaded Daniel Moynihan, a popular politician with a traditional Irish gift of gab, to give a talk at the opening, but that was only good as a onenight stand. What should she do? I rented an Uher tape recorder and rode all around Boston taping the very varied and distinctive sounds of the subway system, went to a recording studio and edited a twenty minute sound loop. I hid the loop recorder and a couple of speakers on the roof of the subway car and the nostalgic sounds brought the show to life. I put together an anthology show of experimental films in the newly opened condo complex of a developer who was one of our trustees. Films by Ron Rice, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, and Harry Smith had probably never been seen by such an innocent audience before. Neither had the USCO light show we set up at Logan International Airport. Probably the worst job I had at the ICA was babysitting Alan Solomon’s Montreal Expo show that Sue had decided to bring down from Montreal. The paintings were all designed to be installed in the huge Bucky Fuller Dome. So they were much too large for our Newbury Street home. Sue had to rent and repaint Horticultural Hall, a mustard-colored monster across the street from Symphony Hall miles away from the art scene. Probably most of the people who would have wanted to see the works had seen them in Montreal, which meant the show was frequented only rarely by art classes usually led by semi-hostile or indifferent teachers. I preferred the occasionally hostile one who might point to the huge Barney Newman, a completely uninflected blue ground with a solid vertical red stripe running down its center, and ask, “What’s that supposed to be?” “It’s Newman’s return to representation,” I would answer, and seeing the teacher’s blank look, I’d explain. “It’s the lower left leg of a marine officer in full dress uniform.” That was okay, but the only real satisfaction I got out of that show was learning how to make poems out of the popular novels that the public relations officer on loan to us from the USIA used to bring with her to work and would leave unread while she went off to business brunches and lunches or for all I cared on shopping trips. Paul managed to lure Elly and me out to San Diego. We drove out with our books and our one-year-old son Blaise in an old Chrysler we’d bought for two hundred dollars, and when we arrived in Phoenix we learned that Introduction

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Andy Warhol had just been shot. The next morning as we were getting ready to go on to San Diego, we learned that Robert Kennedy had been shot and was dying in a hospital in Los Angeles. When we arrived somewhat paranoid at the house Paul had rented for us in Solana Beach, we found we needed a refrigerator. So I bought one for twenty bucks in a resale shop a couple of blocks away that was filled with all sorts of junk and a trove of brownish snapshots of Hitler. The two old guys managing it were listening to the radio news. “He got just what he deserved,” the whitehaired guy observed. The other nodded in agreement. San Diego was a military town, and the university sat on a mesa of about four hundred acres of eucalyptus and chaparral just northeast of La Jolla that once served as a marine training camp. The Visual Art Department offices were still housed in some of Camp Matthews’s old wooden buildings, studio classes were taught in Quonset huts, and the art gallery had taken over the commissioned officers’ bowling alley, renovated and refurbished with taupe-colored carpeting and lots of redwood stripping. It was the darkest art gallery I ever saw. And it had no budget. Still, calling on my personal connections over the next couple of years, I was able to put on a few significant shows. With Lawrence Alloway I was able to stage a big Fluxus show that Lawrence personally loaded into a station wagon for a student to drive out to us. And because I believed that by the late sixties the great achievements of Abstract painting had largely played themselves out, I put on an exhibition of post-Pop representation that featured painters like Robert Bechtle, Sylvia Sleigh, Richard Estes, and Alex Katz alongside late Pop works by Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Wesselman. We also took the Alex Katz retrospective organized by the Museum of the University of Utah in 1971, for which I wrote one of the catalog essays. The Wesselman caused its predictable scandal, because affluent San Diego lived mainly in the proprieties of the fifties, where even a droll work in the Fluxus show by the photographer Peter Moore could cause some local outrage. It was a simple black and white photograph that showed full size a primly dressed young woman printed on one side of a Venetian blind that could be turned to show the same prim young woman naked on the other side. The local TV news snickered about the piece but were too timid to show the innocuous image. John Coplans, who was then director of the Pasadena Art Museum, dug out of his storage and lent me a bunch of Klees, Kandinskys, Kirchners, Feiningers, and Jawlenskys from the Galka Scheyer collection and helped Elly and me stack them into a station wagon for the drive back to our gallery. I managed to put together shows with younger process sculp •

Introduction

tors like Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and Alan Saret because I thought that Minimal Art was getting very tired. In 1970 Seth Siegelaub and Lucy Lippard invited me to put together a magazine exhibition of eight cuttingedge artists for the summer issue of Studio International. I was to be one of six international critic curators, each of whom was to have eight pages for their artists in what Seth and Lucy envisioned as a comprehensive magazine mapping of recent conceptual art. Charles Harrison and Lucy produced the most dutiful selections. I may have been the most eccentric, since I picked Dan Graham, Harold Cohen, John Baldessari, Richard Serra, Eleanor Antin, Fred Lonidier, George Nicolaidis, and Keith Sonnier. George Nicolaidis is the only one who dropped out. So I think my choices have held up pretty well. I also put on a show of Nancy Spero’s “Artaud Drawings” because I thought her fierce drawings had a kind of graffiti-like force and her text/image overlays were a healthy violation of genre purity that let me stage some Artaud readings and inaugurate the gallery as a space for poetry and performance. Joan Jonas did an early performance of her naked mirror piece in our gallery around 1969. All the while I was also writing essays for ARTNews. How I Became a Literary Critic Some time around 1971 or early ’72 I got a call from Bill Spanos. Bill was a passionate Greek American literary critic and professor of literature at SUNY Binghamton hooked on Heidegger and phenomenology. He was starting up a new magazine grandly named boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and wanted to know if I would be willing to write a piece about Postmodern American poetry. I hadn’t really thought much about the term. I was a working poet. I’d been publishing poems and stories and translations in avant-garde literary magazines since the late fifties. I’d published three books of poetry, written a couple of reviews in Clayton Eshleman’s magazine Caterpillar, and a manifesto in some/thing, the magazine I’d started and edited since 1965 with my old friend and comrade-in-arms Jerome Rothenberg. But I didn’t think of myself as a literary critic. Still, as a working poet I’d had for some time the strong sense that something had ended and something new was beginning. So I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the present situation in American poetry and find out where we were and how we got there—what it was that was over, what was still alive and well, and if possible, where we were going. I didn’t realize till later that this task would require me to go back to the origins of my own literary career. I discovered Modernism some time around 1948. I was cutting a shop Introduction

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class and stumbled on a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives in my high school library. It was the flattened blues music of “Melanctha” that made me want to be a poet. I had found Stein and arrived at 1906. So I started looking around for others. I discovered a beaten-up copy of Ezra Pound’s Personae, and was struck by the translated force of the little poem with the Greek title—∆ώρίa. I was so haunted by it that the first poem I ever wrote was a transformed imitation of it I called “poem in a minor key.” That took me to about 1912. Very soon afterward I found Eliot’s Collected Poems in the same bookstore and almost immediately wrote an imitation of “Prufrock.” But this only got me to 1917. I had an Irish beer-drinking buddy named Bob Wilson (later the novelist Robert Anton Wilson) who introduced me to Ulysses. Which took us to the twenties. But where was the present? By the end of the Second World War, the world that the great Modernists had grown up in was gone. Eliot and Pound and, for a much smaller number of us, Stein and Williams were the great ones, but by the time I got to college in 1950 they were securely fixed in the past—along with Cummings, Marianne Moore and HD. The Objectivists—Reznikoff, Oppen, and Zukofsky, who might have established a thirties pathway from Williams and Pound, never achieved much of a public presence and had virtually disappeared, leaving the field of poetry in English to Auden and his versifying successors. If you took a popular fifties anthology like John Ciardi’s Mid-Century American Poets as characteristic, you would have supposed that the competent and conventional verse of Richard Wilbur, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell was all that was left of the Modernist tradition. But they had never really been part of it. From its origins, the central issue for Modernism was the perceived insufficiency of conventional modes of representation. For painting and sculpture, for theater and for the newly invented medium of film, this meant a struggle against the perceived clichés of standard iconic representation. For poetry it was the battle against the clichés of conventional modes of narrative and expressivity. And the alternatives the Modernists offered were abstraction and collage. Abstraction was a kind of escape hatch that let you evade culturally degraded materials so you could attend to other things, while collage was a strategy of accepting these clichés, fragmenting, combining, reframing them and applying them to another purpose. There was no sign of such a struggle in Ciardi’s MidCentury American Poets. By the end of the Second World War the development of radio in the thirties and television in the fifties had released a flood of corrupted texts and images into the public arena, seductively deployed in the manner  •

Introduction

of collage, making even this Modernist tactic more difficult to employ against the torrents of cultural noise. So what my friends and I were looking for was a poetry that could confront or escape that. Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology New American Poetry provided a more contemporary view of the American poetic landscape of the fifties. It presented a gathering of Beat, Black Mountain, New York school and San Francisco Renaissance poets, many of whom deployed collage strategies drawing on the Pound of the Cantos and the Williams of Kora in Hell and Spring and All. So this work established a living link to early American Modernism. Though out of date by the day it was published, it stood as a partial alternative to the closed verse, Anglocentric, tradition of the Hall-Pack- Simpson anthology New Poets of England and America, which was published three years earlier and functioned as a continuation of the Ciardi anthology. But by the sixties we had the sense that to find the kind of poetry we were looking for, we would have to search for the foundations of language meaning-making, and to conduct this search on a global scale. It was what led me to proclaim in the manifesto I wrote for the first issue of some/ thing in 1965: nostalgia for a lost order is a form of noise that noise has uses is fairly obvious to whoever reads the newspapers or listens to presidential addresses they create a barrier through which it is nearly impossible to hear or speak to write poetry today is to attempt to communicate over a very noisy channel . . . in theory it is possible to communicate even over a channel of nearly unlimited noise with suitable methods of coding how if the noisy channel is also in our own head.

It’s what persuaded us to publish alongside our contemporary poets a group of Aztec definitions translated from the Nahua and Spanish of the eleventh book of Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain (The Florentine Codex). What led us to publish them as poetry was our strong sense of the struggle of these Aztec survivors of their crumbled empire to explain to this Franciscan friar, and probably to themselves, the meaning of the ordinary Nahua words that represented their experience of the world. This seemed very much like what we as contemporary poets were trying to do. And we were not alone in this sort of meaning search. Many poets and anthropologists were translating and retranslating tribal poetries from all around the globe. The sixties and sevIntroduction

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enties were a great age of poetic exploration, discovery and rediscovery, not only of tribal poetries but of a great variety of modernisms. It was a time of new translations—of French Modernists, of Breton, Apollinaire, and Cendrars, of Jacob and Reverdy, of Spanish and Latin American Modernists, Lorca, Alberti, Neruda, and Vallejo, and the Negritude poets Cesaire and Senghor. Suddenly the seriousness of Dada poetry in the works of Tsara, Ball, Schwitters, Arp, and Huidobro as well as the Zaum poets of Russia—Alexei Kruchonykh and Velimir Khlebnikov—became apparent. By the late sixties it also became clear that a whole poetry movement was missing from the main American poetry anthologies: Concrete poetry, though a serious case was made for it by two anthologies published around 1968—Emmett Williams’s Anthology of Concrete Poetry and Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View. This helped open the field of poetry considerably. But it was the publication in 1968 of Jerome Rothenberg’s groundbreaking anthology Technicians of the Sacred that provided a lens through which it became possible to see some of the possibilities of a truly Postmodern American poetry. On the surface it was a generous look at much of the world’s tribal and archaic poetries, packed as it was with over three hundred pages of charms, spells, naming games, invocations, lists and litanies, rituals, picture poems, shamanic visions, and dream narratives, many in new translations by the editor and other contemporary poets. But it also contained over a hundred pages of commentary that juxtaposed those works, considered as poems, with a range of works by contemporary and early Modern avant-garde poets and artists. These juxtapositions revealed striking compositional similarities between the works of the experimental poets and the traditional tribal and archaic song-men, shamans, and languageartists and suggested new and more fundamental ways of looking at poetic tradition. Technicians of the Sacred didn’t appear out of a void. Primitive poetry was at the center of a discourse that had been going on among many of us poets for some time, much of it taking place around Jerome and Diane Rothenberg’s dining-room table. This conversation went public with two readings of “Primitive and Archaic Poetry” at The Poet’s Hardware Theater and the Café Metro back in 1964. The material, assembled by Jerome and read by four of us—Jerome, Jackson Mac Low, Rochelle Owens, and me—was later made into a Folkways recording and formed the basis for the much expanded anthology. But this was just the beginning of the conversation. In 1970 Jerome and the poet anthropologist Dennis Tedlock started Alcheringa, a magazine of Ethnopoetics devoted to publishing new translations of tribal poetries alongside related contemporary experimental work. Not a schol •

Introduction

arly journal, it nevertheless became a site for serious reconsideration of the art and poetry of nonliterate and archaic cultures. Though personally uninterested in myth and song and most lineated poetry, I was fascinated by Native American storytelling, the story cycles of Coyote and Hare and especially by Dennis Tedlock’s radically oral translations of traditional Zuni tales. I also found new interest in accounts of ritual performances and celebrations and eventually in the significantly different epistemology of oral culture. So interested, I became a Contributing Editor of Alcheringa and published there in 1975 what I still regard as one of my most important talk pieces. The piece, called “the sociology of art,” which I republished in my 1976 book Talking at the Boundaries, should probably have been called “the sociology of primitive art,” because it began as a talk I gave to a class in African art taught by Jehanne Teilhet. But since I was trying to distinguish between the art and poetry of what I had begun to see as distinctively different “oral” and “literal” cultures, I had to deal with both. At the same time I was gradually growing exasperated with textgenerated performance in my own poetry readings. As a poet I was looking for a poetry of thinking. But in a poetry reading the thinking is already over. For the poet it’s all in the past tense. So I was looking back to the improvisatory oral poetics of Homer and the taverna performances of the Balkan bards studied by Parry and Lord in the thirties. Which were wonderful rough and ready narratives, but built up formulaically like carpentry, while I wanted something as freely formed as a Socratic dialogue. So the issues of improvisation became a major concern for me. And narrative. Or rather, a kind of narrative that was braided together with argument. By 1972 I was finding my way to my “talk poems”—verbal improvisations that spun narratives out of arguments and arguments out of narratives. I had been looking for a poetry of thinking and what I found was a poetry of talking, because talking was as close as I could come to thinking. This worked for me and many in my audience, but for others there was a question of genre. Since the idiosyncratic texts of many of these performances wound up in art magazines, the simplest question was, was I an art critic or a poet? Some saw me blending philosophical speculation and stand-up comedy. But while this was a problem for some, by the early seventies the overrunning of genre boundaries seemed typical of most truly contemporary artists. Was George Brecht a sculptor, a script writer, or a poet? Was Yvonne Rainer a choreographer, a filmmaker, or a poet? Was Steve Reich a Concrete poet or a musician? Was Robert Morris a sculptor or a phenomenologist? Was Allan Kaprow an artist, a sociologist, or Introduction

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a Zen master? Was this radical equivocality of genre, taken together with a much broader sense of the possibilities of artistic signification, the distinctive mark of a real Postmodernism? That’s not a question I was prepared to answer in 1972, or even now; though some of the later essays in this book, like “The Stranger at the Door” and “The Beggar and the King,” try to rethink some of the issues that would support such a claim. San Diego 2009

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Art Essays

Warhol: The Silver Tenement

Wittgenstein once pointed out that “a proposition is an image of reality.” It almost seems as if the most curious aspects of Warhol’s work grew out of an examination of the converse statement “an image is a proposition about reality.” This conviction certainly underlies the cliché that “one picture means more than a thousand words,” which suggests that somewhere embedded in the image there is a proposition that cannot be stated in a thousand words. That is to say, there is such a proposition and it is unclear. This touching faith in the meaningfulness and intelligibility of the seen gives a certain portentousness to almost any of the images surrounding us, provided they happen to dominate our attention. Who has not been tricked into regarding intensely some isolated numeral or enigmatic fragment of a label blocking the view from a doorway? I know a poet who wrote a poem on the sign . . . zen foods. Consider the News of the Day. A man in a Chesterfield, carrying a briefcase, is seen descending the steps of a building. A reporter holding a microphone walks up to him and says, “Have you anything to say about your meeting with the President, sir?” The man answers, “No comment,” and walks out of the picture. Still, we are left with the disturbing impression that there is something that we have seen. It is this disturbing sense that Warhol can count on. In his most recent show, the back room at Castelli’s was plastered with citron-colored wallpaper onto which had been silk-screened 73 fluorescent pink cows (somebody counted them). Not whole cows, cow heads. The large trapezoidal face magnified to the point of incipient disappearance did not have sufficient dots to fill out the nose or the horns and stared blankly out of the wall. They were nevertheless recognizable, and recognizability is the only indispensable characteristic of an image. (If it is not recognizable it is not an image at all.) Pushed one step further, it is Elsie the Borden Cow. It is pop art. It is banal. It is funny or vicious, depending on your taste. But change the affect slightly.

The foolish trapezoidal faces, enlarged to a painful scale—the point of incipient disappearance—did not have sufficient dots to fill out the nose or the softly rounded horns and stared mournfully out of the wall. They are sorrowing clowns. “They are all of Us.” Warhol is the master of a communication game that elicits the false response. The image is presented and the affect flickers back and forth, enigmatically back and forth in the case of the cows. Take the early comic strips. A blow-up of Nancy is incredible. (This is generally what makes it so impossible to reproduce the work of Pop artists, for unlike the work of fine artists, theirs has to be seen in the original.) On the small scale of the comic strip Nancy, it is acceptable because it reads in the logic of its convention. It translates into its message so fast it is scarcely an image at all, i.e., it dissolves into Mr. Bushmiller’s conception of the comic. Taken at the scale of the Warhol blow-up the drawing convention becomes insane. There is all that empty space between the contours marking the legs, the eyes are black holes, there is no nose, the hair is a crenellated football helmet, and that ribbon—it is monstrous. But it is still Mr. Bushmiller’s Nancy, which does not threaten us like the fleas under Robert Hooke’s microscope or disgust us like the excreta under Swift’s. In the end it is enigmatic. It is enigmatic because there is no apparent context to which it can be related, and yet the scale, the centrality suggest that there is some context. It can be taken as axiomatic that an image always seeks a context. In fact, images are habitually so dominated by their contexts that removal effects an astonishing change, as is seen in collage. It’s also very strikingly apparent in details of large paintings. In his early essay on mannerism, Walter Friedländer describes in the following manner a female figure in Rosso Fiorentino’s Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro: “She is surrounded by frightened lambs, her arm outstretched in fright, a light cloak around her otherwise exposed body, sheer astonishment on her pretty face.” The violent action of the painting appears to have conditioned Dr. Friedländer’s response to the detail, because the face of the girl, viewed in isolation, is as impassive as a Greek mask, which it strongly resembles, and the animals, if they are in fact lambs, are as deadpan as Warhol’s cows. What is more, the face of Moses himself, who is striking some fallen assailant, could if transposed be seen yawning in sleep instead of contorted with effort or anger. The context is what is all-determining. But this drive to seek mood behind the image of the face is what Warhol works with in the Presleys, in Cagney, in the Marilyns. Absurdly in the case of the Presleys. Two canvases, four images, of the star as gunfighter at the point of the “showdown.” What is shown? The blankfaced  •

Warhol: The Silver Tenement

star faces the spectator, the drawn pistol in one hand, the other held near the hip. The four images are the same, but they are not alike. They have all been printed with different degrees of clarity, at faintly different heights on the canvas. An arbitrary change of color from one canvas to the next shifts everything. From left to right you read out “purposeful rage,” “affronted innocence,” “murderous sullenness,” “terror.” Nonsense! You go back and read it out again. It is indisputable that there is a subtle shift from image to image as the eye traverses the two canvases. But is it in the images themselves? From one canvas to the next there is a sharp jump as the color shifts. Everyone knows color affects mood. How? But the whole thing is ridiculous. It is a staged promotion shot. There is no mood. And yet . . . In the Marilyns the sense of hidden meaning is enhanced by public tragedy. There is the gay, familiar, openmouthed face. Surely lurking somewhere behind it is some cue, some information communicating a private agony. This is the conviction that spewed up columns of drivel in the papers, reams of poems, learned dissections by psychiatrists and sociologists. It was also this that led Myshkin in The Idiot to say that if he had been a painter he would have painted nothing but the faces of men about to be executed, the faces of the condemned. The belief in the moment of truth made visible. This conviction also compels subway riders to stare into the faces of the British Heath Killers or the untroubled features of the strangled bride in the pages of the Daily News. Consider Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men. So captioned they are a sinister crew and we can all detect the marks of depravity on their ravaged faces. But change the caption. They are: Founders of the Little League, Board of Directors of a Soft Drink Company, Worker Priests, Members of New Evangelical Religious Sect. In each case we can read the marks of their lives back into the photographed faces. Take the Golden Electric Chairs, a centered, empty electric chair in an empty room, the straps loose, the leader cable visible in the grain of the news photo overcolored yellow. I once worked with a man who told me he had written away to see if he could get tickets for himself and his wife to attend Lepke’s execution because he thought it would be an experience to remember. This impulse to touch tragedy or, more broadly, meaning, is the basis also of the Jackies. The face of Jacqueline Kennedy, as familiar as royalty, caught in a public disaster, seen over and over again on the television screen. In the newsreels, the newspapers. The individual shots of her are now as familiar as the Stations of the Cross. This is where she gets out of the car, her skirt covered with blood; here she watches Lyndon Johnson being sworn in; here she attends the funeral. The images are so well Warhol: The Silver Tenement

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known that they are recognizable even when only the barest cues to the image remain. And in the Warhol canvases, the image can be said to barely exist. On the one hand this is part of his overriding interest in the “deteriorated image,” the consequence of a series of regressions from some initial image of the real world. Here there is actually a series of images of images, beginning from the translation of the light reflectivity of a human face into the precipitation of silver from a photosensitive emulsion, this negative image developed, rephotographed into a positive image with reversal of light and shadow, and consequent blurring, further translated by telegraphy, engraved on a plate and printed through a crude screen with low-grade ink on newsprint, and this final blurring becoming the initial stage for the artist’s blow-up and silk-screening in an imposed lilac color on canvas. What is left? The sense that there is something out there one recognizes and yet can’t see. Before the Warhol canvases we are trapped in a ghastly embarrassment. This sense of the arbitrary coloring, the nearly obliterated image and the persistently intrusive feeling. Somewhere in the image there is a proposition. It is unclear. The Flowers are somewhat different. Here a photograph of flowers from a Kodak journal has been interfered with. The grays are removed and what emerges are floppy-shaped petals and signified grass in decisively unnatural colors: fluorescent blackish greens, orange, gold, purple. I have heard the Flowers described as funny, as a put-on. And they are absurd. The pathetically limp shapes in contrasting brilliant and absurdly somber color. They resemble those photomurals that interior decorators used to put on office walls, particularly the large four-foot canvas. But the flowers are shaped like baggy-pants comedians (no interior decorator’s touch) and somehow they resemble more closely Watteau’s traveling players. It is practically impossible to say what the object of the pathos in Flowers is. Warhol manipulates an almost impossible pathos. It is, in a sense, the images themselves, their awkwardness, their insubstantiality, their unnaturalness. Watteau’s comedians are also awkward, insubstantial, and unnatural. At the same time Warhol insists on, and we are always aware of the unjustifiable nature of, the feeling. If this is a put-on, it is a good thing to remember that all of Zen is a kind of put-on and that a Zen master is nothing other than a master of the spiritual put-down. This doubleness of affect is especially peculiar to the films. A remarkable thing about Blowjob was that when Allen Ginsberg saw it he was reported to have said, “The whole theater lit up when he came.” While Paul Blackburn told me, “The thing never came off at all; he was like hung-up, man.” This is clear-cut contradiction, and again it was a case of reading out the proposition from the image of a face. The Thirteen Most Wanted Men  •

Warhol: The Silver Tenement

or Founders of the Little League? How do we know anything was going on at all in Blowjob? All we saw was the image of a face, peculiarly blank. Perhaps what we recognize is that enigmatic, introspective smile of one turned back upon himself. We recognize the same smile in Haircut, in Eat, in Leonardo’s angels. Does this suggest a new interpretation for La Gioconda? More impassive than the Flowers but very similar are the Elizabeth Taylors. In this work the image lies in a very narrow space slightly in front of the canvas, and it is in this narrow field that the “ideal,” expressionless face separates into a series of floating superimposed colors (Clement Greenberg, take note)—the eye shadow, the lips, the hair. The ideal face is transformed into a curious mask. It is not to be doubted that this is an “ideal” face despite the terrifying flesh tones out of Woolworth portraits, the mad eye-shadow and the wig-like hair. This is, after all, Liz. Warhol specializes in the Beautiful People and is probably the last significant “ideal” painter since Ingres (I call him a painter since he generally uses canvas and colors it). The ideal is to a great extent determined by its situation (pose) more than by its intrinsic appearance, and Warhol favors extreme frontality for the face, the chin slightly elevated and shadowed underneath (for men). This is the position taken for his own “ideal” portrait and for the multiple prints of Rauschenberg as the “Beautiful Youth.” The main requisites for the beautiful face are traditional: youth and blankness, which almost amounts to the same thing. But under the spell of the hieratic pose (to which we have long been acculturated and whose significance we instantly recognize) we forget Warhol’s age and Rauschenberg’s pearshaped body. There is only the curious seediness of the printed photographs. In the case of the Rauschenberg it at times almost obliterates the image entirely. The mechanical defects in the process are preserved and magnified and give a sense of wear and tear, of aging, to an ageless image of romanticized youth. It is not an accident. In the Jackies, the magnification of the image and the suppression of gray values give her a remarkably ugly nose. Rauschenberg is almost consumed by underdevelopment; Warhol menaced by shadows spreading from under his jaw and threatening to engulf him, the same shadow spreading from the cleft in the chin of some unidentified actor in one of the films shown at Warhol’s new discotheque. This seediness is a shadow hanging over all his images of the beautiful. Eye shadow in the macabre face of his astonishing singer Nico, who so beautifully resembles a memento mori, as the marvelous deathlike voice coming from the lovely blond head sings, “Let me be your mirruh! Let me be your mirruh! Let me be your mirruh!” repeated each time with the precision of a Warhol: The Silver Tenement

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cracked record; five o’clock shadow in the case of the beautiful Gerard. For who is seedier than Gerard Malanga? (Henry Geldzahler.) After prolonged exposure to Warhol’s work, seediness emerges as almost a spiritual category. As a kind of inevitable consequence of the beautiful and its lesser and more pathetic forms, the chic and the fashionable. Everything Warhol touches becomes intricately seedy, and maybe even unsuccessful (beautifully though). The discotheque is a case in point. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable on a Wednesday night—set in the barnlike upstairs hall of the Polski Dom Narodne. With few people present, three films are projected simultaneously toward the front stage. In a panel on the left, Eat, Robert Indiana eats his mushroom silently and selfconsciously. Center, Vinyl. In an endless juvenile delinquent routine Gerard Malanga keeps lighting cigarettes meaningfully until he becomes the victim of some obscure and ludicrous torture arrangement, which, correctly, is all preparation. On the right, Banana. The banana has been eaten many frames ago and a beautiful female impersonator in full dress lies on a couch while Malanga, this time well-dressed in nineteenth-century Viennese gentility, with another actor, looks on significantly (Freud and Breuer? An abortion?). The movies, all homemade and showing it, have a consistently attractive, ratty look. Rotary mosaic mirrors and stroboscopes flash light through the rather windy depths of Polski Dom Narodne’s upstairs hall. There is intermittent high-decibel rock and roll and a few dancers. A little man walks around quietly emptying ashtrays. Fragments of a film soundtrack mix with the music. Gradually more people come and dance. Robert Indiana changes colors and seems to be looking at the scene. After a while there are no more films and there is much more dancing. Finally the Velvet Underground itself, with Nico singing. Dancing are Ingrid Superstar, Gerard Malanga, and Mary Woronov. Nico, perfect as a cadaver, sings “Let me be your mirruh! Let me be your mirruh! Let me be your mirruh!” Warhol, this precise moralist, has moved right into the teeth of the discotheque world brilliantly, but the most remarkable effects of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable seem to depend on the hall being half empty for quite some time, i.e. on his not doing good business. Otherwise you never get to hear the films (Hedy: “Do you know who I am? I have fourteen thousand dollars in uncashed checks right here in my bag!”), the slow buildup more typical of Judson Church than a discotheque. Otherwise it turns into just another discotheque. Warhol’s success depends upon his failure, on being a magnificently cracked “mirruh” with the silver chipping off. But with the natural confidence of a renaissance man, he has moved from medium to medium creating his priceless and beautifully shoddy works. (They are priceless because there is no  •

Warhol: The Silver Tenement

way to set a price on them.) He has moved from painting to film, to the taped novel, soap opera, the discotheque, all sharing the same precisely pinpointed defectiveness that gives his work its brilliant accuracy. I have heard that his next move will be into architecture and that he is now planning a silver tenement. But the Sculls will move in, and he will have failed again (beautifully). 1966

Warhol: The Silver Tenement

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Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

There is a common idea in the art world that the major art of the twentieth century has been and is abstract. It is one of those ideas that is so deeply rooted that almost nobody remembers how he came to believe in it and seldom if ever feels a need to give it voice. It simply lies too deep for thought. The trouble with this idea, as with most such beliefs, is not only that it is nonsensical—for there simply is not a single coherent and large body of work we could point to as “the triumph of abstraction”— but that it stands as a major obstacle to a serious consideration of any unequivocally representational art. This belief has resulted in two alternative critical responses, one of which is to treat representation as a “respectable minor art” and the other is to consider it a mildly aberrant form of abstraction, only contingently employing images as a sort of armature upon which to hang something like “plastic values.” Normally, indifferent or hostile critics take the first view, while friendly critics, and occasionally the artists themselves, take the second. Apparently “the triumph of abstraction” consists not so much in the accomplishments of individual Abstract artists—who it would be worth examining from the cooler position of the seventies—as in the success of their original propaganda as an educational program, which has finally made it nearly impossible for the art audience to deal with representation at all. It would seem that after fifty years of Johannes Itten-like studies reducing the Duchess of Alba to a grid of light values and Clive Bell demonstrating that all art is triangles, the public has come to believe not only that it was matter of indifference whether or not Whistler was painting his mother, but that the coolly depicted lady is not even there. Given such beliefs, it is understandable why critics have generally chosen to discuss the Pop painters in terms of quasi-technical considerations, such as their reliance on photography and ready-made commercial images, and why the same critics are almost to-

tally unable to deal with seemingly more straightforward figurative painters like Alex Katz. In point of fact Katz is not an especially straightforward painter, but because of the widespread prejudice against figurative painting almost all of the real representationalists have adopted a number of modes of working that seem to be forced on them by a general acceptance of what they conceive to be Modernism. This makes them all somewhat more difficult to read. Some have decided, along with Clement Greenberg, that what Modernism has abolished is the illusion of tactile three-dimensionality, and consequently restrict themselves to a shallow space for all their representations; others have concluded that Modernism has abolished the significance of “literary” subject matter and have permitted themselves sculptural volume in the rendering of banal or apparently nonsignificant objects. Both of these are alternative methods of evidently asserting the primacy of “formal” concerns in representational painting: either it doesn’t look real; or it does, and its reality is of no consequence. Thus, a painter like Estes will seem to be protecting his Modernism by painting reflections, which are inevitably shallow; and Sidney Tillim will protect his by painting plumbing, which is not notoriously rich in literary suggestion. Katz seems to have combined both these strategies—flatness and lack of literary significance. But while the implications of this view of “Modernism” are hardly compelling, in view of the lethal consequence of this theory of Modern Art for abstraction itself, the obligation to “flatness” and “banality” seems much less dangerous for representation. The idea of an illusionary “realism” has been vastly oversimplified, apparently under the pressure of Abstract art. How else to explain how a scholar as reasonable as Linda Nochlin could describe the existence of a realism “creating an accurate, detailed and recognizable simulacrum of visual experience?” Surely such a realism never existed, because the description itself is meaningless. Although it is quite possible to determine recognizability, few forms of representational painting have ever failed this test. On the other hand, detailing is a matter of degree and type. It is probably not any more possible to evaluate the amount of detail in a representation than it has proved to evaluate the “simplicity” of a grammar (once thought to be a simple affair and now seen to be a nearly inconceivable task); as for accuracy, portraits of the same gentleman by both Cezanne and Renoir are quite unlike each other, but were they representing the same thing? Without wishing to be unfair in the case of a particularly inauspicious sentence, we must beware of the absurd simplifications of representational theory that we have become accustomed to accept

Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

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out of deference to the propaganda of abstraction. The idea of illusionism in painting in contemporary criticism is just such a simplification. Sculptural illusion is only one of a number of possible illusions, as the Impressionists were well aware when they went chasing after the illusion of luminosity. Cezanne may have been able to represent luminosity and contour at the same time, but only under the condition of sacrificing the illusion of bulk, with the result that his landscapes look like crumpled-up tablecloths. With representation, you pay your money and you take your choice; but you don’t get anything for nothing. The term “realism,” new or otherwise, is essentially an accusation against some other form of representation, which one may feel has omitted some fundamental characteristics of what was to be represented—the sexy flat-footedness of a woman, the thickness of an apple, or the compassion of the Lord. Flatness may turn out to have nothing more against it than fashionableness, even if it is as arbitrary as “correct perspective” was in the early Renaissance, and banality is not unliterary, it is merely another kind of literature. The issue is not whether these strategies are based on false premises, but whether they lead to interesting conclusions. In Alex Katz’s work they lead to brilliant representational conclusions, which validate the strategies simply because they generated these very same conclusions. The paintings of Alex Katz are large scale, with shallowly modeled figures flattened against a fairly generalized background space, however remote, painted decisively in broad areas of even color without any special emphasis of “painterly” handling, yet without any attempt at mechanical application of paint. They are simple, conceptual and handmade. They are the paintings of a dandy. This is not a “formal” or technical description of Katz’s work, it is merely a description of one of the things he has chosen to represent by his selection, or development, of a painting style—namely, his point of view. This is more easily seen if we consider the semantics of contemporary paint-handling styles at the time Katz developed what has become his painting stance. To the right of him we must imagine Fairfield Porter, whose work Katz was considerably closer to before 1960. Porter’s nuanced and carefully worked paint surface must be conceived as representing “painting cuisine”; it elicits descriptions of his “sensibility” and “refinement,” etc. Further to the Expressionist right is the stormy gestural style of de Kooning, generally described as “tormented” and “personal.” To the left we must imagine the silk screen and the squeegee. A homogeneous application of paint to a preconceived place on the canvas will then be characterizable as “cool,” and we must assume that Katz’s smoothness means that he is neither ravished by the beauty of paint nor overcome by the intensity of his feelings. Now it is certainly true that in a  •

Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

different context Pollock’s whippy drawing style might be read as dandyish, that is to say, detached, negligent and filled with exuberance, but not in the symbolic context of Abstract-Expressionism. The dandyism of the early ’60s was reserved for an unruffled, even bland appearance, which got to be known as “cool.” Katz’s dandyism actually exceeds that of all the other “cool” painters because of his superior insight into the implication of painting by hand as opposed to the use of machine methods. Unless you are going to make an awful lot of copies and expend a great deal of effort to perfect your mechanism, the hand is quicker, more casual, and more competent. So Katz’s choice of the hand over photography was not a nostalgic decision for “handicraft” or “touch” but another mark of his dandyism. Interviewer: Are you interested at all in photography? Katz: (Smile) No, I really haven’t got the patience for it. Because of Katz’s decision to represent himself as a dandy, which is a choice of painting personality, it would have been completely inappropriate for him to have selected an unequivocal three-dimensionality for the objects he—the painter—set out to represent. The reason for this is that flatness is a fashionable painting characteristic, and it is not for a dandy to quarrel with fashion. His role is to operate smoothly in control of it and always slightly in advance. On the other side, consider the marvelously rueful expression that Paul Georges has painted upon his own face as he attempts to lead forth his fully three-dimensional model into his painting The Return of the Muse. All of the committed three-dimensionalists insistently represent themselves as “intense,” “stubborn,” “perverse,” and “willfully awkward.” Sidney Tillim is the most notable example of this form of self-representation; and it is only fitting, since he sees “the choice between ‘Pop’ sensibility” (flatness) and “revisionist consciousness” (a return to three-dimensional illusionism and perhaps narrative) as a “moral one.” If the “moral” choice is three-dimensionality, it is also the choice which must appear “difficult” and therefore awkward. Fluency must be the other way. Once the idea of “cool” comes up, there is an inevitable comparison to the Pop painters Warhol and Lichtenstein, with whom the term is associated. There are in fact meaningful relationships, but neither Warhol nor Lichtenstein enter their works as “the cool artist.” It is probably necessary to remind oneself that the word “cool” derives its meaning from the jazz world and ultimately from the black community. It inevitably characterizes a “personal style” of loaded restraint, relying on minimal gesture. In Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

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the mythology of jazz, the black performer is always entitled to his “restraint” because everyone believes in his “grievance.” Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot—three chords on the piano, and the whole bar comes. It is a triumph of “personality.” It is precisely the absence of “personality”— of a first-person “narrator”—that made it possible for Warhol to take on an immense range of terrifying or melodramatic subjects, because at no point did it appear that he had to stand in any relation to the electric chair, or the police dogs, or the blood-spattered widow of the president. However exotic a public personality he created for himself, silver haired and anonymous, he never appeared within the work as represented by “intention,” “touch,” or even “choice”; and he went to great lengths to eliminate the appearance of these. For anything as ordinarily human would have reduced to absurdity his “scalding” material. The point of contact between Katz and Warhol and Lichtenstein is their relation to ideal images, the glamorous and hip. In this area Katz has a somewhat more complex maneuver. Warhol’s images of glamour are typological and catastrophic. His “stars” (in the paintings) were ready-made, usually institutionally fabricated, and his depiction of them (which is made to seem accidental, the outcome of mechanical incompetence) is unusually straightforward—the hopeless Marilyns, the Elizabeth Taylors with lipstick running off onto their teeth. Lichtenstein’s glamour figures, like Poussin’s, are situated in an Arcadia of comic strip, slightly preposterous and beyond any contact but a mildly ironic memory. But Katz operates in a more human domain. It is illuminating to compare Warhol’s portraits to Katz’s, because it is here that their differences are clearest. Warhol’s faces are borrowed for calamity—Holly Solomon, Rauschenberg, the wife of some anonymous collector who owned a discount house, his own self-portraits. He is no respecter of glamour: Rauschenberg is aging, Holly Solomon hysterical, and Warhol himself a death’s head. But it is in the portraits that Katz has the greatest flexibility. In some manner he almost always respects the glamour of his subjects. The only instance I know of where both Warhol and Katz have had the same subject is in the portrait of Lita Hornick, and it is particularly instructive. Warhol is implacable, the image is of a social stance visibly paid for in personal disaster. As always he manipulates it by images of strain, seemingly the accidental outcomes of the technical procedures of picture making. Katz’s Lita is as smooth and chic as the painting style, the face a charming mask buoyed up by a sort of eighteenthcentury, jaunty bravado. It is almost as if the modes of paint application became two modes of applying makeup. For Katz glamour is a form of human or social dignity, which he respects, however thin, and a thin dignity is often the “subject” of his portraits. In a sense, he is obligated to  •

Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

respect it, because he is personally “present” in the paintings, and any move he makes within them must be “socially possible.” Since the glamour of Katz’s figurative paintings doesn’t derive from the sitter’s fame— though they may be well enough known within a small social circle they are not national figures like Marilyn or Liz—it’s interesting to see how he manages to represent the fact that they are glamorous. Katz didn’t always depict glamour. It was a development that appeared in his work in the early ’60s. I can think back to a portrait of Rauschenberg I saw in Katz’s studio, which is describable only as “A Young Man Stranded in a Room Seen as Too Much Space.” There is a comparable painting of his wife Ada, also stranded in an interior where she is left glamourless and clasping her arms on a bed. In both of these works the subjects are depicted as relatively expressionless dolls. In Ada’s case the self-clutching pose, with knees gathered up under her, the styleless dress with the awkward short sleeves cuffed halfway up from the elbow, the great empty distance from the foreground to the low bed on which she sits, and the fairly high viewpoint leave her completely vulnerable. It is not Expressionism but she is wiped out nonetheless. With the appearance of Katz’s large-scale work of the ’60s, the images of glamour begin to appear. I do not think that it is an accident that the early ’60s are themselves an age of social glamour. Perhaps it was fortuitous that the moves of Pop to embrace the social scene, and the appearance of the Kennedy administration, with its calculated intentions of embracing culture and the arts, more or less coincided in time. But the effect of this coincidence on the art world should not be underestimated. Where it might not have been quite intellectually respectable for a woman to appear too fashionable in an artist milieu before 1964, it soon became not only commonplace but nearly obligatory. The fashion of the art world moved in the course of the ’60s from an idiosyncratic “bohemian” image to an “avant-garde fashion world” image as art and fashion merged to celebrate the new marriage of art and society. Jacqueline Kennedy was both a “best-dressed woman” and a “patron of the arts.” Her relationship to the art world was that of one of Louis XV’s mistresses. Katz’s people do not in fact arrive at his marriage of art and fashion (and power), but they do arrive at the “Kennedy glamour.” An untitled painting of 1964 is especially interesting. In the background two men or a man and a boy are playing catch with a softball. In the right foreground a three-quarter view of the face of a young man is cropped by the edge of the painting, in the left foreground a cropped profile of a young woman looks into the center of the painting. In the center there is a second girl seen from the chest up. She is the focus of the painting. Katz presents her frontally and in a thoroughly simplified manAlex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

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ner, but it is evident that she is all glamour. To begin with, though in a casual environment, she is clearly wearing the most fashionable makeup, at that time an exceptionally deceptive style of “natural” cosmetic spread evenly to suggest no makeup, finished with an extraordinarily pale lipstick, which cannot fail to be noted as lipstick. All of this obviously noncasual pallor emphasizes the girl’s heavy, dark brows and “Grecian” hairdo, while the neckline of her “gown” falls away, also in a “Grecian” fashion. The young man on the right is also one of the Beautiful People because he has a “Kennedy haircut” and especially distinct eyelashes. If we have any doubts of the glamour markings in this work, we can look at an earlier version of this image, where the same five figures occur. Here the figures are not cropped. The girl on the left is seated awkwardly on a chair in a styleless summer dress. The central girl’s Grecian gown turns out to be a loosely fitted bathing suit, that she slackly inhabits, while all of her beauty is concentrated in her piled-up hair. The boy on the right is holding a pail of clams (?) and is not yet monumentalized by cropping. The earlier version is a vernacular image—Summer People. The later version is taken as a close-up in which foreground, middle ground, and background are pressed tautly right up on each other onto a surface which acts as a movie screen with a sharp focus on the central girl, who has lost her slumping shoulders in the zoom and turns Byzantine, while the boy blurring slightly is monumentalized but marvelously softened. The only remaining cue to the summer scene is the game of catch continuing vaguely in the background. To a certain degree these techniques of obtaining glamour for his subjects are derived from mass media. The close-ups and the cropped image in the context of Katz’s flattened style call upon all the semantic resources of movies, just as frontalization and monumentalization can rely upon sources as diverse as the advertising billboard and Byzantine mosaic. In the 1964 painting the foreground figures are nearly isocephalic. These are by no means the only methods Katz has available to manipulate glamour. He has at least one other method that is rather subtler and more insidious. It depends upon the people he has chosen as his subjects. They are generally from a particular part of the art and poetry world of New York, and they are well enough known for most people at all familiar with the art world to know that they are known, though not always well enough known to know who they are. That is to say, they are what we may call “secret celebrities.” And for Katz they have this advantage over real celebrities: that while you are certain you should know them, it is nearly certain that you don’t. An innocent viewer confronted by one of these group portraits finds himself in a position peculiarly similar to that of the only stranger at a cocktail party where all the others are friends. The  •

Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

actors in these paintings appear so thoroughly committed to the situation that, however tedious the party may be—and only a veteran of Fischbach parties could testify to that—or however unprepossessing the people may look, it is borne in upon him that these people have some mysterious importance. Having heard that there is a “New York school,” one may imagine it as some entity distinguished by intellectual or advanced concerns. One may imagine its members to be infinitely elegant, conversing in Mandarin French on fascinating unlikely subjects, as noble in aspects as Kenward Elmslie’s greyhound. In this setting it hardly matters what they actually look like. So that Katz is free to be relatively unflattering to the individuals in these works, and he indulges enough in this freedom for group scenes like One Flight Up (a group cutout) to have an ambiguously human character. His people run a range from looking noble to looking completely foolish. Moreover this piece is so designed that the same people may look noble or foolish depending upon which angle you catch them at, overlapped by what other face and inclined at what direction from you. This flickering quality of appearance is a fundamental property of Katz’s truthfulness, which is the truthfulness of a dandy. His flickering quality is most profoundly worked out in the many portraits of Ada, who in Katz’s hands seems capable of a nearly infinite variety of appearances, and it is for her that he has reserved his grandest styles. Ada Suffering in a Car across from the Driver, Ada in a Shawl as Alceste, Ada in Basic Black, Ada Smiling as Isadora Duncan in a Convertible, Ada Upside-Down with Memories of Symphonie Pastorale, Ada Failing to Recognize Someone on the Beach at East Hampton through Sunglasses, Ada on the Way to a Smile, Ada as an Irritated Housewife Taking Time Out to Pose, Ada Putting One Foot Forward into a New Life. It is the essence of these characterizations that they appear to be transient states. Which is to say that it is not glamour that is Katz’s subject. Glamour is a component of the subject, but the nature of glamour and grandeur or any other state in Katz’s repertory is its transience and real insubstantiality. Here the flatness of Katz’s representational style comes to his aid as a semantic cue to insubstantiality. The paintings serve as scrims on which a mood is momentarily thrown, and each state seems no thicker than a veil or, more precisely, to follow this Romantic ontology to its source, no thicker than the layers of an onion, which, as Leonce tearfully discovered, disclose no center. This shallow style has served Katz extraordinarily well and has failed him in only one particularly brilliant and unsettling painting. It is one of Katz’s flower paintings, which as far as I am concerned are normally examples of fluency and a faintly acid chic, limited mainly because flowers do not have aspects for an urbane artist. Except for this Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

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particular rose. Lilies are lightweight and flashy. They are easily disposed of. But it appears that the glamour of a rose, all of its straightforward romantic suggestiveness, is encoded stubbornly around some primary image of richness, density and bulk. Taking on a rose Katz found himself divided between the semantic logic of the flower and the meaning of his flattened painting style, with the result that an extraordinarily rich, thick, and nearly preposterous rose is jammed into an otherwise flat painting. It is a painting so obviously tense that I believe it has always made him nervous, mainly because it is the clearest demonstration of his relation to the meaning of imagery and style. Apparently even a dandy can be tempted to an extreme on certain occasions. Probably he has become less nervous about this painting now that he has chosen to move directly into an exploration of more obviously romantic situations. The enormous painting of the Paul Taylor Dance Company reopens all of his themes in a somewhat more straightforward manner. From the onset a painting of a “balletic” dance company in action engages most of the Romantic issues head-on in the situation itself. Each dancer in his own and her own separate space presents himself and herself through an image of “the beautiful” that is completely outlined and wonderfully banal. The taut physicality of these bodies always suggests and frustrates any possibilities of erotic satisfaction, which would inevitably destroy the stylistic image of beauty which evokes the interest. There they are—the narcissism and eroticism of the epicene male dancers and the females with the sucked-in cheeks, starving themselves into shape at “Vim-and-Vigor” on yogurt and carrot juice and health salads. The paradigm of Romanticism here is so obvious and irritating: “satisfaction destroys desire and it is desire that is beautiful.” Poised as always on a fragile momentary state. This painting, with its unabashed and cool Romanticism opens the way to that unfinished business that may be the great career of representational painting. For once, an intelligent Romanticism equal to the ironies it uncovers and cool enough to absorb the comical and pornographic as well as the grand tragical. It is still an unfinished business. 1970

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Alex Katz and the Tactics of Representation

Jean Tinguely’s New Machine

4,578,939 a self- stabilizing data processing machine Jean Tinguely, Paris France, assignor to Museum of Modern Art, a corporation of New York, NY Filed Nov. 27, 1968, Ser. No. 567, 832 A data processing machine designed to receive an input of data, which is scanned by a series of analyzers for its equivalence with the data already contained in one or more of the storage bins of the said machine. The data is scanned in a series of passes through the analyzer banks until all of the identities between the input data and the already stored data are exhausted, after which the input residue is passed through a governor or selfstabilizing system consisting of various erase and garble mechanisms and then passed once again through the analyzer banks. This cycle is repeated until the input data is assimilated to the initial state of the machine. The novelty of the said device consists of a final state or output which is indistinguishable from the pre-input or initial state of the said machine.

What we knew before we know now. We seem to have been here before, but there is a feeling of something vaguely new. The Museum of Modern Art usually seems to take the same pieces out of the storeroom, place them a little differently and give the show a new name. But is this fair? A car by Bugatti. A model of a Tatlin machine. What’s to blame? They have plenty of machines? History. In the case of machines, as you might imagine, there are people who came before and people who came after. These are forebears and successors. The rest is prophecy. Leonardo is a forebear. Vaucanson is a forebear. Jaquet-Droz is a forebear. Gabo, Tatlin, Vesnin, Popova, Moholy-Nagy, Schwitters, Calder, Stankiewicz, Tinguely, Mu-

nari . . . are all successors. E.A.T. is prophecy. And there is the special history we learned as children—Modern Art as a series of paintings in successive rooms upstairs, and in the garden some drastic sculpture. So there are plenty of paintings. But what’s a machine? “A machine is a mechanical system designed to produce forces and motions in accord with specified requirements, consisting of a fixed frame and moving parts such as links, cranks, wheels, gears, belts and similar devices arranged to transmit force and determine motion. The usual function of a machine is the transmission of energy from a source of power or prime mover in order to perform useful work,” says Howell Newbold Tyson, author of Kinematics, a book published by John Wiley and Sons. “A machine is an imitation of our muscles,” more or less agrees K. G. Pontus Hulten, organizer of “The Machine” show put on by the Museum of Modern Art this winter, and author of a book of the same name, published by the same museum. In this show a machine is a car or a camera. What kind of machine is a camera? An Art Machine. You feed it Life and it turns out Art. It was also a thermal machine. It sent cold chills up and down the spines of artists. What kind of useful work is that? Nor was it a consequence of the kind of art it turned out. That it was derivative art, bad art or good art. It was its inevitability. An automatic point of view. It was, so to speak, the opinion of the silver bromide. Everything it did was art. A useful kind of work. Making artists stop to ask why they should make that kind of art. A useful machine. Let it be. And the car. It is with cars as with planes. They change our way of life. I am flying up to Boston, sitting beside two salesmen engineers from a chemical company in Pittsburgh and we are eating Republican food. (Democrat?) It is at any event Protestant food. The steak has been frozen and the salad dressing is bottled. I arrive in an hour. Fog settles over the city the next day and I return to New York on a train. We ate George Wallace food, ham and cheese and a Pepsi, talking all the way with a member of Frank Sinatra Jr.’s band. It takes five hours and is from day to night. A car. A poet I know called it a vehicle of passion (see Ed Kienholz) and meant it. Driving his car past a field, a bird in a tree caught his interest and he drove into the field to see it. Why are we interested in machines? If it is the way they look, it is an extension of still life. Schamberg, or Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder. Or it is folklore. We grew up with machines and they like us. The way we must suppose Duchamp-Villon grew up with a horse. When I was a child during the War—I’ve always called World War II the  •

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War and know better, but I cannot help it—we went to Rockaway and I had lots of time that I spent in penny arcades playing baseball machines. When you put a penny in the slot a small steel ball came out of a hole in the umpire’s chest and dropped into the pitcher’s hand that was shaped like a bowl. He swiveled, releasing the ball toward the plate, which you tried to hit. If it was over the plate and you didn’t hit it the umpire’s right arm went up for a strike and sometimes when it was not over the plate his left arm went up for a ball but usually it didn’t. Though I once got a walk. There was another machine with a gypsy and a mechanical raven, she nodded at you, the raven shook his head and a card came out with your fortune. There was a machine gun that shot at images of planes on a screen. When you aimed correctly the plane exploded in a burst of red light and a point got added to your score. Also a Fats Waller movie that used to play for a nickel, “Fish! Fish! Fish!” The romance of machines. This has gone through light and dark days. The days of Paley’s clock. The duck of Vaucanson. She eats, she drinks, she flaps her wings, and, when the mood overcomes her, excretes her food. Or the little penman of Jaquet-Droz. The bright machine, the nice machine, the clean machine. The streets of science fiction which are always swept clean about their orthogonal corners. (Where is Bucky Fuller’s device for cleaning you in your fully automated house?) “Oh to make a machine, that would make a machine, that would make a machine . . . !” The joyful cry of Les Levine: “Soon everything will be solid state!” Or Warhol, “I want to be a machine.” What kind? Not an eggbeater, I bet. The sex life of machines. Has fallen on evil days. Lautréamont. The sugar dust blowing in the air settles in drifts on the machines, where the girls in white dresses with white kerchiefs in their hair break the pink sheets of gum, first into belts then into packets of rectangular pieces. Dropping the pieces into a vertical chute. The column of gum descends. A fork-shaped pusher draws back, slams two pieces of gum into the paper, the paper and gum into a tumbler that revolves, closing the package, which is sealed with wax heated by a metal plate in front of the machine from which the small red, white, and blue packets emerge onto the conveyor belt. The white-clad girls, their faces coated with white sugar dust, empty a tray into the shaking machine, bend, pick up another tray, lean against the platform enclosing the pusher, which vibrates against their lower body. Bend, take a tray, break the gum. Soon they are missing the chute. Gum is falling on the floor. “The encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine.” Picabia knew better. So did Duchamp. With machines sex has its ups and downs. Why are we interested in machines? What a machine does. Whatever Jean Tinguely’s New Machine

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it does, it does a lot of it. This gives us pause. If computers do only one thing for us, they will at least stop us from giving casual instructions. “Buy soybeans!” My brother-in-law did, in fact, not ever having seen a soybean. And the commodities market falling, saw soybeans advancing in freight cars toward his lawn in Great Neck. A Swiss analyst wrote of a patient who had a horror of refuse and, thinking of the great garbage dumps, refrained from giving dinner parties to prevent eggshells and banana peels, soiled napkins and wrappers, and boxes and string. Stopped taking walks in the rain for fear of worn-out galoshes and broken umbrellas. The output of machines is staggering. So is the garbage. On a good day if you walk to the Hudson you can see machine art coming down the river. There is Tinguely, fishing. An enterprising curator could have put a trap above the museum roof for gases, but there’s a Chirico painting of air pollution. Standing in a junkyard with bedsprings, refrigerators, and toilet bowls, I remember watching a small black boy leading a girl in a white satin riding suit on a horse, which picked its way between the rubble. I asked a man with a child, who happened by, where Bergen Beach was, and he pointed to a swamp. My wife is tired of washing dishes and demands edible plates. I want soluble houses and the astronauts are recycling their urine and sweat for drinking water. Why are we fascinated by machines? It is the last refuge of the artistic temperament. If you want a steady, reliable job you get a dull man. But if you want an unpredictable prima donna, get a machine. I have never been to a gallery where all of the machines were running after the day of the opening. Sometimes even then it’s too late. So there are records of machines. A fossil or a tombstone. We bring it flowers. Tell us what it did. The interest in machines is to have them surprise us. Tatlin working to make his Monument for the Third International, which had to consist of four separate rotating chambers, the base cylinder rotating once a year, the pyramid once a month, the second cylinder once a day, and the final hemisphere (once an hour?). The consequence of all these demands for specific results leading to the chaotic spiral housing. The home for the Comintern, a cross between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and a roller coaster. Was Tatlin surprised? Holding a machine on a leash is surprising more often than not. Girls working in a watch factory in Akron, Ohio, painting the dials with luminescent paint, pointing the brushes by placing the tip in their mouths absorbed radium salts and glowed in the dark. They were surprised. San Diego 1968  •

Jean Tinguely’s New Machine

Lead Kindly Blight

As its inaugurating event, the Oakland Museum opened its doors to a slightly confused though generally friendly public with a Pollution Show—an array of paintings ranging from post-Pop acrylics to what Ivan Karp calls with a faint tremolo in his voice, “the new Lyrical Romanticism” (piece-goods on stretchers, in the new fall colors), plus photographs, drawings, even an etching, kinetic junk sculpture, found sculpture, cast-resin sculpture, downright funk, several discreet piles of rubbish, and a dead seagull (courtesy of some oil company) in a jar up on a sculpture base. On the way in, a lady representing the Sierra Club, the Friends of the Earth, and several other friendly organizations sat unobtrusively at a desk and distributed literature. Well, why not? That a museum dedicated, according to its charter, to “California art, history, and culture” would mount a pollution show should occasion little surprise and no confusion. After all, what’s surprising about pollution in California? Rosy sunsets bathing the Golden Gate Bridge (when there is a sun) and stretching from the northern end of the San Fernando Valley to Nixon’s snappy home in San Clemente—and perhaps in the not-too-distant future in an unbroken line to Ensenada— proclaim California’s leadership in the field. (In what other states do they have to discontinue children’s gym classes at commonly attained smog levels?) And one flight over the San Francisco Bay says everything you need to know about “the pollution of our waters.” The surprise seems to have been that it was the Art Division of the Oakland Museum rather than Natural History that put on the exhibition. This surprise and a certain diffidence carried over to the museum staff itself. Curator of the Art Division, Paul Mills, a distinguished-looking man with a full, fashionable mustache, was quick to assure me, when I asked him about guidelines for the show, that he had had no responsibility for putting it together. It was entirely the work of the Pollution Show

Committee, two of whose members were young artists represented in the show. They had approached the museum with the idea and had planned the exhibition from beginning to end. Mills turned me over to his assistant, George Neubert, who had worked closely with the planning committee, and went off to watch a television reporter climb into one of the pieces of sculpture so that he could have his picture taken in it—a red plushlined Coffin for the Earth. Neubert is a considerably younger man. He was also fairly nervous about the show. “Theme shows are very difficult. And art and politics don’t mix well.” He respected the intentions of the artists and thought it was a theme deserving real attention. Did he think the show was a failure? We turned to look at the crowds of visitors, mainly parents and children, some giggling but most respectful, as they made their way through the bewildering assortment of works. No, on the whole he thought it was a good thing. He thought there were even some works of independent artistic merit in the show. It turned out his favorite piece was a block of normally clear, cast acrylic resin, the lower half of which had been blackened and filled with an assortment of paper wrappers and matches. According to Neubert, the artist was a serious one (i.e., pure). He had continued to do his thing—work in cast plastic resin— but to suggest pollution he had added gum wrappers. This was pretty refined and I walked off to watch a couple of edgy parents steering their children away from a painting of a just-having-balled couple lying amid the rubble of their weekend—cigarette butts, beer cans, paper bags, cardboard boxes and a rubber tire from their car. The painting was exhibited flat and low off the ground like an actual bed and was surrounded by real beer cans. The show itself was pretty refined on the whole, almost all the sculpture up on bases, nothing to disturb the lovely parquet floors, the neatly framed paintings. It was hard to see what made the museum so nervous. Oakland is an undistinguished city, most famous I suspect for its football team and the savagery of local attacks on peace marchers—in this way something like Staten Island or Queens. It had somehow raised over $6 million for a new museum, creditably enough built in the next-to-latest architectural chic of New Brutalism (concrete slab and glass) and situated over Merritt Lake, looking out at Oakland Hills (and with its back door to the ghetto, according to unfriendly critics). It houses an extraordinary, though as yet uncataloged collection of California art, a Natural History Division, which is mainly a showroom since no research wing is attached, and what is to be a comprehensive Regional History and Culture Depart •

Lead Kindly Blight

ment. The museum is city-financed and its direction entirely responsible now to a city manager who replaced in authority a museum commission appointed in accordance with some sort of civil service guidelines. Predictably, since the museum is public in the literal sense, and since its charter commits it to regional culture and history, it was rocked even before its opening last January by a controversy over the representation, or lack of it, given to black and brown minority groups, who form a sizable portion of Oakland’s population. The controversy resulted in the firing of the director and the educational coordinator, both of whom were committed to an active involvement of the black and brown communities. In the course of the battle leading to the director’s expulsion the museum commission censored a painting by a black artist and delivered itself of the rather unpromising dictum that “nothing inflammatory should be exhibited” in the museum. The painting, called The Death Makers, ostensibly depicted the skeleton of Malcolm X being carried off by the police. How this was recognizable is an interesting question—one skeleton looking very like another—but it led to an interesting exchange at the commission meeting. According to the minutes of the meeting, Paul Mills told the commission that he had discussed hanging the controversial painting with the black art-and-artist committee at some length. Then Mr. Hayes (the commission chairman) told Mills, “It is not appropriate for the black art-andartist committee to decide which painting should or should not be hung in the galleries of the museum.” Two other commissioners, constituting a majority, agreed with the chairman that “this responsibility is exclusively that of the curator.” Then “the commission instructed Mr. Mills that this particular painting must not be hung.” Even so, it’s hard to see what all the nerves were about. It’s hard to imagine what there is in a pollution show that could possibly offend anyone—except a bit of colorful sex (the balling couple, say), and with the open distribution of beaver movies and I Am Curious (Yellow) even that becomes doubtful. It is on record that Mayor Alioto of San Francisco has come out against automobile exhaust fumes, at least while he was a potential candidate for governor of California. The lieutenant governor of California has denounced the Santa Barbara oil slick. Even President Nixon, notably nonactivist except in military circumstances, has been moved to warn the nation not to litter. But suppose you want to offend. Then, as it says in the travelogue, “let us say farewell to Oakland.” The scene is New York. A proposal for the Jewish Museum’s current Software Show is offered by Jean Toche. It would introduce pollution right into the museum in the form of a choking gas. If Lead Kindly Blight

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nothing else, this is aggressive. A large number of people, largely middle class, vaguely liberal, almost all against the war in Vietnam, police brutality, de facto segregation, higher transit fares, and all of them dead set against pollution, enter the museum and exit coughing with real tears in their eyes. This is nearly as good as a demonstration—or going to hear LeRoi Jones yell at you for being a white racist creep, a theatrical scene quite fashionable a couple of years ago. It leaves you only three options: A. Say “Up yours!” and leave. B. Turn to the fellow in back of you and say “He means you.” C. Develop a taste for Expressionism. The first two result in a pointless cul-de-sac for the theatergoer, and the last requires some highly complicated strategies ranging from easy to nearly impossible, depending upon the time and place. Easy: You go to a cold-water flat (a storefront would be better). You see a painting that rubs you the wrong way. It’s a mess. The stretcher is made out of orange crates, the paint runs all over. Furthermore, it appears to make no sense. You say, “This is pretty hard to take! It’s ugly—offensive.” (This is a nostalgic scenario and goes back at least twenty years.) You go out shaking your head, jolted but proud of yourself for being able to withstand the assault. The more you think about it, the more interesting it gets. Before long you go back for a second look. Then, a third. After a while you bring visitors. You’re a connoisseur. Moderately Hard: You go to a loft, spacious with high ceilings. Sparsely furnished, white. There is a frosty light through the windows that used to look out on a buttonhole factory. (This is also nostalgic.) Now there’s another artist over there. Paintings unstretched and tacked to the wall. Photographs, news clips all around. Many cans of paint but they are neatly arranged. The painting is recognizably busy. You say it is “violent” but “powerful.” You look at another painting, it is less “violent.” There are fewer smears and drips. The ones that are there are more or less predictable. You don’t say so, but your verdict is, “That one is too easy.” Nearly Impossible: You go to see Henry’s show at the Met, or a big retrospective at the Modern. On the impeccable walls, large, handsomely mounted paintings confront you. The sheer wealth of paint spread over the finest white duck. The stretchers are incredibly expensive. As for the paintings, there is all that luxuriant pigment vibrating with light. If you are an Expressionist you go home feeling vaguely depressed.

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Lead Kindly Blight

So with Toche’s gas attack. With time, people even develop a taste for smoking. Last spring, several artists sneaked into the Museum of Modern Art and suddenly began tearing at each other’s clothes, grappling and smearing each other with blood, and wound up writhing on the terrazzo floors in a great pool of gore before the gendarmes stepped in. I hear that later several people criticized their choreography. Even the Aztecs may have had art critics at their murderous ceremonials. The question is whether somewhere between aestheticism and assault there is a place of engagement. If Oakland’s Pollution Show takes us nowhere we haven’t already been, then Jean Toche doesn’t take us much further. Perhaps the problem is in the idea of pollution itself. It generates an image of a machine. We want that machine. It makes something like daylight at night. But it isn’t working well. So it also makes smoke or dirty water. We say, “Oil the gears!” (Our image of the machines is still kind of clocklike—electronics and the computer notwithstanding.) Who will oil the gears (if there are gears), and will he have to drive to get there? How much pollution will his car exhaust put into the atmosphere on his way to oil the gears? There are really two pollution problems, not one: criminal pollution and tragical pollution. If we really want to, we can force the power companies to spend their money on large enough afterburners that will effectively ash almost all of their fossil fuels. It may be politically difficult and costly, but in theory it is very simple. But if we want to live in deserts with air-conditioners, dishwashers, driers, and Laundromats, all of which may in fact be necessary—if we take away the dishwasher and drier we live by womanpower rather than horsepower—we are faced with energy conversions in which we are always losing ground (see the second law of thermodynamics). Let us prosecute criminal pollution, but as for tragical pollution, we will have to decide with great care what is tragical and what merely suicidal. Consider the mound-building Indians of the upper Mississippi. They were the northern fringe of a great American maize culture that extended from Guatemala through the Mexican plateau up as far as the forests of Michigan. The northern Mississippian branch flourished over a relatively short time, attaining a high degree of urbanization, living in complexes of thousands. Then, somewhat mysteriously and fairly rapidly, they disappeared, leaving behind the large ceremonial mounds for which they are known. There is no clear-cut explanation for the rapid shift in their fortunes, swift growth to a large community and quick wipeout, but there is a plausible theory that goes this way. Unlike the Mexican plateau the Mis-

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sissippi Valley did not provide conditions for a constantly bountiful maize harvest, but there were relatively long periods during which the climate did make abundant harvests possible. According to the theory, during a long-term optimal swing in climatic conditions, the maize people built up to larger and more complex communities supported by their increasing surplus of grain. But as the weather swung away from the optimal, though changing by only a few degrees, the maize payoff grew worse and worse. The people, unaware that the situation was irretrievably worsening, probably hoped for improvement or were unwilling or unable to disband into the smaller and sparser communities from which they had emerged. Or maybe they were just too committed to their cities. Result? Wipeout. It is easy to consider these Indians stupid, but we are not certain how our own cities grew up, whether they are merely changing or whether we are reaching a point of decline inextricably connected with the nature of society, regardless of its political organization. In this time of uncertainty and concern a wide range of artists in different arts have, for their own reasons, gotten concerned with the web of relations that goes by the clumsy name of ecology. “House Science?” “Housekeeping?” “The Rules of the House?” Look at this enormous power plant. Question: “Who’s going to pay for it?” Answer: “It’s on the house.” Which doesn’t mean it’s free. But all the concern of all the artists in the world doesn’t automatically make clear what, if any, relation there is or can be between art and ecology. If a man is painting paintings or making something as definable as sculpture, it’s hard to imagine any especially interesting results. Yet even here the issue is not clear-cut. No one could have imagined the intellectual power of representational painting—lying nearly dead these many years—in the hands of Pop painters like Warhol or Lichtenstein. But on the whole, ecological interest is coming from what for lack of a better term must be considered the extreme avant-garde. Consider a piece of “documentation art” (sometimes called “Conceptual Art”) by Douglas Huebler, Duration Piece 2. The documentation, which is all that there is of the piece, consists of 12 photographs. It is subtitled Sand 30⬘ by 4⬙, referring to a 4-inch wide marker strip of sand he laid across a road at the point included in each photograph. The photographs were taken at two-minute intervals at a fixed position along Route 25 at Plaistow, New Hampshire. Each shot includes a view of both sides of the road for a distance of perhaps 30 feet. Of the 12 photographs, 6 contain pictures of passing cars—3 in one direction, 3 in the other. There is a mailbox in the picture, and this led me to wonder how many cars pass by this house every second on this lightly traveled road. Since there is a mailbox, the likelihood of very high speeds is low, though this  •

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doesn’t make much difference. Suppose the cars are all traveling at 30 miles per hour. This means that they’re traveling 44 feet per second, and they will remain in view along a 30-foot expanse of road for roughly ¾ of a second. The photographs were taken at 120-second intervals, so that, multiplying by /, there were 160 parcels of time during which a 30-mileper-hour-traveling car could have been caught by the camera. It doesn’t take much mathematical intelligence to reason that if 80 cars came through in the 2-minute interval (or the 160 parcels of time), that there would be a 50/50 chance of catching a car in the picture. Which is what we have—6 cars in 12 frames. That would mean that the cars traveling both directions on Route 25 near Plaistow, New Hampshire, come by at a rate of 1 every 1.5 seconds. This sounds incredible, and is statistically not at all convincing because the sample consists of such a small number of photographs for such a large number of possible events. Nevertheless suppose 1 car came by every 5 seconds. The chances of finding a car in the frame would be 1 in 7. Since the first frame doesn’t count—Huebler could have intentionally clicked the camera shutter on an empty road without any wait—it appears that the cars come with a frequency of 6 in 11. A car was in front of that house probably more often than one every 5 seconds. What was going on in Plaistow, New Hampshire? I would say this is an ecology-oriented work that has escaped from the artist’s intention. It is about cars passing a mailbox on a minor road in a nothing state. Is this pollution criminal or tragic? Take another work. Dennis Oppenheim’s Cancelled Crop. Oppenheim selected a field—as it happens, in Finsterwolde, Holland—and a gallery location that was to serve as a grain silo in Nieuweschans (likewise in Holland). For no special reason except that it is fashionable for artists to like self-referring systems, he had the field seeded in a configuration representing a scale reduction of the route between Finsterwolde and Nieuweschans. The grain (Oppenheim doesn’t say what kind in the proposal) was harvested and shipped to the gallery-silo. For one month the gallery became just that—a silo. New personnel were hired, the phone number changed. Gallery advertisements mentioned only “Grain for Sale.” Justifying the “esthetic properties” of the work, Oppenheim says, “This project poses an aesthetic interaction upon mediums during the early stages of processing. Planting and cultivating my own material is like mining one’s own pigment (for paint) . . . In this case the material is planted and cultivated for the sole purpose of withholding it from a product-oriented system” (and I hope he didn’t sell it). It is an ecological work, though perhaps somewhat edgy in point of view. Expected query: “Why grain, not toothLead Kindly Blight

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paste?” Or again, “Why not send it to India?” Answer: “I like wheat and they don’t like wheat in India. The poor are always with us, etc.” Besides, who says the Artist is a Friend? To follow this up more closely, consider Robert Morris’s proposal to the Los Angeles County Art Museum. The museum has been working on a vast collaborative art and technology show and had asked for proposals from the artists they thought would get the most interesting results. Morris proposed to take an unpopulated area about one square mile in scale and make “an extensive ecological survey” to “record the seasonal variations in flora, fauna, weather, humidity, wind, rainfall . . . After the various surveys have been in progress for several months, a number of highoutput air-conditioners and heaters will be adapted from existing units now functioning in aerospace ground-support systems . . . The outputs of hot and cold air, either in the form of air currents or radiant energy, will for the most part be above-ground, although sub-surface radiant heating will probably be incorporated . . . The actual output for currents of hot or cold or warm or cool air will be disguised. Fiberglass rocks with fissures, plastic crevasses, camouflaged conduits in trees, etc., will function as the interface between technology and nature.” From one point of view this is a thermal park; from another it will be the first documented example of the artist as ecological invader. When the project was conceived, the museum thought to have it carried out by Lear Siegler, a mainline company in ground support for aircraft, missiles and electronics. Perhaps somewhat more appropriately, the museum shortly afterward switched the project to NASA, which ultimately proved unable to make arrangements for realizing it. The museum presented another ecological project to industry for the same show. This was Jackson Mac Low’s. Mac Low is a poet who wanted to set up a series of computer-controlled poems that would articulate the ecological relationships obtaining at whatever site the work was to be performed. The museum curator, the ever-optimistic Maurice Tuchman, and Mac Low hopefully offered this benevolent but staggering project to IBM, which took one look at it and one at Mac Low’s beard and said no dice. Subsequently, IBM took on a more comfortable project—an abstract, computer-controlled, animated film. Apparently there is nothing large corporations find more comfortable than decorative abstraction. Some works of art that are more fundamentally ecological have no obvious relation to “nature.” Wildlife isn’t the whole “house” by any means. Two recent “exhibitions” at Gain Ground, an experimental gallery on Manhattan’s West Side, are excellent examples of this.

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The first, by Vito H. Acconci, was a show that was in transit over a three-week period. Acconci, a poet and ARTNews critic, lives down on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Each weekend he emptied his “house” (a four-room apartment) room by room of its furniture, which he transported to the gallery some seventy blocks away. The week he moved the kitchen, if he needed his coffee pot or a dish he had to travel back to the gallery to get it. If you followed the show from week to week, on any weekend you’d have seen some subset of Acconci’s life within that space. A rigorous method—to remove the logistical support for your life, your chair, your bed, your table, and then find how much you need them when . . . and how much you don’t. You feel like a cup of coffee and your percolator is seventy blocks away. You aren’t allowed to go downstairs and buy one (what are rules for anyway?). You take the subway to 79th Street, walk one block down Broadway, round the corner to 246, take the elevator up to the gallery, get the percolator, take it all the way back to the apartment—who wants coffee? Sometimes there’s an advantage in not having things on hand. Having learned this, on the last day Vito started giving things away. The second show, also at Gain Ground, by Eleanor Antin, was called “California Lives.” Here again, objects, movables. This time they were not worn out or used, but fresh from discount centers. They were not quite livable. Like California. A white-and-gold TV tray table, a Melamac cup and saucer, a filter cigarette, a pink hair curler, and a book of matches from George’s roadside steakhouse in Cardiff-by-the- Sea make up the work called “Jeannie.” A bridge table, two open folding chairs face each other across it, a lady’s white cardigan with rhinestone beading, a game of dominoes, a glass candy dish, and a bunch of California grapes is “Georgia de Meir.” A name and a group of objects, portraits from which the sitter walked away. These objects extend your sense of dependencies. A house is not a home. Every real-estate operator knows that—so all he advertises are “homes.” Who says Jeannie doesn’t depend on her hair curler? At the end of Acconci’s show he gave his objects away. After you have seen Eleanor Antin’s show, you wish somebody would take these objects away. The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own conditions for existence or those of the world. Not a statue of an eviscerated seagull or a lament for the California condor. Though these are harmless enough, all that they offer is elegy or taxidermy, which may be all that is possible in the normal context of a museum. When Robert Morris was asked to do something for an environment show at the Museum of Modern Art, he had them install several

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thousand tiny fir tree seedlings. This reduces the forest to a museum scale. And at the Oakland Museum, one artist contributed a square-foot block of asphalt through which a single blade of grass poked up. The assistant curator saw me looking at it and said, “I like that one, too. I take it as a sign of hope.” But two days in the museum and the grass died. San Diego 1971

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“ It Reaches a Desert in which Nothing Can Be Perceived but Feeling”

the predicament There is something quite arbitrary in the history of art as in the history of all social institutions; but to the degree that this arbitrariness is the shape of the space we inhabit, it looks logical, even matter-of-course, to all of our contemporaries, which is how we know they are our contemporaries. But at some point in the future it is also what makes us suddenly bizarre to our successors and nearly incomprehensible. Things that must have been logically compelling: Greek temple architecture, Roman rhetoric, Abstract art, seem suddenly insane. There is something engaging but lunatic in taking a rock structure that occupies real space and lavishing on it an endless attention to details of surface proportion as if a building were only an occasion for constructing two, three, or four pictorial views; so also in a view of discourse that to a statement of facts which is supposed to be “clear, brief, and plausible” advises the addition of “magnificence of diction” or “attractiveness of style” the way one might add a facade to a wall. But it is a matter of common knowledge how far we are from fifth-century Greece or first-century Rome. It’s only recently clear how far we are from 1937. What are we supposed to make of a passage like this? [Constructivism] . . . has revealed an universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world; that their life and their action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature; that these elements are not chosen by convention for any utilitarian or other reason as words and figures are, they are not merely abstract signs, but they are immediately and organically bound up with human emotions.

It’s depressing. Not only does this passage of Gabo’s state as facts a series of unproven and unprovable propositions, but its vaguely therapeu-

tic and contentless psychologism has become so transparently unlikely. To be sure, I can think of people who subscribe to these fanciful notions, but they are scarcely the ones who would have subscribed to them in 1937. The most notable example I can think of is an IBM vice-president who, on being solicited for support for a computer program in the visual arts, expressed a real but transient interest in the program in the hope that the research might find application in some such situation as restoring the mental stability to a hypothetically flipped-out astronaut through transmission to him of an appropriate stabilizing image—naturally abstract. Although it is virtually certain that the National Institutes of Health is at this very moment funding some psychology department to study the effect of abstract patterns as potential positive and negative stimuli on selectively chosen adult populations; artists, with more experience, are much less magnificent in their expectations of abstraction. In November 1970 Sol Lewitt had a pair of his wall drawings executed on the walls of the Pasadena Art Museum. He had this to say of them: The draftsman and the wall enter a dialogue. The draftsman becomes bored but later through this meaningless activity finds peace or misery. The lines on the wall are the residue of this process. Each line is as important as each other line. All of the lines become one thing. The viewer of the lines can see only lines on a wall. They are meaningless. This is art.

This is what the tradition of abstraction has come to. There is nothing but lines on a wall, in this case pencil lines, colored on one wall and black on the other, but no claim is made for them; or, rather, a specific claim of “meaninglessness” is made for them. While Lewitt is not representative of all Abstract artists, he is certainly one of the better ones and he shares with almost all of them a fundamental belief in the “meaninglessness” of art as an activity or as an outcome. To explain what I mean by this, Lewitt has little relation to the decorative formalist painters, Noland, Olitsky, Stella, though at this point all of them make marks on a surface. These painters confine themselves within the bounds of a historically determined game. This game is a genre (painting), which they play at as well as they can, Stella perhaps somewhat better than the others. Sometimes they introduce rule changes, altering the game slightly while maintaining its general structure on the order, say, of exchanging the position of the bishops and knights. Stella has generally appeared to be more radical than this, mainly through a lack of consistent respect for rules he sometimes gives the impression that he regards as binding. So at one time he apparently restricted all the marks on the surface of his paintings to redun •

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dant reflections of the shape of the surface; he followed this by changing the shape of the surface apparently to accommodate differently shaped marks, only to then change the marks to disaccommodate the shape that he seemed to have designed for them, all of this with a considerable degree of wit and skill. But of what consequence could it possibly be to question the “meaningfulness” of chess? The major difference between Stella and Lewitt is the degree of markedness with which they would both affirm the meaninglessness of the activity. For Stella it is a matter of course and for Lewitt it is some form of assertion. There are probably a number of reasons for this difference, some perhaps personal, but the most significant is that Stella and Lewitt derive, or more precisely, have chosen to derive from two different traditions in Abstract art. The decorative formalists (and Stella, with special inflections) derive from the pseudo-Cubist tradition, more commonly known by its popularizers as the tradition of “modernist painting.” We are by now quite familiar with this theory, according to which an art becomes modern to the degree that it restricts itself to those means that are distinctive to it. According to the theory, what was distinctive about painting was the physical flatness of the surface on which the painting took place, thus the much celebrated “integrity of the picture plane.” Although the critics who supported this view always provided a prehistory for the tradition, ordinarily reaching back to Impressionism, they agree in crediting to the Cubists the final establishment of the painting surface as the obligatory concern of painting. It was not a great step forward for the advocates of this theory to suppose that the shape of the edges, that is, the boundaries of the physical surface, must also have “exerted a pressure” on whatever marks were to be made on that surface. Since the general habit of painters was to employ rectangular frames, this meant that there was a pressure toward orthogonality proceeding from the frame. Thus formulated, Modern painting could be viewed as a “board game” deriving from Cubism, in which any move suggesting three-dimensionality produced a “tension” (by conflict with the picture plane) that had to be resolved by a contrary “pull” back to the surface, and any curved line or diagonal had to be somehow balanced by being “pulled back” into the rectangular confines of the frame. It is from this formulation that the formalist critical vocabulary of the fifties derives, with its pictorial “tension” and “firmly locked planes.” Presumably the Cubist discoveries should have led to flat and totally geometric paintings; but the crucial element, without which there would have been no game, only a correct style, was the notion that total flatness was either optically impossible or artistically undesirable. When considered achievable, it was generally assumed to lead to mere “decoration,” a grave “It Reaches a Desert”

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charge from which Clement Greenberg felt called upon to defend Newman, Rothko, and Still in his 1958 essay, “ ‘American-Type’ Painting.” This was either because all great art was known to have some minute depth or because of a hostility to the vocabulary of Art Nouveau with its advocacy of both flatness and decoration. Whatever its rationale, it provided the context for the drama in the game of “Modernist painting”: the claims of the surface against the impulse toward depth and the claims of the edge against the impulse toward nonredundant drawing. So in Olitsky the painting will seem a kind of graph of illusion densities, ranging from some segment of the surface that is either clearly flat pigment or even built-up impasto, thereby “defining the surface” it occupies, and, if it should happen to be parallel to an edge, “defining the edge” also, to a kind of trailingoff spray of atmospheric color to give the illusion of somehow hovering in front of the canvas instead of trailing off into traditional illusion space, and so on and so on. And it is true that a pleasantly malevolent streak in Stella has removed all the dramatic “tension” and replaced it with a formal comedy. Thus Stella will go through the motions of lawful academic painting merely to produce a disastrous outcome, for example, rigorously repeating the shape of the frame in smaller and smaller rectangles in bands of alternating color, but with the canvas divided by diagonals into quarters in such a manner that the smallest bands crash together out of line at the center, or repeating the frame shape in smaller and smaller rectangles without diagonals, so that they close in on the center, which is replaced by a neat rectangular hole. But since the form of this comedy is parody, it is all about this academic and fanciful set of rules derived from pseudoCubism. The reason for calling this game pseudo-Cubism is that it is a highly conjectural view of Cubism, elaborated long after the fact of Cubism, and for which the visible evidence is extremely unconvincing. It is common knowledge that Cubism was a thoroughly representational art, or more precisely that it was concerned with a new form of representation and subsequently with a parody of itself, taking as its subject the conventions of representation, its own as well as others. The raw materials for the Cubist revolution lay in the idea, never taken entirely seriously and never entirely abandoned in post-Renaissance European painting, that a painting was to yield a representation of the visual image. The discrepancy between this idea and the reality of painting consisted of the uncameralike character of the human eye (or eye-brain pair). The painters had in mind as the visual image an intelligible and meaningful unit, which seems not to be a single gestalt but a synthesis of perceptual information (added together from a number of rapid scans) and the attendant conceptual information  •

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provided by experience of real objects and their real and apparent relations. While the knowledge of this discrepancy was not exactly news to painters all over Europe when the Cubists proclaimed it in their paintings, in earlier European painting there had been for the most part a kind of gentlemanly agreement to pass over it without making more of an issue than a well-educated man should. But the less than gentlemanly nature of the Impressionists, who were willing to allow their pursuit of luminosity to throw the contradiction into the foreground, and the cantankerous nature of Cezanne made it a central painting issue until the Cubists settled it once and for all. Picasso and Braque simply accommodated themselves to the synthetic nature of the visual image by representing a scene (the visual image) as a concatenation of “glances,” pieces of visualized atmospheric space of variable depth juxtaposed against rapid conceptual analyses of what those spaces contained. The result ranged from the chaotic and nearly unreadable to hyper-simplified recognizability, depending on what syntactical rules Picasso or Braque applied to their image fragments (the glances and experience bits) and on whether they were interested in a more splintered or blander result. It is obvious that the later Braque and painters like Gris were most generally fascinated by glamorous elliptical effects, while the Futurists seized on the more dramatic effect of scenesplintering. In this context, whether you painted a painting or part of a painting more or less flat depended only on the dramatic tempo, that is, what kind of ride you like and where you were on your last move. But the tempo of the ride was to a great extent determined for the observer by the relation of the depicted image to the imagined objective reality, that is to say, the difficulty or facility of the decoding problem. It was not a formalist art. The most convincing argument against its formalist nature is given by Cubist collage and Picasso’s early sculpture. The collage works, with their brilliant confusion of trompe l’oeil painting, pasted paper, atmospheric lettering, and schematic diagram, are a complicated extension and parody of the representational ideas of analytical Cubism, and the early sculpture parodies the whole idea of two-dimensional representation in three dimensions. What possible “formalist” rationale could one give for this work? A three-dimensional object that carries marks of a “picture plane” is sheer hilarity or on its way to becoming something else. This something else was the Abstract tradition, which Cubist sculpture rejoined by way of Tatlin and the Russian Constructivists. The Abstract tradition, though it may have borrowed a geometrical appearance from Cubist work at the beginning of the twentieth century, is considerably older than Cubism. It seems likely that this tradition was the outcome of a reductivist and purist sensibility that can be traced back “It Reaches a Desert”

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to the last quarter of the eighteenth century in the work of the rationalist architects like Ledoux and Lequeu and slightly later to archaizing simplifications of the sort of the so-called Primitives out of the atelier of David. While rationalist and primitivizing sources may seem completely divergent and documentation of the historical connections is hardly adequate, the primitive-Abstract and the scientific-Abstract ran together through the whole history of Abstract art from Gauguin and the symbolist circles around the Revue Wagnerienne of the 1880s to Les Vingt in Belgium, aspects of Art Nouveau, Cubism itself, Expressionism, Constructivism, and Dada, and naturally both currents can be found in the Bauhaus and most of its descendants. This was fairly natural, since the intention of Abstract art was a direct operation upon spirit, which was not dissimilar to science’s direct operation upon generalized matter. And the idea of a primitive society was an idea of a simpler, more universally human condition, where the human spirit was more accessible because it was less cluttered with the bric-a-brac of civilization, which was imagined to have gotten progressively more complicated. Though the idea of operating upon pure spirit has a somewhat religious cast, this is not entirely necessary if one understands the word “spirit” to signify the generalized capacity for sensation or feeling. Thus, Madame de Stael, without a notably religious sensibility, bearing the message of Expressionist art theory from Germany, which is also the message of abstraction, declared that “the arts are above thought; their language consists of colors or forms or sounds. If one could imagine the impressions of which our spirit was susceptible before it learned speech, one might better understand the effect of painting and music.” That is to say that the arts, in this case painting and music, operate directly on the prelinguistic level of pure sensation. What is more, according to Madame de Stael, art is the vehicle for communication of the artist’s sensation to a hypothetical audience—soul to soul. Given this pair of beliefs (shared by artists as divergent as Gauguin and Kandinsky), it is not easy to see what sort of sensation could be transmitted except one that is prelinguistic and without structural clues to its possible relation to any external reality. Obviously the idea for such abstract communication is based on an analogy with music, which was generally conceded to represent nothing and yet to communicate feeling, presumably abstract (contentless) feeling. Music was in fact much envied throughout the nineteenth century for its immateriality, which made it the paradigm for abstraction. Schopenhauer went so far as to assert that music was “pure will” because it was entirely independent of all physical reality. But music is notably physical in its effects; noises may be felt as physical pressures or even pain. These are tangible consequences, though “meaningless.” Ex •

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pressionist aesthetics had a tendency to equate the feelings of the artist with the feelings generated in the audience. This equation is not universal throughout Abstract-art theory by any means, though its acceptance in some form is more widespread than imagined. Consider the painting of Ad Reinhardt, the black paintings. Their operation is quite simple. They consist in general of a two-colored cross, in which the two colors, say red and blue, are so close in value to black that they can only be distinguished from each other and a black background with great difficulty. Because the human eye distinguishes colored objects to a great extent by the ratio of intensity of the light reflected by them, and the ratio in this case is very close to one, our discriminating abilities are almost entirely frustrated by the task. The dark environment of the painting forces us to undergo an odd dark adaptation in a fully lit room. These factors produce considerable eye fatigue and frustration. When we do make out the painting, all that it consists of is a “meaningless” cross. We experience a feverish though not unpleasant optical sensation and the pleasure of having decoded the painting. This may be a paradigm of abstract aesthetic sensation, and Reinhardt imposed on himself the same sort of effortful task of color discrimination, added to a tedious and meticulous attention to craft detail, in painting the picture. Presumably this equivalence respected the Expressionist equation. Reinhardts are reliable aesthetic machines. They may occasionally need repairs but they always work. In a somewhat less extravagant fashion Lewitt and Los Angeles artists like Robert Irwin and Michael Asher are working in the same tradition—Irwin and Asher projecting through a tenuity of format a kind of affluent spirituality that bathes all Los Angeles like a dubious sunset. Tonally this work suggests connections with religious disciplines, particularly the Eastern ones so popular now in the Western world. The reason for this is simple: here our experience of Eastern spiritual disciplines is largely literary or, at the very least, cut off from any social context that would exact responsibilities or confer any benefits beyond the moment of the experience. The result is disconnected from the rest of life, quite tangible and trivial. And as religious feeling in itself is indifferent to the content of the religion that evoked it, so is aesthetic feeling independent of any art object that may have operated as a trigger. Duchamp became aware of this rather early and offered a number of possible objects (ready-mades) for arthood. Although it took some time for them to be accepted, possibly time enough for the art audience to change significantly, I imagine Duchamp observed the change in their fortunes with some concern. Though the objects themselves are of varying interest, by now all have been accepted as legitimate triggers for aesthetic experi“It Reaches a Desert”

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ence. In fact, legitimacy is no longer a question for an audience that has no criteria for the legitimacy of an art object except the triggering of the art experience, which this audience has become so skillful at attaining that no possible object could be found inadequate. This remarkable feature of the present art audience has led one artist, Robert Morris, who, like most other Minimal artists to some extent traded on this capacity of the audience for a nearly autonomous aesthetic response, to complain: At the present time the culture is engaged in the hostile and deadly act of immediate acceptance of all new perceptual art moves, absorbing through institutionalized recognition every art act.

This may be true, though I think it excessive to complain of the culture’s hostility. The culture has no reason to feel hostile to an art offered for contentless experience. It is what the culture is most at home with. It has been the triumph of American business to prepare the American public to maintain a high level of satisfaction in the face of a constantly diminishing product—the car from General Motors, the G.E. toaster, the condominium on the golf course from Bank of America. It is an inescapable conclusion that the same satisfaction awaits you when you attempt to breathe the air conditioning in Saarinen’s airport or do your work in one of Mies van der Rohe’s glass architectural triumphs as when you “Travel American” or sleep at a Holiday Inn. It is no accident that this is the culture of the pharmacy and the encounter group. A mystical business deserves a mystical art. So the artist and the businessman have combined to instruct the culture, and the public has learned the lesson of all Abstract art. With some confidence it goes prepared for an aesthetic experience to the faintest possibility of an encounter with art. If a conceptual artist offers it an “art thought,” if a body artist offers it an “art action,” let it be contentless and the culture is ready for its experience. It is all ready for the sensory deprivation chamber. As Malevich said, “It reaches a ‘desert’ in which nothing can be perceived but feeling.” Or more precisely, in the words of Timothy Leary, the archetypal American consumer: “I don’t need acid to get high.” elements We have come to the end of the line, not suddenly; but we have realized it suddenly, as all realizations are sudden. Formalist art is dead because its formalist aspect is, like chess, a game of no consequence, an image of nothing in which the same ground is gone over and over in the same way,  •

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to the vast indifference of nearly everybody but its dealers; and abstraction has declined to an empty and affluent spirituality at the level of consumer goods. It is true there are other aspects to formalist art, and the decorative aspect of formalist work has never been adequately explored. By this I don’t mean it hasn’t been noticed or even exploited as a commodity. One might go so far as to say that this is precisely what the formalist critics have rather grandiosely called “quality” and offered as a sort of bonus along with the formalist game. But this obscures the ambiguous meaning of decoration, which is situated in a complex tangle of psychologically and sociologically conditioned attitudes known as the domain of “taste.” An attitude toward decoration is a stance in relation to taste. By its nature it cannot be “formalist” because taste is engulfed in the cultural micro-history that is fashion, with its seeming chaos of value images appearing and disappearing almost before they can be identified. So, the new (and, as I say it, stillborn) “lyrical, romantic painting” of New York’s downtown galleries was born of a taste change, from an irritation with the appearance of hard-edge, seemingly systematic formats. But it is not the same thing to be exploited by taste as to explore it. The only serious explorations of the meaning of decoration and taste came through two nonformalist movements, Minimal Art and Pop. Warhol’s manipulation of a kind of lethal or sleazy glamour is well known, as are Lichtenstein’s melancholy meditations on “Modern Art” transformed by time from an aggressive aesthetic to an Arcadian taste. The meaning of color choices and finish in the work of Stella and Judd is less familiar, possibly because it seems less ambiguous and more deadpan. By now it is almost an effort to remember how equivocally attractive the metallic Stellas were. Unlike Johns’s silvery grays, these coppers and violets carried strong connotations of a crappy commercial usage right alongside their atmospheric glamour; and at present it is still difficult to define what is the source of partial unpleasantness in the color of the protractor paintings. In Judd’s case the evocations of the Buick Riviera and the automobile showroom were nearly inescapable. Though the objects, pseudo-objects, or object-paintings of minimal art did not directly imitate the commercially or industrially produced object, they offered a variety of images of commercial or industrial glamour as surely as Pop. One might say that both Pop artists and certain of the minimal artists attempted to take possession for art of an area of the culture both feared and disdained by all immediately previous art. These attempts to take possession resulted in an art that was a new kind of representation. This was pointed out by Robert Morris, who argued from slightly different grounds. “To construct objects demands a preconception of a whole image. Art of the ’60s was an art of depicting images.” Reeval“It Reaches a Desert”

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uating his own artistic position in the same article, he was obliged to conclude that “the open, lateral, random aspects” of the work he was describing and advocating also provided “a general sort of image.” It appears that the doctrine of the literalness of the artwork has finally been laid to rest. It was a valuable position, though polemically taken and always stated in an exaggerated fashion: “A thing is what it is.” But “try to imagine a thing with one aspect.” If we are forced to a theory of art as representation, then we will need a new and adequately complex theory of representation, which is to say that we will need a new theory of content. This may have to partake of mapping theory, the theory of descriptions, systems theory, or whatever comes to hand and is effective in leading us out of the trap of representing what has always been represented in the way that it has always been represented. But more likely we need to begin more simply, not with the complicated syntax we may or may not have to employ, but with what appear to be the simplest and least arbitrary elements that seem to offer immediate possibilities. But what elements? In a sense we are in a circular bind. The elements one chooses depend upon what it is one wishes to do, just as what one does will depend upon the elements one takes to hand. When the organizer of this exhibition wrote to Carl Andre to participate in a show loosely organized around work with the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, he declined on the grounds that he worked with the ninety-eight elements. Even a casual inspection of Andre’s work will show that this is simply not true. At most he may have worked with perhaps five or six of those ninety-eight “elements,” and all metals at that. What kind of element is steel, defined as it is by a statistical relation between carbon and iron and a fanciful image of bonds? How much sulfur was still in his zinc or lead? These metals were not chemical elements for Andre, but shiny metal, light colored metal, orange metal, and rightly so. There is a Chekhov story in which a lady traveling in one of those coaches through the outer reaches of eastern Russia stops at an inn, where she encounters a gentleman slumped disconsolately over the only table. When he tells his story, as the disconsolate gentlemen always do in these narratives, it turns out that he had been a student of chemistry, had learned all there was to know of chemical matters, every property of every element and all of their combinations, and he had been happy in his knowledge; then they discovered a new element. Nobody has to recognize hydrogen as an element whose life doesn’t lead to californium. In phenomenology we might take a lesson from the habits of the German language, where oxygen is “acid stuff,” hydrogen is “burn stuff,” and succinic acid is “amber acid.” The only elements we need to  •

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recognize are the elements we work with, the ones that are part of our life; and there is no buying a part of the periodic table without buying the whole scientific apparatus. I suspect that the most serious reason for Andre’s otherwise whimsical refusal (he has never been nonwhimsical) was his grasp of himself as an artist fitting into the particularly traditional genre of sculpture, metal sculpture at that. This is perfectly reasonable, given the nature of his work. But I think there are very pressing reasons, social and political as well as metaphysical, for choosing elements that are more primary and lie outside the structure of technology. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water qualify in that they lie a level below man’s technological consciousness. They offer simpler material distinctions. No doubt this is why the Western world arrived at them before its embarkation on a technological career. What may be against them may be their very materiality. They are all, except Fire, substances that offer the possibility of contentless sculptural treatment. Again, excepting Fire, they threaten the trap of being mere materials rather than elements; and Fire also offers the opportunity for facile use as a trivial physical process, leading again to “sculpture.” Once we have chosen to seek the ground of elements, we have to ask ourselves in what way could “sculpture” be interesting? If we are to do something fundamentally meaningful we may have to begin by eliminating the genres that have helped trivialize our art. By this I don’t mean subgenres like “painting” or “sculpture.” I mean the distinctions between the arts in general. Is visual information in itself at all capable of producing interesting art? Is acoustical information? Since visualization is not an isolated perceptual sense, but a complex mode of interacting with external reality, based on a synthesis of different types of perceptual data, is there any more reason to set out again to invent a “visual art”? That may have been the career we just terminated. The path of that career has had the effect of obscuring many achievements of earlier art or alien art traditions or even defining them out of existence as art because of our inability to distribute them among the arbitrary categories based on our equally arbitrary division of the sensory system. We have never dealt adequately with the curiously hybrid character of Egyptian relief, situated as it is beside Concrete poetry, not only because it contains verbal material as well as visual; but because the visual materials (pictures) derive from the same block of signs as the ideographs themselves. Do they have the double valence of capital letters (or capitalized morphemes) and enlarged pictures at the same time? In view of this need to break down arbitrary categorical distinctions, is the choice of the four elements sufficiently universal? These elements are after all prototechnological. They are attempts to universalize “materials,” and materials are “It Reaches a Desert”

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passive recipients of the actions of Workman. It may be impossible for us now to reattempt to enter again the world as family, as in an Indian elements system, with “Sister Water” or “Brother Tree.” Smohalla’s complaint may be too far away: You ask me to plough the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.

We have done too much to the Earth to be able to call it “Mother” without laughing. But it is not impossible to imagine the elements in terms of survival. What are the elements of survival? Light Air Water Food Heat Shelter Transport Rest My list comes to eight, considered within the domain of “Survival.” The specification of the domain may be absolutely necessary in order to avoid the inevitable debasement of elements to “media.” I am not sure that this list is sufficiently universal either, and the “domain” may be too narrowly chosen. “Survival” might be interpreted to mean how little air we can get by on in an airplane without fainting or how high a dose of radioactive materials we can take in our milk. Probably it’s the outcome of being “up against the wall.” It is hard to escape the feeling of wanting to borrow something of the generosity of Smohalla’s domain, however impossible. I am not entirely satisfied with my own elements and it is probably a little premature to encourage a museum to ask for an art of survival. Moreover, there is something intuitively appealing about the old phenomenological scheme, which exhibits a strong overlap with the larger list of eight; and if it is too much to hope that artists will interpret the four elements in terms of survival, still they offer meaningful image properties that have already suggested possibilities to numbers of artists. Insofar as these suggestions go, the elements do not seem to be of equal value. The one that seems to have appealed most readily is Earth. Generally, it has been taken as unrefined, material physicality, unpurified substance ranging from dust to chunk to slime. The various conditions in which it  •

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may be encountered present different experiential images themselves as the words “chunk” and “slime” imply. Not only may the degree of solidity and particle size vary, but the variability of both these aspects may also vary in a given stretch of this material, presenting different degrees of homogeneity. This introduces its own image possibilities. Above this there is a tendency to deal with this material in a range of scales running from garden, to excavation, to the magnitude of a geographical feature. Both Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim have exhibited fairly consistent interest in the scale of the geographical feature. Actual physical magnitudes larger than this are essentially out of the question, but Oppenheim and Robert Smithson have invoked images of terrestrial scale by involving themselves with mapping metaphors. The actual physical size, from an audience point of view, is probably totally indifferent in any event, since they will inevitably wind up experiencing the work through pictorial or verbal documentation. Insofar as the artists are their own audience this is not true and presents no problem, but if the work is to be considered public it is a major drawback. Photography is a very poor visual medium because it is so alien to the way we see, and the size and actual material of the physical site can only be recreated in the mind by a major act of imagination stimulated by the recognizability of the terrain. This limits the range of materiality severely. Excursions to sites of earthworks have been arranged, but generally for a limited and select public. Movies of the site are the latest innovation; and while a movie can convey some image of physical traversal of terrain if the “personal camera” is used, it has most of the same drawbacks as still photography. The way of “landscape” and the “picturesque” by way of “park architecture” suggesting in mode, though not in content, the eighteenth-century meditational gardens, seems so far the direction with the greatest payoff. The richest appearing of these are Smithson’s geological fantasies, though for their most effective operation they require support from Smithson’s prose. This is not an especially limiting factor. It merely means he has a hybrid medium, partly literary and partly physical. This is the possibly necessary hybridism I mentioned before and occurs in different forms in many of the artists. Doug Huebler, to stake out his claim to the entire stretch of the forty-second parallel across the United States, required the coupling of cartography and the U.S. Post Office and probably a number of local telephone companies to establish communications with the chambers of commerce in the cities punctuating the route. What imagery is conveyed by this piece is not clear, beyond the not entirely surprising fact that there are physical and social places that correspond to the marks on a map. Ordinarily Huebler’s work is more interesting than this, in that the action he takes often functions “It Reaches a Desert”

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as a kind of flypaper for human and factual surprises. In this sense he is not really involved in earthworks, but Earthworks. But again, like most of the conceptualists he is having a terribly hard time breaking away from the abstractive tendencies of the visual arts, which have provided everybody with such bad training. As an element, Water, taken in its most literal sense, is a traditional sculptural material with a history of fountains, aqueducts, and artificial irrigation projects. In the form of snow and ice most of the potential is seen in terms of landscape, though ice pieces by Haacke, Kaprow, and Ferrer are particularly notable exceptions. The general range of its possibilities is probably laid out most precisely in Leonardo’s multiply repeated chapter headings for his planned treatise on water. The least likely possibilities to be exploited do in fact offer fruitful moves in terms of water as life support in drinking or washing. As a physical support for objects and people, beside the boat-raft life preserver, we now have the erotic waterbed; and I suppose a variety of types of floating furniture will not be far behind. As for Air, the situation is not unlike that of Water, only that it is traditionally the “invisible element” and presents an even looser structure. Air-plays are perhaps as likely as fountains (and they can sing), but they are only made manifest by their effects on other materials. Air could also be used directly as force, say to blow people in or out of the museum. At Steeplechase they used to blow girls’ skirts up in the air, and this was very popular with young boys. As a life-sustaining atmosphere, breathing it or dealing with the difficulty in obtaining enough of it to breathe (which may present problems of tact or humanity) or use of it as an oxidizing medium might prove more peculiar. As a medium for carrying, transporting, or transmitting, it is much like water; and the floating, flying, soaring things will surely be used to define this property. Fire will break into at least two parts—Heat and Light, which may or may not be separated from Flame or Ignition. Of lightworks we have had so many that it is hard to see what more could be expected of them. Usually the lightworks have meant lights, lots of them in sequence and simultaneously, producing either apparent rhythms with notable patterns of recurrence or the now more fashionable random sequences. We have also had an excess of dazzle or excess light with its predictably intense set of uninteresting afterimages. Light as “space-defining” has been a sculptural cliché since light sculpture arrived. It has never been meaningful, though it could be if there was something meaningful about the space it defined. I cannot think of a single example of the use of truly minimal ambient light, though that might prove interesting if it raised the issue  •

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of visibility as a human question—beware of redoing Reinhardt in lights. For Fire as combustion, the range of kinetics between slow charring and explosion leaves lots of room, as does the temperature range of combustion. Leonardo’s ignition of brandy vapors in a sealed room is probably the most definitive use of anticlimax in the long history of fireworks. More melodramatic ones will surely have been proposed. I am not sure that any choice of elements would be both sufficiently universal and inviting to provide an infallible setting for the re-beginnings that are necessary. Certainly no one could expect an exhibition situation to provide such a setting in any case. It is likely that an artist looking for such possibilities will have to feel his way toward his own set of elements. What is valuable is to provide a series of invitations and pitfalls that will allow the participating artists to appear in the context they deserve. Even if one could, one shouldn’t invent a context that artists don’t deserve. 1971 notes  Naum Gabo, “The Constructive idea in Art,” in Circle: An International Survey of

Constructivist Art, ed. J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, and N. Gabo (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 7.  Sol Lewitt, artist’s statement, in “Sol Lewitt” (catalog for his exhibition), Pasadena Art Museum, 1970.  Capablanca in fact suggested such a change in the game of chess in order to prevent atrophy of the game.  The term is from Clement Greenberg’s essay, “Modernist Painting” Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965): 193–201.  In “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg says that “the flatness toward which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an utter flatness. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe-l’oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion” (198, italics mine). This suggests a painterly obligation very strongly. But in the very next sentence Greenberg asserts the physical impossibility of total flatness. “The first mark made on a surface destroys the virtual flatness” (198).  Back in 1958 Greenberg defended the “new kind of flatness” of Newman, Rothko, and Still from charges of decoration, presumably arising from their new flatness. “The issue is raised as to just where the pictorial stops and the decorative begins, and the issue is surmounted. Artiness may be the great liability of these three painters but it is not the artiness of the decorative” (“ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” repr. in Art and Culture [Boston: Beacon Press, 1961], 226).  Practically nothing in the literature contemporary with Cubism gives any support to the ideas elaborated by Greenberg and Michael Fried. For a comprehensive “It Reaches a Desert”

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survey of this literature, see Edward Fry’s excellent book Cubism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966).  Madame de Stael, De l’Allemagne (Paris, 1869), 407.  See the discussion of the idealist conception of music in Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Nizet, 1959), 39–45; see for the development of melomania, Meyer Howard Abrams, “Expressive Theory in Germany: Ut Musica Poesis,” in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford, 1953), 88–94.  Robert Morris, ”Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum (April 1969): 54.  Ibid.  The Nez Perce chief’s whole speech goes very far to point out how different a view of the “elements” you get when you don’t have “working them” in mind: You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair? It is a bad law and my people cannot obey it. I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. We must wait here in the house of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the body of our mother. (Herbert Joseph Spinden, The Nez Perce Indians, Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, vol. 2, 261)

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Art and the Corporations

In the spring of 1971 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art finally opened the doors on its long awaited Art and Technology show. According to the museum’s curator, Maurice Tuchman, the exhibition was conceived as far back as 1966, and it had certainly been in the works since 1968. It has been much publicized in the press and parts of it were displayed in the American Pavilion of the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970. As a consequence many of its works are familiar, perhaps overly familiar, to the art world. But perhaps precisely because of the familiarity of its objects, its long public and not so public development—as a result of which it comes at the end of a long line of technological art exhibitions—and the scale and direction of its ambitions, it deserves serious treatment. The trouble, however, is that it is difficult to decide what to treat. The physical exhibition on the museum’s grounds consisted of the work, or documentation of the work, of a maximum of 15 artists. This uncountability of the participating artists is characteristic of the exhibition in general and part of the difficulty. Typically, a piece by Robert Irwin was exhibited during the show in the museum; it had no connection with anything that he had done in the course of his project with Garrett Industries. Question: what was it doing on the premises? On the other hand, there were many projects that were realized and were not or could not be exhibited in or around the museum during the course of the show. These are lengthily if peculiarly documented in A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967–1971, a 386-page piece of conceptual art released after Osaka and before the Los Angeles exhibition and which records the efforts of 76 artists. This documentation ranges in length and character from the entry under “Participating Artist,” Piotr Kowalski, which runs in full, “Primarily because of his successful participation in the International Sculpture Symposium in 1964 at Long Beach State College we invited Piotr Kowalski to submit a proposal for A&T. Kowalski in-

dicated he would, but surprisingly he did not,” to some 29 pages replete with pixieish images of Oldenburg at work and play, which tell a mysterious story of how it came to pass that Claes did not collaborate with Disney but the Ice Bag was built. Inevitably to discuss the show is to discuss the physical exhibition, the catalog, and what is not in either of them. Because the catalog preceded the physical exhibition, I shall discuss the physical exhibition before discussing the catalog. As a general impression the show was dominated by dimly lit to dark environments, a strong aesthetic condition that biased almost all the large-scale works inside the museum. This velvety darkness was most intrinsic to Rockne Krebs’s mirror-and-laser piece, Boyd Mefferd’s strobecolor walls and Newton Harrison’s glow discharge columns, though it is my understanding that Krebs would have preferred a daylight setting for his lasers. All three are likeable and relatively workmanlike at setting up the opulent science fiction atmosphere that has become a tradition in this type of luminist art. As one might have expected they drew the usual contingent of stoned kids sitting about and saying om. The Lichtenstein filmic paintings, their mild interest not withstanding, were most damaged by darkness. Darkness is not a condition for looking at paintings. It does not allow for that singular neutrality which, from the nature of the images he chose, Lichtenstein appeared to want. As for the Tony Smith or the Whitman works, no amount of darkness or light could have made any possible difference. A cardboard sculpture made out of tetrahedral and octahedral structural blocks that had to be taped together and finally hung from the ceiling because it would not stand can hardly be harmed by inappropriate lighting. In the case of Whitman his usually brainless imagery was this time unaccompanied either by focused dumbness or his customary glamour. The Warhol—is astonishing. It is the only fully attested fake Warhol in existence and it is extremely valuable in that it demonstrates, by its total distinction from all of his other works (in its absolute inertness), the total personal control by whatever occult means that Warhol used to exercise over his works of art. Typically Warhol made this clear by having his stand-in photographed alongside the fake piece. Peripherally the inside of the museum also contained Rauschenberg’s mud piece, jumping in tune to a canned sound track; Fahlstrom’s cutouts; a graphic display of Reichek “designs,” ostensibly generated by a computer, which I will discuss further on; Kitaj’s mock-up of the “History of the Industrial Revolution”; a series of questions generated by James Byars as a consequence of his visit with Herman Kahn (the well-known member of MENSA); and a nearly invisible prism by Irwin, unrelated to the show. Outside the museum were Oldenburg’s celebrated Ice Bag, two totally distinct pieces by  •

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Serra, one a more or less academic piece of stacked sculpture and the other a partially buried, semi-conceptual piece, and finally Newton Harrison’s post-Osaka piece, a shrimp ranch occupying a quadripartite saline pool. If this show, from three to four years in the making, was to be judged on the basis of these objects (read: “environments” or “displays”) the way a painting show or sculpture show might be judged, solely on the basis of the paintings or sculpture included within it, the verdict would be disastrous. But it was not a painting show or sculpture show; it was an “Art and Technology” show and its intentions in the words of its curator were to “bring together the incredible resources and advanced technology of industry with the equally incredible imagination and talent of the best artists at work today.” Does it do this? The answer is that it is very difficult to tell on the basis of the things that finally found their way into the museum and onto its grounds. Thus the catalog-book. It is not, for example, possible to tell what is meant by “the best artists at work today” or what these “incredible resources . . . of industry” are without reading it. Looking at the physical exhibition one might reach the conclusion that industry was rather impoverished and that the “best artists” were primarily a small, though perfectly good enough, group of New York artists who had dominated the early ’60s in a kind of generalized Pop ambience—the Castelli-Janis axis—combined with a small number of other artists that the museum happened to like. But even more importantly, without the book it is impossible even to imagine what conception of Art and Technology was at stake in this show and why this art required technology or appeared to stand to benefit from it. Behind this lies a still more fundamental question, not answered in the book: what art does need technology? And in order to deal with this exhibition it is necessary to take up this question as well. There is a sense in which all art is technological. For ultimately no matter what refinements of definition we employ, technology is nothing more nor less than the ability to get something from here to there. So we have always had art-and-technology. Stonehenge was art-and-technology, vase painting was art-and-technology, even oil painting and bronze sculpture were art-and-technology, of a sort. The only difference here is that the last two employed a relatively archaic technology. But what is more important, the art of painting has not generally claimed that its basis lay in the technology of pigment application, though certain recent discussions of acrylic staining techniques seem to verge on such a claim; and recent sculpture has most decisively attempted to divorce itself from “technique,” seeking, as it were, to approach either of two poles: pure conceptuality on the one hand or pure materiality on the other. Generally what we think of Art and the Corporations

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as technological art is an art that aspires to the condition of technology; and this condition has been seen somewhat differently over the last eighty years or so, during which artists have considered the positive possibilities of technology. Eighty years, because it is important to distinguish an art that aspires to the condition of technology from an art that aspires to the condition of science, in chase of which we would have to move further back into history. This distinction between science and technology is perhaps easier to make from the point of view of art than it is from the point of view of either science or technology, the boundaries between which have become irrevocably blurred. But from the easier viewpoint of art, science is concerned with understanding reality and technology with manipulating it. Thus it is possible to understand why Constable saw painting proceeding in the manner of science—to discover the laws of nature. But it fell to the architects like van de Velde, Sedding, and Ashbee to the fin de siècle reformers coming out of the backlash of the Art Nouveau line, to proclaim for the first time need for a technological art. Thus Charles Robert Ashbee: “Modern civilization rests on machinery, and no system for the endowment, or the encouragement, or the teaching of art can be sound that does not recognize this.” In 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright welcomed technology in the form of the machine as “the forerunner of democracy” and “the normal tool of civilization.” The identification of technology with “the machine” and “the machine” with “democracy” was more or less typical of early reformatarian attitudes toward technological art; and the identification of technology with the machine was nearly inevitable. The machine was the concrete metaphor of technology—the physical embodiment of the ability to get something from here to there. The linkage between technology and “democracy” is not so inevitable. Nevertheless the theme of the democracy of technology has been a persistent one, cropping up not only in Art Nouveau theoretics, and logically, therefore, in the Bauhaus, but subsequently in The New Tendency work in Europe, in Billy Kluver and Rauschenberg’s EAT, etc. It is therefore fitting that it should also show up in full ambiguity in the Los Angeles County Museum show, where it is extraordinarily well documented in the entry under “Participating Artist” Victor Vasarely. At the very outset of the exhibition Vasarely, who had been invited to discuss a project with the curator, proposed: “a large lumino-cybernetic screen that can send out millions of different color combinations . . . a metallic box . . . subdivided into 625 compartments each measuring 12.5 by 12.5 centimeters and each containing a circle 10 centimeters in diameter” (each compartment also being 10–20 centimeters deep). Containing appropriate electronic and thermostatic controls, each of these 625 compartments  •

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were to be able to put out 12 different tones of six basic colors—red, blue, green, mauve, yellow, and gray—so that each compartment would have been required to generate 72 variations. According to Vasarely, “there are enormous possibilities.” This electronic Color-Aid set could be filmed to “compile a repertory of composition references which is inexhaustible.” “The artist chooses among the best of the compositions the machine has proposed and then recreates the work in the form of a painting, a tapestry, a serigraph, a fresco, a stage setting, a setting for film or television.” The master, growing enthusiastic for his fantasied machine, cannot leave the matter. It is not long before it will find application in integrating the requirements for “plastic beauty in future constructions” of “the urban or rural habitat” and “lastly, thanks to our machine, we will be able to conduct human experiments of the highest importance in the domain of Experimental Psychology. In offering this spectacle to the masses and in asking them to express their preferences, we will obtain statistic truth of aesthetic values of an entire population. From this time on, art can freely enter the general circuit of production-consumption.” The museum, considering this an important project, offered it to IBM, which rather mysteriously decided that it would cost two million dollars and therefore politely declined to pursue it further. Aside from the inanity of the proposal, which the museum makes no comment on, it is perfectly clear from what sort of position this artist has conceived the statistical equality of “the masses.” While this morally unpleasant idea of a “democratic” or, rather more precisely, “demotic” art whose parameters of choice are selected by an artist-despot is a little old fashioned, it is with us still. Generally however the position has changed somewhat for the “democratic” artists of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Consider what “Participating Artist” Rauschenberg has to say in this context: “It is an existing fact that the world is interdependent. The idea of art often tends to illustrate some solitary independent concern recognized as isolation. It celebrates more often a kind of withdrawal or self-concern; and it’s unrealistic.” This is also an advocacy of a kind of demotic art, but it does not carry with it the idea of the hieratic Artist-Experimenter. According to Rauschenberg, Mud Muse was to be unmoral and nondidactic (“pure waste, sensualism, utilizing a pretty sophisticated technology”), that is to say, it was to be immediate in its appeal, “primitive,” as he said, and thus his version of the demotic. There is even a calculated demoticism in the style of Rauschenberg’s quoted (probably tape-recorded) comments on his piece: “I think you immediately get involved with Mud Muse on a really physical, basic, sensual level as opposed to its illustrating an interesting idea, either successfully or unsuccessfully, because the level of the piece, Art and the Corporations

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on the grounds of an idea, is pretty low . . . There is no lesson there . . . It was to exhibit that technology is not for learning lessons but is to be experienced.” That must have been why it was obvious immediately to Lewis Ellmore, director of special programs at Teledyne, “that Bob was certainly not a typical artist,” and why Ellmore “grew increasingly enthusiastic; more about the prospect of working with Bob than about the project in general” for as Ellmore modestly insists, “it seemed to me that any contribution I could make would be insignificant compared to the artistic creativity injected by Bob,” this difference notwithstanding the fact rather touchingly observed by Ellmore that “it also appeared that we could work together easily since we shared . . . a sincere belief that although life was pretty grim, it was possible to improve it.” Bob is a regular fellow, with genius. This is the Pop artist as seducer. Ellmore is a real mine of information and from him we also learn that: “Bob’s goal was to create a dynamic work, which not only would stimulate more than just the visual senses, but would in fact interact with the observer . . . Bob wanted to escape from the limitations of two dimensions and to couple the work, in a way yet to be defined, to the observer . . . At one time we looked into actually being able to sense the mental state of the observer, but while theoretically possible, it seemed to be a bit advanced in terms of actually implementing it.” Even though discretion seemed called for here they went on: “to explore ways of stimulating the observer, not only visually, but with both audible and non-audible sounds, pressure differentials and so on. Finally, we looked into the means of selectively creating emotional responses in an observer and, in fact, of using these emotions to further modify the art.” This is the interactive work of art conceived as the perfectly responsive lover. But what finally happened to these grand designs? Once more in the words of the catalog, this time the museum’s words, “according to the artist, he was lying on the beach when it occurred to him spontaneously to use mud and to reproduce the bubbling activity of the ‘paint pots’ at Yellowstone National Park.” So Teledyne arranged for a series of blowers to blow air in various ways through a tank of driller’s mud in response to acoustical activation. It was supposed that the sounds of spectators picked up by variously placed microphones would provide this activation and constitute the spectator interaction. Unfortunately in the first days of the museum exhibition the spectators immediately got so “involved with Mud-Muse on a physical, basic, sensual level” that the containing tank, the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling were spattered with not merely visible but tangible evidence of their involvement to such an extent that the piece had to be shut down, cleaned, set on a noninteractive soundtrack  •

Art and the Corporations

and protected by a guard. Apparently there had been too much involvement of the wrong sort. Nobody in the art world to my knowledge has blamed Rauschenberg for being overly suggestive, I do not mean by this to imply that the idea of interactive art is either trivial or futile. It is a profound idea that remains partially open and variable. It is not a question of democracy, but of seeking an appropriate ground for a human engagement. Certainly it will not be possible for a neutral or merely curious spectator to enter unpremeditatedly into a work that an artist has been thinking about for a long time on terms of anything like equality unless the terms are chosen in such a manner that equality is not an issue. The idea of using a human being as a power source and/or switch, which is about all that Rauschenberg is doing, is if considered seriously quite possibly humiliating. But the part of the art world from which Rauschenberg comes hardly considers anything seriously anymore. It is not possible to get away with using the ideas of Cage in a half-baked manner. The ideas are too potent and too equivocal in their consequences. In this context it is interesting to observe that interactive art is not inherently or necessarily technological. Yet with the exception of certain open-structured transient works they have almost always appeared in the context of technological art. For the art world it would seem that interaction with people is seen not as interaction at all but as manipulation, that is, technology. So it makes sense that the longest and most elaborate of the projects in the show, the Turrell, Irwin, Wortz collaboration, which lasted over a year and was totally unrepresented in the physical exhibition, consisted specifically of a series of interactive theatrical events called “Experiments” and conducted in the atmosphere of “Scientific Research.” Appropriately the scene was “Perceptual Psychology,” complete with sets and props—the anechoic chamber, the Ganzfield, the electroencephalograph—and the cast were the “Doctors” and the “Subjects.” A scenario for one such performance conducted in the anechoic chamber at UCLA is recorded in some detail and is worth quoting: experiment i Introduction: The purpose of this investigation is to determine a person’s reaction to isolation in a completely dark anechoic chamber for a short period of time. The periods of isolation for three different groups of people will be 4 minutes, 7 minutes and 10 minutes. Procedure: The person is told “We want you to come and sit in this room for a period of time and see what it’s like.” (This set of “looking for something” is not unlike coming into an art experience with a “looking sense.”) “This Art and the Corporations

• 

experience is yours alone. No one is observing you. Afterwards we will instruct you as to what to do next.” The first part of the piece consisted of the person (the “subject,” i.e. “S”) being “taken into the anechoic chamber and seated. The light is turned off, and the door closed for the time duration.” At the end of the first scene the “Subject” is “casually asked: ‘How did it feel?’ ” In the final scene “S” is asked to “Please come out and be seated and fill out this questionnaire.” How did the room feel? Subject: Hard to put a shape to it . . . What, if any, was the effect of entering the room? S: Springy floor. Could be scary since it was dark. What, if any, was the effect of leaving the room? S: Waking up, bright, weird. What did you see? S: Gray on dark gray. Rod-shaped blue things and lights swelling in from sides. Hallucinations (e.g., faces from weird angles—mainly looking up at them—focus on eyes and noses—mainly “Christ-like” and “blondfemale” types and designs . . . and colored objects). What did you hear? S: Fast, vibrating mechanical sounds throughout . . . What did you think of while you were in the room? S: Of falling asleep (felt guilty about this); of trying to think about These questions which I knew I would have to answer (i.e., concentrating on seeing and hearing mainly). How long were you in the room? S: Very long time—I don’t know—timeless. Did you feel claustrophobic in any way? S: Yes, when I tried to look around. Were you relieved to get out? S: In a sense, so that I would remember “my dream.” Did you want to stay in?  •

Art and the Corporations

S: No. Do you meditate? S: No Age: 25—Sex: F

As theater it is rather charming and filled with pathos. As for its view of technology, it is clear that here technology is conceived as a capacity to gain vocabulary. This is even clearer in Turrell’s own “discussion” of an “experiment”: “S’s are isolated up to 72 hours with auditory, visual and tactile deprivation. Results: ½ S’s had progressions alpha, beta and delta rhythms, others experienced digressions of these rhythms—effects of deprivation ran both ways—maybe effects are dependent on the attitude of the S.” And while the artists acquired a vocabulary of “S’s” and “alpha,” “beta,” “delta” and “progressions” and “digressions” in a truly interactive manner, the technologist and the “S’s” acquired a “meditational” vocabulary, words like “tantric,” “koan,” “om.” Wortz demonstrated his vocabulary acquisitions in a set of instructions for Exercises in Meditation, which includes: 7. Koan Strenuous effort to understand intellectually a purely intellectual question that has no intellectual resolution. (Who were you before you were born? What is the sound of one hand clapping? What’s in the meaning of the word Mu?—pick your own.) 9. Tantric Meditate on a mystical phrase or word such as om. The word is repeated over and over.

And since benevolent therapeutics are part of this vocabulary: 6. Group effort—Meditate in a group and try to help others—help them to do what? It’s for you to decide.

The result of the collaboration was what Irwin called “overlapping matrices of information,” which presumably translates into a syntactical rule for combining vocabularies. By such a rule “alpha states” combines with “meditational states.” This rule is quickly grasped by the “S’s,” as documented in the case of Maurice Tuchman, Jane Livingstone, and Gail Scott (museum curators). In Jane’s words, Jane Livingstone and Gail Scott visited Garrett to meet with the artists and Dr. Wortz and specifically to Art and the Corporations

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undergo alpha conditioning. Each in turn spent 30 to 45 minute periods in the ‘alpha chamber,’ having been hooked up to the EEG and instructed briefly by Wortz. Although a single session of this kind of experimentation is not enough to enable one to enter at will a true meditative state, and thus sustain alpha production, all three were able to achieve relatively prolonged ‘alpha states.’ ” According to the account “all three of them experienced definite, inexplicable sensations of anxiety, or a sense of mental dislocation or dissociation.” This seems to have disturbed them somewhat—apparently because it is not appropriate for “meditational states” to have bad “side-effects”— but they explain: “This is apparently not an unusual phenomenon from one’s first exposure to alpha, but it is said that such ‘after-effects’ disappear with increased expertise in this kind of meditation.” The S’s have apparently learned the combining rule very well. Here it is probably necessary to point out that it is an inherent capacity of IndoEuropean languages, of which English is one, to nominalize nearly anything. It is a capacity upon which this sort of science has capitalized to multiply entities without number. What is an “alpha wave”? It is the undulating printout from a pen with “crests” or “valleys” occurring between approximately 8 and 12 times a second; this printout is produced as a consequence of measuring minute differences of potential taken by electrodes stuck to the surface of the scalp and amplified by high-gain amplifiers. What has this minute cyclical rise and fall in the potentials measured on the surface of the skull to do with the activities of the brain? Or with the mind? We have had alpha waves since the 1930s and no mental state has been successfully connected with them. If the phenomenon of alpha waves is treated seriously, the syntax learned by the subjects becomes bizarre. The congenitally blind do not exhibit alpha waves. Does this mean they cannot “meditate.” (Here the learned doctors will interpose, “When blind men meditate it will be marked by Rolandic rhythms.”) It appears that somehow in some manner the measurement of alpha rhythms is dependent upon differences in potential seeming to arise in connection with visual centers. The most recent and probable theory is that “alpha rhythms” arise essentially from a form of physiological tremor generated in the extraocular muscles. It is not especially novel to be able to condition oneself to a physical state. Any man can think himself into an erection. But we should recognize here that the issue involves something more than the “science” of artists; it involves the “aesthetics” of scientists. Ever since the last quarter of the nineteenth-century scientists have been fond of regarding the brain as an “electrical communication system.” This was understandable because electrical communication systems grew up at about  •

Art and the Corporations

the same time that the electric potentials of the brain were first measured. But it is not uncommon even now to find perfectly respectable scientists writing: “Communication in the nervous system consists in the transmission of electric signals that are relayed from cell to cell.” Yet it is at the same time usually obvious to the same scientist that this is a highly aestheticized description of the fact that neural synapses consist of the messy transmission of fluids from little vesicles in the boutons of one nerve cell to the appropriate place on an adjoining nerve cell, and that among the things that can be measured when this happens is a physicochemical change that registers on appropriate instruments as a difference in potential. What is more, it is also true that during periods of digestion there is a difference in the amount of acid secreted in the stomach. This will also register to an appropriate measuring instrument as a difference in potential. Nobody has yet suggested that the gut is an electrical transmission system, even though emotional changes sharp enough to cause ulcerating twinges would register as such potential differences. There is an inescapable glamour in electrical transmission systems for most scientists, especially when they have to confront the pedestrian problem of trying to find out where one nerve begins and another ends. At the present time this electric (electronic, occasionally, or even computer) image of the brain is less of a working model for scientists than it is inspirational literature. When an artist acquires it, what he has acquired is a kind of poetry. Perhaps one of the most amiable images of technology in the show emerges from Jesse Reichek’s computer project. According to the catalog, Reichek was interested in having the computer make a study of his past work, determine his “style,” generate new works in that “style,” study the implications that this new work had for the consistency of the style, and then generate more new works, etc. In other words, Reichek had in mind to take a computer as an apprentice. After meeting with a number of executives at IBM and a physicist-mathematician who had a strong feeling for music, he learned that there were inherent limitations to the present capacity of computers to do this. On the face of it, one might have suspected this, but there were aspects of Reichek’s work that might have suggested it was not in his case entirely out of the question. Reichek is a Hard-Edge painter who tends to use relatively few elements, which can be regarded as sets, and subjected uniformly to simple operations, made still simpler by the heavy reliance on symmetries and a grid-like analysis of his two-dimensional surface. Nevertheless, cheerfully titled articles in computer journals or in Scientific American notwithstanding, pattern analysis, the problem on which the whole program would hang, is not a Art and the Corporations

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strong point of computers. Decisions which for human beings are trivially simple, like what is the figure and what is the ground in even simple configurations, are not inherently appropriate for computer “mentality.” And there is no reason that they should be. Figure-ground analyses are specific to certain animal sensing and analyzing systems. We haven’t the vaguest idea on what they are based in practice in living animals. As a result, to make a computer arrive at correct figure-ground decisions, special kinds of ad hoc strategies have to be employed and then translated into computer terms. How do you tell a “chess playing” computer to make a particular move “to gain tempo”? But a programmer knows what “tempo” is, and a programmer can also tell which is the figure and which is the ground in even complicated drawings. To “analyze” Reichek’s style is far beyond the capacity of any computer but not by any means difficult for a human being. What happened at IBM was that Reichek took a physicist as an apprentice. The physicist learned the style and developed a code that enabled him to use a graphic computer as a kind of scratch pad on which to draw Reicheks. Reichek could look at the output and validate whether or not Jack Citron (the physicist) had in fact learned how to make Reicheks. Citron was then successfully apprenticed, and everybody was happy. If fundamental technology can be described as a “rip-off ” of the sun, then the only approach to anything like fundamental technology appears in Newton Harrison’s second piece. By the time the museum got around to preparing its Los Angeles opening, Harrison had the good sense to be no longer interested in his pleasant but nearly two-year-old glow-discharge tubes. He had begun to work with a number of different approaches to what one might loosely call ecosystems. At the Elements show in Boston he had grown an Annual Hog Pasture Mix. During the installation at L.A. he simply set up a salt salvage system and a shrimp ranch in a quadripartite pool in front of the museum. The pond contained sea water, an alga, and brine shrimp. The brine shrimp live on the algae; the algae are nourished by the sun, which evaporates the water, which is shifted from one vat to another as the salinity increases. What is admirable about the piece, which is after all not much more than farming, is the casualness and simplicity with which it asserts the basic mechanism of the sun driving the machine. There are, however, as one might have imagined, hitches. Wilshire Boulevard is not ideally located for a fish-ranching operation. The sea water has to come from somewhere—impairing the efficiency of the system—and there is good reason to suppose that Los Angeles air pollution will contribute a number of extra nutrients to the probably wellsalted shrimp salad one might expect. Like organic lead compounds. This should lead to curious documentation.  •

Art and the Corporations

But in a sense, for this show, the most important “Participating Artist” was the curator Maurice Tuchman, and it is probably more significant to define his image of technology as well as his image of art, because it was in the context of his choices that the other “Participating Artists” were selected and access to the technology obtained. Tuchman is fairly clear about how he conceived the show: “In 1966, when ‘Art and Technology’ was first conceived, I had been living in Southern California for two years. A newcomer to this region is particularly sensitive to the futuristic character of Los Angeles, especially as it is manifested in advanced technology. I thought of the typical coastal industries as chiefly aerospace oriented (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed Aircraft) . . . At a certain point I became intrigued by the thought of having artists brought into these industries to make works of art.” Tuchman does not say whether or not he conceived of this before or after E.A.T. put on its 1966 9-Evenings show at the Armory in New York, but this is largely irrelevant because there is a certain sense in which, despite fundamental differences in attitude between Tuchman and the Judson dance sensibilities of the E.A.T. group, both Tuchman and E.A.T. were motivated out of what one must call in the broadest sense a Pop sensibility. The early ’60s in American art were distinguished by an intense if sometimes ambiguous desire to marry the culture. Pop Art (in the narrow sense), Minimal Art and Hard-Edge painting, Kineticism and Luminism of that period share in this cultural rapprochement. And to a New York émigré, what could be more Pop than Los Angeles? Anyone who comes out here for the first time stares in a kind of stupefied wonder, perhaps attributable to a sexy lethargy induced by the air pollution, as they watch Los Angeles lead America over the cliff. For a while (from the early ’60s until about 1969) it was fashionable for anybody in the art scene coming back from California to tell you he liked Los Angeles better than San Francisco and feel a little hip and wicked. Foreigners like Rayner Banham, arriving late, still think it’s the city of the future, and I suppose that’s what Tuchman meant by “futuristic.” So it’s not at all surprising to read the catalog and feel confirmed that Tuchman’s definition of both Art and Technology are Pop definitions. If you read the list of artists, distinguishing those who were seriously sought after and considered from those who are mere window dressing, you find almost all the Pop artists (minus Wesselmann, whose sense of pornography should have qualified him, one would suppose), most of the Minimal sculptors (including the Venice high-finish school), a few straightforward technological artists, and older-generation dignitaries of various sorts, nearly all of these being “important” artists in a reputational sense; otherwise there are a few odder figures who straggle Art and the Corporations

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in from various directions. A perfectly suitable method of choice, given Tuchman’s definition of technology. It is rather elegant. Technology is corporations. This is a straightforward sociological definition of technology as enclaves of social and economic power, possessing a capacity to move men and material from anywhere to anywhere. Pop once again. This means that the show is inevitably a ’60s show, and this is borne out by the names of its celebrities because that is in fact what they are. It is perfectly defensible. But the show appeared in ’70–’71. It is all very well to imagine the great corporations as immense production machines turning out cars or computers or meat or movies; but it is not so. This is the age of the great conglomerate; for economic advantages, not always shared by their stockholders and even more rarely by their consumers, corporations buy and sell related and unrelated other companies at an alarming rate, so that it may be almost impossible to tell what a corporation like Litton Industries, say, might be producing at any given moment if you have been looking away for a couple of weeks. This gives a rather peculiar and discontinuous structure to the corporations themselves, thus perhaps making it possible for the museum to send “Participating Artist” Peter Voulkos to the Vernon plant of Norris Industries and, finding him reluctant to work at the Vernon plant because of its involvement with contracts for casings for nuclear warheads, to suggest as an alternative that he work at Norris’s Thermador division in Walnut, which manufactures porcelain and ceramic coated steel products. The image of the corporation as a large machine should be considered very carefully in the light of the information we have been receiving throughout the late ’60s. Consider the American military machine. It is a very large corporation, but has not been notably effective in dealing with a specific small war in Southeast Asia. Consider the cities of America. They are also large corporations. And consider the pioneering evidence of Los Angeles, where the giant movie companies collapsed in the ’50s while small, virtually fly-by-night operations have sprung up and continue quite profitably in the teeth of television. When one normally thinks of grand concatenated and glamorous technological enterprises, one imagines NASA perhaps. It is a mistake to do so. The space program is not in its end-products typical of American industry. It specializes in vastly expensive disposable art. It’s like building a cathedral and treating it like a Kleenex. Moreover it is an especially old-fashioned kind of art form in that it produces unique objects, which cannot afford to fail because they fail in public. As Robert Morris commented to me while we were watching the not especially disturbing collapse of one of the 9 Evenings back in 1966, “This is all about money.” But even in principle, consider a great and complex machine. The larger the machine the more  •

Art and the Corporations

likely it will be to have a great number of sequentially dependent parts. Each of these parts has some probability of failure. If you line up an operation a hundred parts deep and each part has one chance in a hundred of failing, what are the chances of the machine operating? The alternatives to this situation are: 1) to avoid deeply structured machines with large numbers of serially arranged parts; 2) to demand of each serially linked part so high a reliability (so low a probability of failure) that the final operation is highly reliable. The second alternative is enormously costly, the first is a form of decentralization. From this point of view consider the corporations again. Case in point, Tony Smith and the Container Corporation of America. According to Smith he wanted to make a “cave-like” sculpture, enclosing and yet sculptural rather than architectural or environmental. The idea of working in cardboard appealed to him also. The parts would all be glued together and he would for once have a soft work that was very close in materiality and appearance to the maquettes that he was used to working in: “My intention was to use the complete component and simply glue it—glue the surfaces in the way that I had been in the habit of doing with my [maquette] units. This actually is a different type of structure than a structure which is based on lineal elements or struts which are fastened at the joints. In other words, there isn’t any structure except the components from which the form has been made.” A Container Corporation executive and Jane Livingstone went to Hawaii to confer with Smith and they essentially agreed to the idea. Smith had Polaroid pictures taken of his model and sent to the museum. He visited the Container Corporation’s corrugate plant in Los Angeles. The company made two full-size mockups of single units and promised to make several hundred reduced scale modules; these never appeared. When the final modules did appear en masse they had lock joints. Result: wipe out. Container Corporation has no idea how this could have happened. Failures of this gross sort were not typical of all the projects, most of which died a death of attrition. Philco-Ford would not finally back the completion of Robert Whitman’s optical environment because of the amount of money involved. Part of it had to be farmed out to a professional display company, which could not maintain the degree of precision required for the images to be visible. The only way that the environment got built at all was that John Forkner (the scientist on the project) managed to enlist his church group, the Laguna Beach Unitarian Fellowship, to undertake the construction. Working with complete amateurs and for a trivial amount of money they managed to complete it satisfactorily, at least from a technical point of view. Oldenburg’s participation in the exhibition was based Art and the Corporations

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on his intended collaboration with WED Enterprises. The idea was that there was some natural linkage between Oldenburg’s imagery and Disney’s capacities. This may have been so, though Oldenburg seems to have been aware that conflicting ideologies would have been involved. The museum desperately wanted an Oldenburg, regardless of the fact that once Disney was out of the question, the whole logic, such as it was, had disappeared. Finally, Oldenburg got his Ice Bag produced by the Gemini atelier, with an endless succession of subcontractors. In the process of bailing out each individual piece in this way, the ideas upon which the work were based all eroded until finally nothing was left. Can anyone really defend that ghastly Ice Bag, except as a print? Yet everyone who worked on these projects was an honest man, more or less (with the possible exception of Claes, who must have known it was a disaster). The problem was that the museum, too, was in the position of corporate enterprise, caught up in an interminable succession of necessities from which it felt unable to extricate itself at any point. The idea of abandoning a work as pointless seems not really to have occurred to anyone, probably because if they abandoned one, others would have been swiftly lost. One thinks of that massive corporation, Lockheed, where Kitaj found his way, logically enough into a mock-up department filled with refugees from the film industry. There he was able to accomplish the fragment of his idea that could be realized under these difficult circumstances, namely that Lockheed, like the rest of the corporations, fundamentally was uninterested. I remember a conversation I had with an industrial designer who worked out there. We sat in the room in front of a large mock-up fuselage of a new passenger plane that Lockheed was seemingly in the course of building. As we sat there surrounded by the peculiar uriniferous odor of one of the plastics inhabiting the room, the designer explained to me the principles of design in this corporation. The plane must be sold to owners of airlines, not to passengers. Therefore, the designer might have allowed for a very comfortable amount of leg-room or provided hangers for the coats of the passengers, say; but then the prospective buyer (airline owner) must not receive the impression that any space that could be put to economic use had been wasted. Thus, the impression of a bearable amount of discomfort might be necessary to relieve the airline owner’s anxiety. Not long before, one airline president noticed that hangers were provided for the passengers; he stole them and waved them angrily under the designer’s nose as evidence that his passengers would certainly steal them from him. Now Lockheed is a very large corporation, and as recent events show it has not been especially successful at getting something from here to there, except perhaps money—from the  •

Art and the Corporations

taxpayer’s pocket to theirs. The definition of technology as corporations is a Pop definition and fundamentally false. What it boils down to is the idea that technology is money, which has very little basis in fact, though it is true that the corporations cannot produce even the shoddy results that they do without chewing up vast quantities of money. But since they were unwilling to contribute more than trivial amounts of it to this show, even these pathetic expectations were unwarranted. 1971

Art and the Corporations

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Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

video art. The name is equivocal. A good name. It leaves open all the questions and asks them anyway. Is this an art form, a new genre? An anthology of valued activity conducted in a particular arena defined by display on a cathode ray tube? The kind of video made by a special class of people—artists—whose works are exhibited primarily in what is called the “art world”—artists’ video? An inspection of the names in the catalog gives the easy and not quite sufficient answer that it is this last we are considering, artists’ video. But is this a class apart? Artists have been making video pieces for scarcely ten years—if we disregard one or two flimsy studio jobs and Nam June Paik’s 1963 kamikaze TV modifications—and video has been a fact of gallery life for barely five years. Yet we’ve already had group exhibitions, panels, symposia, and magazine issues devoted to this phenomenon, for the very good reason that more and more artists are using video and some of the best work being done in the art world is being done with video. Which is why a discourse has already arisen to greet it. Actually two discourses: one a kind of enthusiastic welcoming prose peppered with fragments of communication theory and McLuhanesque media talk; the other a rather nervous attempt to locate the “unique properties of the medium.” Discourse 1 could be called “cyberscat” and Discourse 2, because it engages the issues that pass for “formalism” in the art world, could be called “the formalist rap.” Though there is no necessary relation between them, the two discourses occasionally occur together as they do in the talk of Frank Gillette, which offers a convenient sample: D: The emergence of relationships between the culture you’re in and the parameters that allow you expression are fed back through a technology. It’s the state of the art technology within a particular culture that gives shape to ideas.

D: What I’m consciously involved in is devising a way that is structurally intrinsic to television. For example, what makes it not film? Part of it is that you look into the source of light, with film you look with the source of light. In television, the source of light and the source of the information are one.

Though it is not entirely clear what “high class” technology has to do with the rather pleasantly shabby technical state of contemporary video art, or what the significance is to human beings of the light source in two adjacent representational media, statements of this type are characteristic, and similar quotes could be multiplied endlessly. And if these concerns seem somewhat gratuitous or insufficient with respect to the work at hand, they often share a kind of aptness of detail, even though it is rarely clear what the detail explains of the larger pattern of activity in which these artists are involved. In fact what seems most typical of both types of discourse is a certain anxiety, that may be seen most clearly in a recent piece by Hollis Frampton: Moreover it is doubly important that we try to say what video is at present because we posit for it a privileged future. Since the birth of video art from the Jovian backside (I dare not say brow) of the Other Thing called television, I for one have felt a more and more pressing need for precise definitions of what film art is, since I extend to film, as well, the hope of a privileged future.

It would be so much more convenient to develop the refined discussion of the possible differences between film and video, if we could only forget the Other Thing—television. Yet television haunts this exhibition, as it must haunt any exhibition of video art. It is present here only in a few commercials and the “golden performances” of Ernie Kovacs (a television “artist”). Other television “artists” and “artworks” are absent—Walter Cronkite, Sam Ervin, Ron Ziegler, the Sid Caesar Show, Cal Worthington, McCann-Erickson. Television is here mainly in quotes, allusion, parody, and protest, as in Telethon’s TV History, Douglas Davis’s installation piece with the TV set forced to face the wall, Richard Serra’s Television Delivers People. No doubt, in time there will be an auteur theory of television, which will do for Milton Berle and Sid Caesar what Sarris and Farber and Cahiers du Cinéma have done for John Huston and Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks. But the politics of the art world is, for good reasons, rather hostile to Pop, and that kind of admiring discussion will have to wait; even Cahiers du Cinéma has abandoned Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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for Dziga Vertov and the European avant-garde on sociopolitical, aesthetic grounds. But it’s unwise to despise an enemy, especially a more powerful, older enemy, who happens to also be your frightful parent. So, it is with television we have to begin to consider video, because if anything has defined the formal and technical properties of the video medium it is the television industry. The history of television in the United States is well known. Commercial television is essentially a post–Second World War phenomenon, and its use was, logically enough, patterned on commercial radio, since control of the new medium was in the hands of the powerful radio networks, which constitute essentially a government-protected private monopoly. This situation determined many of the fundamental communication characteristics of the new medium. The most basic of these is the social relation between “sending” and “receiving,” which is profoundly unequal and asymmetrical. Since the main potential broadcasters, the powerful radio networks, were already deeply involved with the electronics industry through complex ownership affiliation, and since they also constituted the single largest potential customer for the electronic components of television, the components were developed entirely for their convenience and profit. While this may not seem surprising, the result was that the acts of “picture taking” and “transmission” were made enormously expensive: cameras and transmission systems were designed and priced out of the reach of anything but corporate ownership. Moreover government regulation set standards on “picture quality” and the transmission signal, which effectively ensured that “taking” and “transmission” control would remain in the hands of the industry into which the federal government had already assigned the airwaves channel by channel. The receivers alone were priced within the range of individual ownership. This fundamental ordering, establishing the relations between the taker-sender and the receiver had, of course, been worked out for commercial radio. Only ham transmission—also hemmed in severely by government regulation—and special uses like ship-to-shore, pilot-to-control tower, and police band radio deal in the otherwise merely potential equalities of wireless telephony. That this was not technically inevitable, but merely an outcome of the social situation and the marketing strategies of the industry, is obvious. There is nothing necessarily more complex or expensive in the camera than there is in the receiver. It is merely that the great expense of receiver technology was defrayed by the mass production of the sets, whose multiplication multiplied the dollar exchange value of transmission time sold by the transmitter to his advertisers. So the broadcasters underwrote receiver development, because every set bought delivered  •

Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

its viewers as salable goods in an exchange that paid for the “expensive” technology. For television also there is a special-use domain—educational, industrial, and now artistic—where the relation between the camera and receiver may be more or less equalized, but this is because transmission is not an issue and the distribution of the images is severely restricted. The economic fact remains: transmission is more expensive than reception. This ensures a power hierarchy: transmission dominates reception. And it follows from this asymmetry of power relations that the takertransmitter dominates whatever communication takes place. This is clearer when you consider the manners of telephony. A would-be transmitter asks for permission to transmit, rings the home of a potential receiver. It’s like ringing a doorbell. Or a would-be receiver rings the home of a possible transmitter, asks him or her to transmit. This formal set of relations has become even more refined with the introduction of the Answerphone and the answering service, which mediates between the ring—an anonymous invitation to communicate—and the response, requiring the caller to identify himself and leaves the receiver with a choice of whether or not to respond. In telephony manners are everything. While in commercial television manners are nothing. If you have a receiver you merely plug in to the possibility of a signal, which may or may not be there and which you cannot modify except in the trivial manner of switching to a nearly identical transmission or in a decisive but final manner by switching off. Choice is in the hands of the sender. Now while this asymmetry is not inherent in the technology, it has become so normative for the medium that it forms the all pervasive and invisible background of all video. This may not be so dramatically manifested in most artwork video, but that’s because most artworks have very equivocal relations to the notion of communication and are, like industry, producer dominated. Yet it has a formidable effect on all attempts at interactive video, which operates primarily in reaction to this norm. In this sense the social structure of the medium is a matrix that defines the formal properties of the medium—since it limits the possibilities of a video communication genre—and these limits then become the target against which any number of artists have aimed their works. What else could Ira Schneider have had in mind about the 1969 piece Wipe-Cycle he devised with Frank Gillette: The most important thing was the notion of information presentation, and the notion of integration of the audience into the information. One sees oneself exiting from the elevator. If one stands there for 8 seconds, Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

• 

one sees oneself entering the gallery from the elevator again. Now at the same time one is apt to be seeing oneself standing there watching WipeCycle. You can watch yourself live watching yourself 8 seconds ago, watching yourself 16 seconds ago, eventually feeling free enough to interact with this matrix, realizing one’s own potential as an actor.

What is attempted is the conversion (liberation) of an audience (receiver) into an actor (transmitter), which Schneider and Gillette must have hoped to accomplish by neutralizing as much as possible the acts of “taking” and electronic transmission. If they failed to accomplish this, they were hardly alone in their failure, which seems to have been the fate of just about every interactive artwork employing significantly technological means. Apparently, the social and economic distribution of technological resources in this culture has a nearly determining effect on the semiotics of technological resources. More concretely, an expensive video camera and transmission system switched-on and ready for use don’t lose their peculiar prestigious properties just because an artist may make them available under special circumstances for casual use to an otherwise passive public. In fact, this kind of interactive video situation almost invariably begins by intimidating an unprepared audience, which has already been indoctrinated about the amount of preparedness (professionalism) the video camera deserves, regardless of the trivial nature of television professionalism, which is not measured by competence (as in the elegant relation of ends to means) but by the amount of money notably expended on this preparation. Yet while the most fundamental property of television is its social organization, this is manifested most clearly in its money metric, which applies to every aspect of the medium, determining the tempo of its representations and the style of the performances, as well as the visual syntax of its editing. The money metric has also played a determining role in neutralizing what is usually considered the most markedly distinctive feature of the medium: the capacity for instantaneous transmission. In principle, television seemed to combine the photographic reproduction capacities of the camera, the motion capabilities of film, and the instantaneous transmission properties of the telephone. But just as the photographic reproduction capacity of the camera is essentially equivocal and mainly significant as mythology, so is the fabled instantaneity of television essentially a rumor that combines with photographic duplicity to produce a quasi-recording medium, the main feature of which is unlikeliness in relation to any notion of reality. The history of the industry is very instructive in respect of this remarkable outcome.  •

Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

In the beginning television made widespread use of live broadcasting both for transmitting instant news of events that were elapsing in real time and for more or less well-rehearsed studio performances; and some of the most interesting events recorded by media were the result of the unpredictability of instantaneous transmission. Spokesmen for the industry never failed to call attention to this feature of instantaneity, and as late as 1968, a standard handbook for television direction and production by Stasheff and Bretz asserts: Perhaps the most distinctive function of television is its ability to show distant events at the moment when they are taking place. The Kefauver hearings, with a close-up of the hands of gangster Frank Costello; the Army-McCarthy hearings; the complete coverage of the orbital shots; the presidential nominating conventions; the Great Debates of 1960; the live transmissions from Europe and Japan via satellite—this is television doing what no other medium can do.

Yet the same handbook casually points out a few pages later that between 1947 and 1957, kine-recordings, films taken directly from the TV screen, were in constant and heavy use, especially for delayed broadcast of East Coast programs on the West Coast, in spite of the much poorer image quality of the kines, and that by 1961 virtually all television dramatic programs were being produced on film. There were, apparently, from the industry’s standpoint, great inconveniences in instantaneous transmission. The most obvious of these was that at the same instant of time the life cycles of New York and Los Angeles are separated by three full hours, and since the day for the industry is metrically divided into prime and nonprime viewing time, in accordance with whether more or less viewers may be sold to advertisers, the money value of instantaneous transmission is inversely related in a complicated way to the temporal distance of transmission. But this was only the most obvious manner in which the money metric worked to eliminate instantaneity. A more basic conflict between the structure of the industry and the possibility of instantaneity is the inevitable relationship between instantaneity and unpredictability. Any series of events that is unfolding for the first time, or in a new way, or with unanticipated intensity or duration threatens to overrun or elude the framing conventions of the recording artists (the cameramen and directors). This element of surprise is always in conflict with the image of smoothness, that has the semiotic function of marking the producer’s competence by emphasizing his mastery and control, his grasp of events. The signs of unpredictability and surprise are discontinuities and ragged Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

• 

edges that mark the boundaries of that competence by puncturing or lacerating that grasp. The image of smoothness depends always upon the appearance of the unimpeded forward course of the producer’s intention, of facility, which means that there must be no doubt in the viewer’s mind that what is transmitted is what the transmitter wants to transmit. And the only ways to achieve this were through a) repeated preparation of the events, b) very careful selection of highly predictable events, or c) deletion of unexpected and undesirable aspects of events, which meant editing a recorded version of these events. Videotape came in 1956, and at the beginning Ampex was taping the Douglas Edwards newscasts and, not much later, the stage presentations of Playhouse 90: once again according to Stasheff and Bretz: By 1957 a new TV revolution was under way. Undistinguishable from live TV on the home receiver, video tape quickly replaced most of the kinerecording done by the TV networks. Not only did the stations put out a better picture, but the savings were tremendous . . . Live production, video-tape recording of live production, kine-recording, and film began to assume complementary roles in the pattern of TV production. Videotape recording, by 1961, became so commonplace that the true live production—reaching the home at the moment of its origination—was a rarity limited to sports and special events. The live production on video tape, though delayed in reaching the home by a few hours or a few days, was generally accepted as actual live television by the average viewer.

Yet this did not place television in the same position as film, which from its origins appeared to be situated squarely in the domain of illusion. Film, after all, has made very few and very insubstantial claims to facticity. Amet’s bathtub battle of Santiago Bay may have convinced Spanish military historians of its authenticity, but that was back in 1897 before the movie palaces together with the movie makers dispelled any illusion of potential facticity. Flaherty looks as clearly fictional as Méliès now. But a genre that is marked “fictional” doesn’t raise the issues of truth and falsehood, and television never ceases to raise these issues. The social uses of television continually force the issue of “truth” to the center of attention. A president goes on television to declare his “honesty,” a minister announces his “intentions,” the evening news reports “what is being done to curb the inflation.” The medium maintains a continual assertion that it can and is providing an adequate representation of reality, while everyone’s experience continually denies it. Moreover the industry exhibits a persistent positive tropism toward the appearance of the spontane •

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ous and unrehearsed event in its perpetually recurring panel shows and quiz programs and in the apparently casual format of its late evening news shows. According to Stasheff and Bretz: The television audience will not only accept, but even enjoy, a production error or even a comedian who blows his lines and admits it or who asks his straight man to feed him a cue once again so that he can make another try at getting the gag to come out right. This leniency on the part of the audience is caused by the increased feeling of spontaneity and immediacy which minor crises create. The audience loves to admire the adroitness with which the performer “pulls himself out of a jam.”

The industry wishes or feels obligated to maintain the illusion of immediacy, which it defines rather precisely as “the feeling that what one sees on the TV screen is living and actual reality, at that very moment taking place.” The perfection of videotape made possible the careful manipulation and selective presentation of desirable “errors” and “minor crises” as marks of spontaneity, which became as equivocal in their implications as the drips and blots of third-generation Abstract-Expressionists. It’s not that you couldn’t see the Los Angeles Police Department’s tactical assault squad in real time, in full living color, in your own living room, leveling a small section of the city in search of three or four suspected criminals, but that what you would see couldn’t be certainly discriminated from a carefully edited videotape screened three hours later. So what television provides video with is a tradition not of falseness, which would be a kind of guarantee of at least a certain negative reliability, but of a profoundly menacing equivocation and mannerism, determining a species of unlikeliness. At first glance artists’ video seems to be defined by the total absence of any of the features that define television. But this apparent lack of relation is in fact a very definite and predictable inverse relation. If we temporarily ignore the subfamily of installation pieces, which are actually quite diverse among themselves but nevertheless constitute a single genre, the most striking contrast between video pieces and television is in relation to time. It may not be quite hip to say so without qualification, but it is a commonplace to describe artists’ videotapes as “boring” or “long,” even when one feels that this in no way invalidates or dishonors the tapes in question (viz. Bruce Boice’s comment that Lynda Benglis’s video is “boring, interesting and funny”; or Richard Serra’s own videotape Prisoners’ Dilemma, where one character advises another that he may have to spend two hours in the basement of the Castelli Gallery, which is “twice as long Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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as the average boring videotape.”) This perceived quality of being boring or long has little to do with the actual length of the tapes. It has much more to do with the attitude of just about all artists using video to the task at hand. John Baldessari has a tape called Some Words I Mispronounce. He turns to a blackboard and writes: 1. poor 2. cask 3. bade

4. Beelzebub 5. bough 6. sword

As soon as he completes the “d” of “sword” the tape is over. Running time is under a minute. It feels amazingly short. But it is longer than most commercials. Robert Morris’s Exchange, a series of verbal meditations on exchanges of information, collaborations, and interferences with a woman, accompanied by a variety of images taped and re-taped from other tapes and photographs for the most part as indefinite and suggestive as the discourse, goes on till it arrives at a single distinct and comic story of not getting to see the Gattamelata, after which the tape trails off in a more or less leisurely fashion. Running time forty-three minutes. Television has many programs that are much longer. The two artists’ tapes are very different. Baldessari’s is a routine, explicitly defined from the outset and carried out deadpan to its swift conclusion. Exchange is a typical member of what is by now a well-defined genre of artist narrative, essentially an extended voiceover in a carefully framed literary style that seeks its end intuitively in the exhaustion of its mild narrative energy. But they both have the same attitude toward time: the work ends whenever its intention is accomplished. The time is inherent time, the time required for the task at hand. The work is “boring,” as Les Levine remarked, “if you demand that it be something else. If you demand that it be itself then it is not boring.” Which is not to say that the videotapes may not be uninteresting. Whether they are interesting or not is largely a matter of judging the value of the task at hand, and this could hardly be the issue for people who can look with equanimity at what hangs on the wall in the most distinguished galleries. For whatever we think of the videotapes of Morris, or Sonnier, or Serra, they are certainly not inferior to whatever else they put in the gallery. Levine is right. Videotapes are boring if you demand that they be something else. But they’re not judged boring by comparison with paintings or sculpture, they’re judged boring in comparison with television, which for the last twenty years has set the standard of video time. But the time standard of television is based firmly on the social and  •

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economic nature of the industry itself and has nothing whatever to do with the absolute technical and phenomenological possibilities of visual representation by cathode ray tube. For television, time has an absolute existence independent of any imagery that may or may not be transmitted over its well-defended airwaves and cables. It is television’s only solid, a tangible commodity that is precisely divisible into further and further subdivisible homogeneous units, the smallest quantum of which is measured by the smallest segment that could be purchased by a potential advertiser, which is itself defined by the minimum particle required to isolate a salable product from among a variable number of equivalent alternatives. The smallest salable piece turns out to be the ten-second spot, and all television is assembled from it. But the social conventions of television dictate a code of behavior according to which the transmitter must assume two apparently different roles in transmission. In one he must appear to address the viewer on the station’s behalf as entertainer; in the other on the sponsor’s behalf as salesman. The rules of the game, which are legally codified, prescribe a sharp demarcation between the roles, and the industry makes a great show of marking off the boundaries between its two types of performances—the programs and the commercials. At their extremes of hardsell and soft-show, one might suppose that the stylistic features of the two roles would be sufficient to distinguish them, but the extremes are rare, the social function of the roles, not so distinct, and the stylistic features seldom provide sufficient separation. Since the industry’s most tangible presentation is metrically divisible time, the industry seems to mark the separation emphatically by assigning the two roles different time signatures. The commercial is built on a scale of the minute out of multiple tensecond units. It comes in four common sizes—ten, thirty, sixty and a hundred and twenty seconds—of which the thirty-second slot is by far the commonest. The program is built on the scale of the hour out of truncated and hinged fifteen-minute units that are also commonly assembled in four sizes—fifteen, thirty, sixty and a hundred and twenty minutes—of which the half-hour program is the commonest, though the hour length is usual for important programs, two hours quite frequent for specials and feature films, and fifteen minutes not entirely a rarity for commentary. Television inherited the split roles and the two time signatures from radio, as well as the habit of alternating them in regularly recurrent intervals, which creates the arbitrary appearing, mechanical segmentation of both media’s presentations. But television carried this mechanical segmentation to a new extreme and presented it in such a novel way, through a special combination of its own peculiar technology and production conVideo, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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ventions, that television time in spite of structural similarity with radio time has an entirely different appearance from it, bearing the relationship to it of an electronically driven digital counter to a spring-driven handwound alarm clock. Television achieved its extreme segmentation of transmission time mainly through the intense development of multiple sponsorship. Old radio programs from the 1930s and 1940s tended to have a single sponsor. The Lone Ranger was sponsored for years by Silvercup bread, Ma Perkins by Oxydol, Uncle Don by Ovaltine; and these sponsors would reappear regularly at the beginning, middle, and end of each program with pretty much the same commercial pitch. This pattern continued by and large into the early days of television, with Hallmark Theater, The Kraft Playhouse and so on. But current television practice is generally quite different. A halfhour program might have something like six minutes of commercial fitted to it in three two-minute blocks at the beginning, middle and end of the program. But these six minutes of commercial time might promote the commodities of twelve different sponsors, or twelve different commodities of some smaller number of sponsoring agencies. The commodities could be nearly anything—a car, a cruise, a furniture polish, a breakfast food, a funeral service, a scent for men, a cure for smoking, an ice show, an x-rated movie, or a politician. In principle they could apply to nearly any aspect of human life and be presented in any order, with strategies of advocacy more various than the commodities themselves. In practice the range of commodity and styles of advocacy are somewhat more limited, but the fact remains that in half an hour you might see a succession of four complete, distinct, and unrelated thirty-second presentations, followed by a twelve-minute half of a presentation, followed by a one-minute presentation, one thirty-second presentation, and two ten-second presentations, followed by the second and concluding half presentation (twelve minutes long), followed by yet another four unrelated thirty-second presentations. But since this would lead to bunching of two two-minute commercials into a four-minute package of commercials at every hour ending, and since viewers are supposed to want mainly to look at the programs— or because program makers are rather possessive about their own commercials and want complete credit for them—the program makers have recently developed the habit of presenting a small segment of their own program as a kind of prologue before the opening commercial, to separate it from the tail end of the preceding program, while the program makers of the preceding program may attempt to tag onto the end of their own program a small epilogue at the end of their last commercial, to affix it more securely to their own program. Meanwhile the station may itself  •

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interject a small commercial promoting itself or its future presentations. All of these additional segments—prologues, epilogues, station promotions, and coming attractions—usually last no more than two minutes, are scaled to commercial time, and are in their functional nature promotions for either immediately succeeding or eventually succeeding transmissions. This means that you may see upward of fourteen distinct segments of presentation in any half hour, all but two of which will be scaled to commercial time. Since commercial time is the most common signature, we could expect it to dominate the tempo of television, especially since the commercial segments constitute the only examples of integral (complete and uninterrupted) presentation in the medium. And it does, but not in the way one would generally suppose. It is very easy to exaggerate the apparent differences between commercial time and program time by concentrating on the dramatic program. Television has many programs that share a mechanically segmented structure with the packet of commercials. The most extreme cases are the news programs, contests, and the so-called talk shows. What is called “news” on television is a chain of successive, distinct, and structurally unrelated narrations called “stories.” These average from thirty seconds to two minutes in length, are usually presented in successions of three or four in a row, and bracketed between packets of commercials from one to two minutes long. The “full” story is built very much like a common commercial. It will usually have a ten- to thirty-second introduction narrated by an actor seen in a chest-shot, followed by a segment of film footage about one minute in length. There are alternate forms but all of them are built on exactly the same type of segmentation. The narrating actor may merely narrate (read off ) the event from the same chest-shot seen against a background of one or two slides plausibly related to the event. The only continuity for the six- or seven-minute packet of programming called “news” consists of an abstract categorical designation (e.g., “national”) and the recurrent shots of the newsmen, actors who project some well-defined character considered appropriate for this part of the show, such as informed concern, alert aggressiveness, world-weary moralism, genial confidence, and so on. This tends to be more obvious in the packets designated as “sports” and “weather,” where what passes for information consists of bits so small, numerous, and unrelated that they come down to mere lists. These may be held together respectively by more obvious character actors like a suave ex-jock and a soft touch comic. Similarly, contest shows consist of structurally identical separate events joined edge to edge and connected mainly by the continuous presence of the leading actor (the host). Television has also—through selection of the events themVideo, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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selves and manner of representation—managed to present most of its sports programs as sequences of nearly identical unrelated events. Baseball gets reduced to a succession of pitches, hits, and catches, football to a succession of runs, passes, and tackles, while the ensemble of events that may be unfolding lies outside the system of representation. If we count together all the programs that are constructed out of these linearly successive, distinct segments of commercial scale, the contrast between commercial and program becomes much less sharp. Moreover a closer inspection of both will show that there are really no clear stylistic distinctions between commercials and programs, because just about every genre of program appears also as commercial. Dramas, comedies, documentaries, science talks, lists, all show up in thirty- and sixty-second forms. Even their distinctive integralness can be exaggerated, because often there is a clean partition between the programmatic parts of the commercial—its dramatic or imagistic material—and the details of the pitch that specify the name of the product and where you can get it. This separation is so common that it is possible to watch three thirty-second commercials in succession with some pleasure and find it difficult to remember the name or even the nature of the commodity promoted. This is not a functional defect in the commercial, the main function of which is to produce a kind of praise poetry that will elevate to a mild prominence one member out of a general family of commodities that television promotes as a whole tribe all of its transmitting day. Poems in praise of particular princes are addressed to an audience already familiar with the tribe, and commercials are constructed to particularize an already existing interest. Nobody unconcerned with body odors will care which deodorant checks them best. It takes the whole television day to encode the positive images of smoothness, cleanliness, or blandness upon which the massive marketing of deodorants and soaps depends. There is no fundamental distinction between commercial and program, there is only a difference in focus and conciseness, which gives the thirty-second commercial its appearance of much greater elegance and style. Both commercials and programs are assembled out of the same syntax: the linear succession of logically independent units of nearly equal duration. But this mechanically divisible, metrical presentation has none of the percussive or disjunctive properties of radio presentation. This is because of the conventions of camerawork and editing that television has developed to soften the shock of its basically mechanical procedures. It is probably fair to say that the entire technology from the shape of the monitor screen to the design of the camera mounts was worked out to soften the tick of its metronome. Almost every instrument of television  •

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technique and technology seems to have the effect of a shock absorber. As in film, the television presentation is assembled out of separate shots. But these shots are very limited in type and duration. Because of the poor resolution of the television image (525 lines of information presented on photosensitive phosphors) and the normal screen size, the bread and butter shots of television are almost all subforms of what film would consider a close-up. Common shot names illustrate this—two-shot, four-shot, etc. Probably primarily for this reason shot durations are very limited in range—usually from two to ten seconds—and very predictable in function and type. The two- to three-second shot is almost always a reactionshot for a transition detail in a narrative, so it will usually be a head-shot or detail of some activity. Distant shots of moving cars, or whatever, will usually run seven to ten seconds, like action in general. Shots of a second and under are very rare and only used for special occasions, but distinct shots over twenty seconds are practically nonexistent. “Distinct” because television’s camera conventions include a cameraman who is trained to act like an antiaircraft gunner, constantly making minute adjustments of the camera loosening up a bit here, tightening up there, gently panning and tracking in a nearly imperceptible manner to keep the target in some imaginary pair of crosshairs. These endless, silken adjustments, encouraged and sometimes specifically called for by the director, and usually built into the cameraman’s training, tend to blur the edges of what the film director would normally consider a shot. To this we can add the widespread use of fade-ins and fade-outs and dissolves to effect temporal and spatial transitions, and the directors’ regular habit of cutting on movement to cushion the switch from one camera to another. This whole arsenal of techniques has a single function—to soften all shocks of transition. Naturally the different apparent functions of various genres of program or commercial will alter the degree of softening, and a news program will maintain a sense of urgency through its use of cuts, soft though they may be, while the soap opera constantly melts together its various close shots with liquid adjustment, and blends scene to scene in recurrent dissolves and fades. This ceaseless softening combines with the regular segmentation to transform the metronomic tick-tock of the transmission into the silent succession of numbers of a digital clock. Because of the television industry’s special aesthetic of time and the electronics industry’s primary adaptation of the technology to the needs and desires of television, the appearance of an art-world video had to wait for the electronics industry to attempt to expand the market for its technology into special institutional and consumer domains. The basic tool kit of artists’ video is the Portapak, with its small, mobile camera and Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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one-half-inch black-and-white videotape recorder that can accommodate nothing larger than thirty-minute tapes. Put together with a small monitor and perhaps an additional microphone, the whole operation costs something in the vicinity of $2,000—a bit less than a cheap car and a bit more than a good stereo system. This is the fundamental unit, but it allows no editing whatever. The most minimal editing—edge-to-edge assembling of tapes into units larger than thirty minutes—requires access to at least another videotape recorder with a built-in editing facility, which means the investment of at least another $1,200. This is a primitive editing capacity, but increases the unit cost by 50 percent to about $3,000. Yet precision editing and smoothness are still out of the question. Unlike film, where editing is a scissors-and-paste job anyone can do with very little equipment, and where you can sit in a small room and shave pieces of film down to the half frame with no great difficulty, video pictures have to be edited electronically by assembling image sequences from some source or sources in the desired order on the tape of a second machine. The images are electronically marked off from each other by an electronic signal recurring (in the United States) thirty times a second. If you want to place one sequence of images right after another that you’ve already recorded onto the second tape, you have to join the front edge of the first new frame to the final edge of the other, which means that motors of both machines have to be synchronized to the thirtieth of a second and that there must be a way of reading off each frame edge to assure that the two recorded sequences are in phase with each other. Half-inch equipment is not designed to do this, and the alignment of frame edge with frame edge is a matter of accident. Alignment of a particular frame edge with a particular frame edge is out of the question. If the frame edges don’t come together the tape is marked by a characteristic momentary breakup or instability of the image. You may or may not mind this, but it’s the distinctive mark of this type of editing. Since this is absolutely unlike television editing, it carries its special mark of homemade or cheap or unfinicky or direct or honest. But the dominance of television aesthetics over anything seen on a TV screen makes this rather casual punctuation mark very emphatic and loaded with either positive or negative value. An installation with synchronized, multiple cameras with capabilities for switching through cutting, fading, and dissolving, and with some few special effects like blackand-white reversal will cost somewhere in the $10,000 range, provided you stick to black-and-white and half-inch equipment. This is only a minor increase in editing control and a cost increase of one order of magnitude. If you want reliably smooth edits that will allow you to join predictably an  •

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edge to an edge, without specifying which edge, you will need access to an installation whose cost begins at around $100,000. One major art gallery has a reduced form of such a facility that permits this sort of editing, which costs about half that. Again we have an increase of control that is nearly minimal and a cost increase of another order of magnitude. Some artists have solved this problem by obtaining occasional access to institutions possessing this kind of installation, but usually this takes complete editing control out of the hands of most artists. There are also ways of adapting the one-inch system to precisionist frame-for-frame capacity, but that requires the investment of several thousand dollars more. A rule of thumb might specify that each increase in editing capacity represents an order of magnitude increase in cost. Color is still another special problem. Though it is hardly necessary, and possibly a great drawback in the sensible use of video for most artists’ purposes (viz. Sonnier’s pointless color work), it is by now television’s common form and has certain normative marks associated with it. To use black and white is a marked move, regardless of what that mark may be construed to mean. So, many artists will seek color for mere neutrality. But it comes at a price. There are bargain-basement color systems, wonderfully cheesy in appearance, but the most common system is the three-quarter-inch cassette ensemble, which together with camera, videotape recorder, and monitor goes at about $10,000. If the Portapak is the Volkswagen, this is the Porsche of individual artists’ video. For editing control the system of escalation in color runs parallel to black and white. The model of ultimate refinement and control is the television industry’s two-inch system, and since that’s what you see in action in any motel over the TV set, interesting or not, everyone takes it for the state of the art. These conditions may not seem promising, but artists are as good at surviving as cockroaches, and they’ve developed three basic strategies for action. They can take the lack of technical refinements as a given and explore the theater of poverty. They can beg, borrow, or steal access to technical wealth and explore the ambiguous role of the poor relation, the unwelcome guest, the court jester, the sycophant, or the spy. This isn’t a common solution. The studios don’t make their facilities available so readily. But it includes works done by Allan Kaprow, Peter Campus, Les Levine, Nam June Paik, and numerous others. Artists can also raid the technology as a set of found objects or instruments with phenomenological implications in installation pieces. There are numerous examples from the work of Peter Campus, Dan Graham, Nam June Paik, Frank Gillette, etc. To a great extent the significance of all types of video art derives from its stance with respect to some aspects of television, which is itself proVideo, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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foundly related to the present state of our culture. In this way video art embarks on a curiously mediated but serious critique of the culture. And this reference to television, and through it to the culture, is not dependent on whether or not the artist sees the work in relation to television. The relation between television and video is created by the shared technologies and conditions of viewing, in the same way the relation of movies to underground film is created by the shared conditions of cinema. Nevertheless, an artist may exploit the relation very knowingly and may choose any aspect of the relation for an attack. If Nancy Holt’s Underscan is an innocent masterpiece that narrates in its toneless voice a terrifying, impoverished story over a sequence of simple photographic images ruined twice over by the television raster, the co-related Benglis Collage and Morris Exchange are cunning parodies that use the cheesy video image to depreciate a filmic genre that would sensuously exploit the personal glamour of stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, replaced here by the mock glamour of two pseudo-celebrities in a visual soup. Holt calls into question anything that the medium has ever represented as a documentary with her sheer simplicity of means, while Morris and Benglis produce a total burlesque of the public figure through the manifest absurdity of their claims. Acconci’s Undertone is an even more precise example of this type of burlesque. In a visual style of address exactly equivalent to the presidential address, the face-to-face camera regards The Insignificant Man making The Outrageous Confession that is as likely as not to be an Incredible Lie. Who can escape the television image of Nixon? In Baldessari’s wonderful Inventory, the artist presents to the camera for thirty minutes an accumulation of indiscriminate and not easily legible objects arranged in order of increasing size and accompanied by a deadpan description—only to have the sense of their relative size destroyed by the continual readjustment of the camera’s focal length that is required to keep them within the frame. Who can forget Adlai Stevenson’s solemn television demonstration of the “conclusive photographic evidence” of the Cuban missile sites, discriminable over the TV screen as only gray blurs? What the artists constantly reevoke and engage with is television’s fundamental equivocation and mannerism, which may really be the distinctive feature of the medium. But they may do this from two diametrically opposed angles, either by parodying the television system and providing some amazing bubble or by offering to demonstrate how, with virtually no resources, they can do all the worthwhile things that television should do or could do in principle and has never yet done and never will do.  •

Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes exhibit nothing more nor less than the simple laws of the physical world in terms of small common objects—a spoon, a cup, an ice cube, a piece of cloth. They make use of a single camera, adjusted only enough to get the objects and events into the frame, and no edits. The hands crumple a spoon handle, place an ice cube in it over a small piece of cloth, balance it at the neck over the rim of a cup. You watch. It takes how long for you to figure out that the ice cubes will melt? That the cloth will absorb the water. That the balance will be upset. But which way? Will the water absorbed into the cloth be drawn further from the fulcrum and increase the downward movement on the ice cube side? Or will the water dripping from the spoon reduce the downward moment and send the spoon toppling into the cup? You watch as though waiting for an explosion. It takes minutes to come and you feel relieved. It has the form of drama. You’ll never see anything like it on educational television or any other television. It takes too much time, intelligence, and intensity of attention to watch—except on video. There are, I believe, twentytwo of them. They have the brilliance of still-life and the intelligence of a powerful didactic art. But it is also a critique of means. Other works similar in this respect of means are Richard Serra’s Prisoners’ Dilemma and Eleanor Antin’s The Ballerina and the Bum. The Serra piece shamelessly adapts a casual stage skit and a contest show format to illustrate hilariously and with absolute simplicity a morallogical dilemma with grave implications for human action. The problem is apparently simple. There are two prisoners, A and B. Each is offered a chance to betray the other and go free—but here is the first catch—provided the other refuses to betray him. In the event that this happens the prisoner who refuses to betray will receive the maximum sentence—this is catch 22. The other alternatives are that both prisoners will refuse to betray each other; this will get both prisoners the second lightest penalty; or that both prisoners will attempt to betray each other, which will get each prisoner the second gravest penalty. On the face of it we have a straightforward 2 × 4 matrix with four outcomes for each player, but all the outcomes are linked pairs: you go free only if he gets life imprisonment and he goes free only if you get life imprisonment; you both get away with two years’ imprisonment if you both hold out against betrayal; you both get ten years’ imprisonment if you both try betrayal. If each player plays the game as a zero-sum game for his own advantage, he will inspect the reward columns and come to the single conclusion that the worst possible outcome is life imprisonment, which can only happen if he refuses to betray. This prevents the other player from screwing him and leaves the original player the chance of screwing his opponent. Since both players— Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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regarded as unrelated individuals who will consider their own individual advantage—will both play to minimize their loss, they will each play to cut their losses and inevitably come out with the next to worst payoff— ten years in prison. There is no way to win and no way to play for mutual non-betrayal because failure to betray always risks total loss. But the video piece is more brilliant than that. It set up two precise illustrations— comic, yes; casual, yes—but elegant in the way it demonstrates that any two unrelated prisoners—say a pair of suspected criminals picked up in the street—will inevitably betray each other and take the consequences. But any two prisoners who have a real community bond between them have no choice but to play for non-betrayal, because they must consider the value of the outcome in terms of its value for both players. Obviously, the differences in negative weights assigned to the penalties will work differently in deciding the outcome. Still, nothing in the world of this lowbudget game could make Leo Castelli betray Bruce Boice in public. This low-budget marker calls up beautiful improvisational acting from all of the players and loose styles from all of the collaborators in this group piece. The logical structuring of the piece owes a great deal to Robert Bell, who occupies a role somewhere between script writer and director, and to all of the actors, whose improvisatory performances contribute markedly to the final outcome of the piece, which must be considered a community venture with Richard Serra assuming the producer’s role. This piece is also of a sort that will never appear on television and has the force of a parable. Antin’s The Ballerina and the Bum, another low-budget job, with single Portapak camera and two improvising actors, declares itself, from its fiveminute opening shot, against television, time, and money. The camera changes position only if it has to, to keep something in view, pans once along three cars of a freight train, to count them, moves inside the car. The mike has no windscreen. The sounds of the world of 1974—cars, airplanes, children, and chickens—intermittently penetrate the film-style illusion of the image of a Sylphides-costumed, New York–accented ballerina “from the sticks” and a twenty-five-year-old grizzled old bum on the way to the big city. Nothing happens but what they say and do. She practices ballet and sets up light housekeeping in the boxcar, they daydream of success, he cooks some beans, she eats them, the train goes nowhere. Everything else is moving—cars, planes, and other trains. A whole Chaplin movie for the price of a good dub. Other successful examples of this low-budget strategy are Andy Mann’s One-Eyed Bum and Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot’s 4th of July in Saugerties, which bring to bear the video of limited means upon documentary as a kind of artist’s reminder of the ambiguities of “honesty” and “simplicity.”  •

Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

It is no accident that the best of these works have, at least in part, a didactic and moral element behind them and are “exemplary.” And even the tapes that are not specifically presented in an exemplary mode become exemplary in their fundamental disdain for television time. But the theater of poverty isn’t the only way. Peter Campus somehow infiltrated WGBH-TV, Boston, to produce a singe deadly piece precisely aimed through their expensive equipment. A man holding a photograph, seemingly of himself. You see him set fire to it and watch it burn from all four sides. Gradually you notice that the photograph is breathing, its eyes are blinking. This is the image of television. notes  Frank Gillette, Frank Gillette Video: Process and Metaprocess, ed. Judson Rosenbush (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1973), 21.  Hollis Frampton, “The Withering Away of the State of Art,” Artforum (December 1974): 50.  Ira Schneider, quoted in Jud Yalkut, “TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery,” Arts Magazine, September 1961, 21 (italics mine).  Edward Stasheff and Rudy Bretz, The Television Program: Its Writing, Direction and Production (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1951), 3.  Ibid., 6 (italics mine).  Ibid., 8.  Ibid.  Bruce Boice, “Lynda Benglis at Paula Cooper Gallery,” Artforum (May 1973): 83.  Les Levine, “Excerpts from a Tape: ‘Artistic,’ ” Art-Rite (Autumn 1974): 27.

Video, the Distinctive Features of the Medium

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Have Mind, Will Travel

At the end of 1990 the Corcoran Museum in Washington opened a massive Robert Morris exhibition with the rather melodramatic title Inability to Endure or Deny the World. The exhibition was devoted entirely to Morris’s work in painting and drawing and appeared to cover his whole career, but seemed more like a setting for his recent encaustic on aluminum paintings, which accounted for nearly half of the eighty-four works in the show. On January 20, the Sunday Times Arts and Leisure section, which usually responds to major museum shows of well-known artists with a plausibly respectful review, greeted the exhibition with a savage attack by Roberta Smith that raised the question of authenticity and cast doubt over Morris’s entire career. “I’ve always thought of Morris . . . as an artistic kleptomaniac and, consequently, a bit of a fake.” The accusation, framed in terms of the notion of originality, charged that for thirty years he had echoed “ideas and motifs deftly lifted from the work of other artists” and questioned whether he had ever achieved much art that was “squarely and convincingly his own.” Normally this wouldn’t be very serious. The New York Times is not especially distinguished in criticism, but Roberta Smith isn’t Hilton Kramer, who counts as the official art-world scold. Moreover, what she said bears a certain relation to art-world gossip. I had heard comments like this before, though I hadn’t paid much attention to them. A couple of years ago a very intelligent art dealer sitting in my living room told me that Morris had stolen everything from Joseph Beuys. At the time my inclination was to laugh, because I could hardly think of two more dissimilar artists. It was like having someone tell me that Ellsworth Kelly had stolen everything from Chaim Soutine. But reading the Smith review, I remembered another occasion back at the beginning of the ’70s, walking on the beach with a well-known young sculptor who complained bitterly that almost as soon as he got an idea, Morris would rip it off in an

exhibition at Castelli’s. It seemed like a funny SoHo fantasy, and I remember dreaming up an elaborate scenario as a solution for what I took to be a temporary paroxysm of downtown art-world paranoia. All you have to do is come up with a great idea. You write it down in a book, notarize it, and give it to your lawyer, who with two witnesses places it in a safe deposit box with one key that is placed in the hands of a neutral trustee who has no idea what bank the box is in. Then you just go hang out in your usual way. Sooner or later you’ll run into Robert, and, because you can’t keep your mouth shut, you’ll wind up telling him about your great idea. Then, when he puts on the show at Castelli’s, you appear at Artforum with your lawyer, your witnesses, your trustee, and you let the editors open the safe deposit box with the dated and notarized page from your notebook, and you claim Robert and the whole show as your conceptual piece. But I knew the whole plan even in fantasy was fundamentally flawed. I knew that if the sculptor had set up this elaborate charade and shot off his mouth to Morris about his great idea, nothing in the world would have kept him from shooting his mouth off about his even better idea for protecting it. So this anxiety was never tested, and like most gossip of its kind has neither been supported nor refuted. It just sits out there at the edge of the art world like a kind of gray cloud that will neither rain nor blow away. And because it was just another piece of art-world weather, I never thought of doing anything about it until it resurfaced in Smith’s review, when I realized there was a whole cluster of art beliefs that Morris’s work as an artist collides with, and that these were worth discussing in the context of Morris’s major retrospective at the Guggenheim. First there is the assumption that an artist can establish a kind of proprietary right to an idea. (You can’t steal an idea unless somebody already owns it.) This proprietary right obviously also depends on the assumption that artists have ideas and that their work embodies them. (If you don’t have ideas nobody can steal them, and if they don’t show up in your work no artist will think to steal them.) But how do you acquire the proprietary right to an idea? This is where primacy comes in. There is a loosely held belief that being the first one to an idea gives you property rights in it. This is the gold rush model. If you get there before anybody else, you can stake a claim. If you can prove it, we will recognize it. But in a global art world this is a little hard to do. Even in a small one it’s not so easy. Who poured first? Frankenthaler? Louis? . . . Rothko? But in spite of its difficulty, the notion of primacy remains, sustained, at least in principle, by analogy with invention or discovery and memories of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Have Mind, Will Travel

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the Wright brothers, and the U.S. Patent Office. Though in practice this ownership right is more often established through persistency of employment. Albers owns squares. Reinhardt owns black. Christo owns wrappers. Koons owns sleaze kitsch. And this relation of ownership that is established through persistence of use eventually becomes mutually selfdefining. So that an artist will come to be defined by the idea he or she owns, and the idea by its artist owner. In this sense having an idea is a little like having a dog. A Doberman owner is clearly a quite different person from someone who owns a Jack Russell terrier. Now it is in this absence of persistency that Smith finds the main symptom of Morris’s “inauthenticity.” “Since the 1960’s Morris’ art has mirrored nearly every twist and turn in American contemporary art. He’s been associated with neo-Dada, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and performance art, earthworks, process art and installation art.” Morris has apparently owned a lot of dogs. So Smith can’t tell what kind of dog owner he is. This is not surprising. The notion of persistence has always been important for art criticism. That’s because there is the sense that if an artist persists in work after work in doing related things, the sequence of works can be read as a series of related actions that unite to form a trajectory of intention. This has been one of the fundamental suppositions of traditional art history—that all of an artist’s works laid out in temporal order form a kind of artistic biography. And it is not a great step beyond that to George Kubler’s somewhat more archaeological proposal in The Shape of Time to lay out all the artifacts of a culture in temporal order to obtain an artistic biography of the culture. In such biographies apparent breaks in the sequence should count for a great deal. In October 1970 after some twenty years of nonfigurative process paintings, Philip Guston opened a large exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in New York city with thirty-three paintings and eight drawings populated by hooded cartoon-like figures. Every critic who dealt with the show felt called upon to explain this apparent break in Guston’s career. For some, it went beyond that. To approve of the new work, sympathetic critics had to find an aspect of this new series of paintings that connected them to the same artist who had painted the process paintings that provided Guston’s artistic identity up to the day of the new exhibition: He took three lessons in a correspondence course in cartooning when he was twelve. He’d always admired Barney Google and Krazy Kat. He used to do caricatures of his artist friends. The dark, blocky shapes in his later nonfigurative work suggest objects. His palette remains the same. This kind of biographical recuperative criticism reaches a lyrical cul •

Have Mind, Will Travel

mination in Roberta Smith’s 1978 Art in America article. “When you take Guston’s career as a whole,” she assures us, “the new Gustons aren’t the betrayal they may at first seem: they’re a surprisingly consistent summation. In them Guston seems to have revisited all his past successes and failures, touching base again and again with all areas of his previous development.” Compiling an extensive if somewhat haphazard and questionable array of thematic, technical, and psychological recurrences in his work, she triumphantly concludes that “Guston has had a certain vocabulary of arrangements under continuous consideration, but has taken his whole life to get them into balance.” While hostile critics like Hilton Kramer used the break to argue that Guston had abandoned the authentic, though minor, Mandarin art that was a direct consequence of his personality and character to adapt to a new art public’s low-cultural taste for narrative and other pop genres. Persistence apparently functions in the art world not only as a trademark, proclaiming the artist’s property rights; it also operates as an assurance of authenticity. The particular art-world system in which the works of Guston, Morris, and Joseph Beuys are made, distributed, and evaluated tends to require that artists have a consistent “personality.” This is deduced from their works and whatever supporting information the artist or the artist’s associates and supporters provide, and then becomes a kind of warranty for all future works. The system operates somewhat like the early American automobile industry in which the Yankee thrift and ingenuity associated with the “personality” of Henry Ford, founded as it was on the Model T (and publicized accounts of his opinions and behavior), could reliably be invoked to justify adaptations to newer environmental circumstances in the Model A and subsequent economy models but got progressively harder to reconcile with the succession of Mercurys, and disappears completely as a source of assurance for the luxuriant Lincoln Continental. Split personalities or multiple identities are not favored in the art world either. Even for Guston, his new figurative work required an account of a two-year-long struggle for his soul between two kinds of drawings before the cartoon style won out. Only after the account of his struggles had been circulated was it apparently enough to say finally, “I wanted to tell stories.” Now in December 1964 and March 1965, Robert Morris had two exhibitions at the Green Gallery in New York that appeared to have virtually nothing in common with each other. One exhibition featured the enigmatic lead reliefs—static gray wall works with embedded small objects or moulds of such objects, electrodes, batteries, and other machine parts or suggestions of machine parts, or traces of earlier actions, invoking images Have Mind, Will Travel

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of arrested or potential functions and motions as mysterious or threatening memories of probably dangerous events. The other was an installation of large, free-standing, elementary forms of uniformly painted plywood—L-shaped beams, a square-sectioned beam with one rounded edge, a floated square slab, a corner wedge, a boiler-sized cylinder . . . As most people saw them, these elements were all painted white. For almost anyone who had seen both shows this could have counted as a major career break. But Morris’s public career was still quite short. He had only come to New York in 1961. So for this contemporary New York art world, he had a career that was barely four years old, and for most members of this world it was probably shorter than that, since his first one-man exhibition at the Green Gallery didn’t occur till 1963. Still he had already staked out a place with the lead pieces and a fair number of other paradoxical objects like the I-Box, the Box with the Sound of its Own Making, etc.—a place in what most of the critics then called neo-Dada. Which meant that they read his work as taking account of Duchamp’s ready-mades and Jasper Johns’s gray paintings from a position at some distance from, but somewhere alongside, Fluxus’s absurd objects. The large geometric sculpture in the “white show” appeared altogether different. It seemed to situate him among sculptors like Don Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt, and Carl Andre. Morris reinforced his claims to this position with his own critical writing, the “Notes on Sculpture,” that he published in Artforum in 1966. This precise and polemical essay engaged with all of the basic theoretical issues raised by the “minimal” sculptors and established him alongside Don Judd as a major spokesman for the group, and the republication of “Notes on Sculpture” in Gregory Battcock’s popular Minimal Art anthology in 1968 consolidated his reputation for a more popular audience as a leading theoretician for this elementary, objectoriented sculpture just at the time that he was beginning to abandon it. Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” explicitly rejected nearly all of the ideas upon which the lead reliefs and the self-referential and enigmatic objects were based. “The relief has always been accepted as a viable mode. However it cannot be accepted today as legitimate. The autonomous and literal nature of sculpture demands that it have its own, equally literal space— not a surface shared with painting.” This polemical and deliberately pedantic essay stakes out Morris’s claim to be chef d’école of the new object sculpture as it goes on to not only reject intimate scale and all internal relation of parts, including incident, configuration, texture, and color, but also proceeds to separate him from Bladen and Snelson and some of the works of Judd and Andre, by rejecting both monumentality and conspicuously displayed mathematical, logical or technological ordering systems  •

Have Mind, Will Travel

in favor of the simple polyhedrons and more or less human scale of the instantly knowable, uniform, obdurate shapes of Morris’s second Green Gallery show. Since Morris’s “neo-Dada” works had not had a very long public career—no significant articles had been published about them in the art journals, photographic reproductions of them had not been widely circulated—they never became established as his trademark and consequently didn’t mark out a distinct public personality. Moreover his writing very quickly established a minimalist persona for him—precise, intellectual, and humorless—that seemed to make his 1960s career intelligible. It suggested an idea of development. He had come into his own as a minimalist. And it offered the New York art world the opportunity to consider all of the absurdist or paradox pieces “early works,” in spite of the fact that no one was really in a position to establish the chronological order of the conception or fabrication of many of them. In fact, for some period of time between 1961 and 1967 there was considerable overlap between what seem to be two different working logics. Though it may even be truer to say that paradox remained a working element in nearly all of Morris’s successful sculptural projects but simply ceased to be foregrounded. Even the most clearly Minimalist pieces, works as apparently neutral as plywood slabs invisibly elevated inches above the floor or a plywood pyramid wedged into a room’s corner, whose color it nearly matches, become absurd through displacement. Simple cubes whose faces are mirrors become nearly invisible, turning into floor. Ring with Light, a circular fiberglass ring eight feet in diameter, is divided in half and emits light from an unseen source at the two cuts. But while many pieces are marked by this sleight of hand, it is delivered deadpan and is never mentioned in the writing. So it never becomes part of the persona. By 1967 Morris was already moving away from the closed object to the more open pieces—the felt works—and by 1968 their apparently strong material and weak “formal” properties were being exaggerated in the truly formless accumulation pieces, where hard and soft, viscous and friable materials, natural and fabricated were heaped or spread on the pristine gallery or warehouse floor. In an appropriately polemical fashion he laid out a set of arguments for this in his 1968 Artforum article “Anti Form” and in 1969 curated 9 in a Warehouse, an exhibition of work by nine artists relating to this idea at the Leo Castelli Warehouse in 1969. The exhibition was accompanied by another Artforum article, “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects.” Question: Is this a career change? Answer: Not really. Have Mind, Will Travel

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The hard-edged object work is explained in terms of a kind of abstract, audience-oriented psychology—the perceptual adventures of an otherwise unoccupied individual in an otherwise empty space, and the newer work appears to evoke the relationship of the maker rather than the viewer to the different properties of the varied materials, these soft and hard, sharp and brittle scraps and shards, snarls of fiber, piles of powder and pools of gunk. Yet they remain equally abstracted arrangements, and the antiform works derive their perceptual aestheticism not only from their contrasts with each other, but from their contrast with the architectural elements of the spaces in which they’re arranged. By the 1980s Morris himself would characterize these works as a straightforward continuation of the Abstract, Modernist impulses of Pollock. These are demythologized, made literal, and typically bound to simple mechanical operations that determine their final appearance. And while the “Anti Form” essay and “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV of 1969 present this work as an attack on “the rationalistic notion that art is a form of work that results in a finished product” and promise an art that “has in its hands . . . mutable stuff which need not arrive at a point of being finalized with respect to either time or space,” the argument is placed in the same Abstract art space as the earlier essays and speaks in the same assured Minimalist (rationalist) voice. Morris’s conceptual works of the 1970s appear to be a straightforward continuation and extension of the ideas articulated in connection with the antiform works. The essay that introduces them places an intensified emphasis on process. “Whatever else art is [it is] at a very simple level . . . a way of making.” But it broadens the context of this making from the phenomenological to the social context of labor and production. “What I wish to point out here is that the entire enterprise of art making provides the ground for founding the limits and possibilities of certain kinds of behavior and that this behavior of production itself is distinct and has become so expanded and visible that it has extended the entire profile of art.” These were the political seventies, the Nixon government was continuously expanding the Vietnam War, and many not especially political artists were finally beginning to question their relation to the cultural institutions that had up to then supported them, however poorly, but seemed to function primarily as emblems or masks of civilization for a brutal, technocratic imperialism. Accordingly a certain political tone begins to color Morris’s writing. This political tonality shows up characteristically in his November 1970 “advertisement,” which in an elliptical style typical of its commercial models here strongly ironized by hyperbole and comic juxtaposition presents:  •

Have Mind, Will Travel

the peripatetic artists guild and announces robert morris Available for Commissions Anywhere in the World offering to undertake e x plosions- ev ents for the qua rter hor se — chemic a l swamps—monuments—speeches—outdoor sounds for the varying seasons — alternate political systems — deluges- design and encour agement of mutated forms of life and other vaguely agricultur al phenomena, such as disciplined trees — earthworks — demonstr ations — prestigious objects for home, estate or museum — theatrical projects for the masses— epic and static films—fountains in liquid metals — ensembles of curious objects to be seen while tr aveling at high speeds— national parks and hanging gardens—artistic diversions of rivers— sculptur al projects 

At first glance the ad reads like a modern expansion of Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico Sforza: I have plans for bridges very light and strong and suitable for carrying very easily, with which to pursue and at times defeat the enemy . . . Also I have ways of arriving at a certain fixed spot by caverns and secret winding passages, made without noise even though it may be necessary to pass underneath trenches or a river . . . I can make cannons, mortars, and light ordnance of very beautiful and useful shapes . . . Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze or clay, and also painting . . . Moreover I would undertake the work of the bronze horse, which shall endue with immortal glory and eternal honor the auspicious memory of the Prince your father and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

But at the same time all of the projects listed in the ad are only mildly disguised characterizations of works Morris had already done, proposed, Have Mind, Will Travel

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or would have liked to do. And the ad takes a strong double reading in which both the comedy and commentary are contemporary. explosions? Why not? Leonardo was the Wernher von Braun of his day. The passage from chemical swamps to monuments to speeches, which we could reasonably characterize as outdoor sounds for the various seasons, reads like a narrative of the standard politician’s response to environmental crisis, that the artist offers finally to clean up through alternate political systems or wash away in deluges (Leonardo again?). After which the modern Leonardo prophetically offers biotech disasters in mutated forms of life and other vaguely agricultur al phenomena. vaguely is a nice touch here. earthworks might be a little obvious, though in the Leonardo context it can suggest fortifications, but demonstr ations is nicely equivocal—either scientific or political or both (was the blast at Los Alamos scientific or political?)—and sets up the transition to prestigious objects that are offered for the neatly expanding series home, estate or museum, before moving to more purely public spectacles for the masses. This leads to a chain of appropriately spectacular claims to create epic and static films (are they both?), then fountains in liquid metal (that’s one better than Versailles), highway art or airline art (en sembles of curious objects to be seen while tr aveling at high speeds), national parks and hanging gardens (evoking Yellowstone or Babylon) and with diversion of rivers, returning once again to Leonardo (this time to his proposal to protect Italy from the Turks by diverting the Isonzo), before finishing with a comically anticlimactic offer of mere sculptur al projects. If the list seems too short, the ad assures us that “the above is but a partial listing of projects in which the artist is qualified to engage. No project is too small or too large.” If the figure of irony hovers over this text, it is not the simple kind that Webster’s defines as “a sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm which adopts a mode of speech, the intended implication of which is the opposite of the literal sense of the words.” Here it appears as an intermittent and variable force, a kind of swiveling wind that blows a discourse now this way, now that, and sometimes more and sometimes less, but always off its anticipated course. In the form of this advertisement the figure seems to cast doubt on the nature of the arena in which the artist is offering to function and, through the exaggerated grandeur of his ambitions and claims and doubtful competences, and his dangerous, perhaps lethal, and occasionally quite trivial projects, and on the role of the artist as well. It also raises some question about the way we are to take the advertisement’s proposal for funding these art transactions, however seriously  •

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they appear to be put forward. The key elements of the proposal involve the shift in the handling of the artist’s reward from sales or fees, which the ad explicitly rejects, to a $25 per working hour wage plus all travel, materials, construction and other costs to be paid by the owner-sponsor, and the taxation of the future sales by the owner-sponsor to finance other projects. (Subsequent sales of any project by the artist-sponsor were to require a 50 percent return of the funds to the Peripatetic Artists Guild to be held in trust to help fund other unfunded commissions between other artists and sponsors.) Twenty-five dollars an hour was a very good working wage in 1970, equivalent then to fees for skilled professionals or master craftsmen. But the main thrust of the proposal was to characterize the artist’s activity as computable wage labor, which could be difficult of both verification and computation when trying to calculate the artist’s thinking time as part of his or her labor. For some artists this would mean microseconds, for others weeks, and for others the difficulty of calculating the duration of their dreams. The artist tax on future sales of these projects was not a novelty. It had been proposed in complete seriousness for conventional art objects like paintings or sculptures, and perhaps it was serious here. But it is hard not to see the tonality of an ad that offered among its projects “chemical swamps” and “alternate political systems” coloring even this apparently pedestrian proposal with an element of dubiousness and absurdity. Irony is a difficult figure to control, perhaps impossible. Once its presence is located in an artist’s work, it threatens to appear everywhere within it, casting the possibility of doubt over any and every assertion or representation the artist makes. It also characterizes its employer in a different way. He’s no longer a simple dog owner, he means something different in owning his dog—perhaps like Gérard de Nerval walking his lobster in the Bois de Boulogne “because it doesn’t bark and knows the secrets of the deep.” In all of the art world, the one artist most clearly committed to the figure of irony has been Marcel Duchamp, and consequently he is the artist about the significance of whose works critics have found it nearly impossible to agree. Nothing that Duchamp ever made or did, from the readymades to his dining habits could ever escape the effects of the figure. In Morris’s case there is sufficient reason to connect him with it beyond his continued assertion of his relation to Duchamp. One text of the ’70s stands out from all his others and is crucial in this regard. “The Art of Existence” seems like a straightforward account of the work of three otherwise unknown environmental artists that Morris tries to connect with the concerns of artists like Michael Asher, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Bruce Nauman. But all of the theorizing takes place in the Have Mind, Will Travel

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first four paragraphs. The rest is a kind of first-person journalistic account of Morris’s meeting with the artists and his experiences with them and their work, and it has all the plausibility of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, with which it shares an abundance of contingent detail. None of the projects of these three artists was so far from the work of well-known artworld artists at the time, or even from Morris himself. Marvin Blaine was constructing a hillside chamber observatory to record the sunrise of the vernal equinox, Jason Taub was designing experiments in extra-audial perception of radio waves, and Robert Dayton, a series of gas chambers for altering sensory states. Any of these projects could have been proposed to the Los Angeles County Art Museum for their Art and Technology show. But the unusual position of Morris as audience and sole art-world witness of these works and his uncharacteristic detailing of his responses not only to the works but to all sorts of surrounding contingencies begin to arouse suspicions. I had moved to a side plank in order not to interfere with the rectangle of light now expanding down the wall to within about six feet of the center plank. I was feeling the dampness and even a slight chill. We all had coffee from a thermos and as I looked up I noticed that the top edge of the light was shrinking downward . . . On the way to the airport the following day the extremely taciturn Blaine revealed that he had notions for several other works that he might realize next summer.

This is the rhetoric of what the French would call classic fiction. And the work of the next two “unknown artists” becomes more and more fantastic, leading to increasingly trivial or disagreeable responses. I did not know what this “shaping of the perceiver” was about until Taub turned on the equipment and invited me to enter the framed up enclosure. As soon as I stepped into one of the circular spaces I felt rather than heard a sound which seemed to be inside my head. It seemed similar to what one experiences when one hears ringing in one’s ears except the experienced sound was much lower.

The text culminates in the visit to the gas chambers of Robert Dayton in a studio “outside Sacramento.” After nearly blinding himself working to achieve visual effects with liquid crystals and highly corrosive acids, he has turned to working with gases to alter psychic states. Dayton is the most colorful of the three artists, and he receives the most elaborate personal description.  •

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Dayton himself is a fairly unnerving personality. He keeps his head shaved, which seems to accentuate the deep scars on his face and neck. He also wears a monocle around his neck which he occasionally peers through if he needs to see a detail or read a gauge. He seems to enjoy playing up a certain sinister ambience that surrounds his work. When I was with him he frequently squinted at me through the thick glass of his monocle and would leeringly compare the venting systems of Buchenwald and Belsen. When he first showed me the inside of the rooms he asked if I thought shower heads as gas inlets would be unsightly.

He offers to give Morris a “retrospective gassing,” which proceeds from his early work with bromine and iodine clouds, to his “middle period fart palette” with various mixtures of butyl acetates, nitrobenzene, and butyl mercaptan, finally passing on to a set of gases that to Morris “presented the most interesting and unfamiliar experiences.” All of these had vaguely associative odors and were invisible, some had strange, almost electrical odors related to the ozone smell. Others stung the nose. But the main effect was not one of odor. I remember my hands feeling heavy and sweaty at times. With some of the other gases I felt dizzy or felt my face flushed. At one point my hearing became strange and I felt somewhat high. It was an exhausting afternoon. Dayton explained that the last gases were his own mixtures which he could rapidly vary in his new mixer and compressor. He let me know, moreover, that they were “secret and dangerous in larger amounts.”

Finally Dayton reveals he is embarking on a project for a “Negative Ion Chamber” that would be “juicier than Willy Reich’s Orgone Box” because it promises to get rid of “brain 5-hydroxytryptamine,” loads Morris up with a pack of scientific articles on the effects of negative ions and as he drives off calls after him in his Dr. Strangelove persona, “Screw the MOMA, but see what you can do for me at Ausschwitz.” So it’s a fiction, a kind of parabolic fiction strongly marked by the figure of irony. The question is—what is the target of the irony? The aims of artists like Asher, Irwin, or Turrell? Or Morris himself? The “dematerialization of art”?—a discourse that figured so largely among the artists of the ’70s. Or all of the above? Which appears likely enough now, and was, I always thought, readable at the time. Though not to everyone. Because two months later a letter appeared in the March issue of Artforum denouncing Morris for ripping off his three unknown artists by presenting them in his article and taking possession of their work in a context that Have Mind, Will Travel

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he had created and given a name to. The letter, written by a Mark N. Edwards of Madison, Connecticut, in a tone somewhat similar to the Roberta Smith review, goes on to accuse Morris of a pattern of ripping off going back to the Castelli warehouse show in which his curatorial presence also assured him authorial credit for ideas generated by younger artists, and is answered with a rather cryptic one-liner by Morris. But that’s not the end of it. The intent of the Edwards letter is easy enough to figure out, but it’s written in an inflated, garrulous, and self-obscuring rhetoric that is somewhat suspicious. Was there really a Mr. Edwards? Or a town called Madison in Connecticut? Or was the Edwards letter really written by Morris? If so, it was composed to reveal the absurdity of a circulating SoHo slander by placing it in the mouth of an apparent fool. The denunciational style of the letter, its incoherent argument, even the address from a provincial place in Connecticut (outside New Haven, and therefore outside SoHo.) all appear perfectly calculated to achieve this effect in the Manhattan art world. But how much further does the irony extend? As far as Morris’s answer? Mr. Edwards is evidently interested in rescuing damsels in distress. I’m not. Robert Morris

Possibly, but to what effect is not quite clear. And it doesn’t necessarily follow from the absurdity of the letter that Morris wrote it. Morris is not Molière, and might not have had the literary skill or experience to construct such an elegant piece of buffoonery. Or he may not have had the inclination. Edwards’s nature might have constructed it for him. Or graduate art school education at Yale. (Madison is close to New Haven.) But the truth here is of less importance than the way in which suspicion of irony continues to spread. Yet in spite of this text, and two unusual conceptual exhibitions, Hearing (1972) and Voice (1974), and the curiously comic S and M poster that accompanied the Voice exhibition and produced its moment of local scandal, Morris’s works of the 1970s didn’t invoke ironic readings, and given the nature of most of his exhibitions there seemed little reason why they should. But in the 1980s Morris’s work took a stranger turn. A funereal exhibition at Sonnabend called Preludes (for A.B.) featuring a series of proposals for cenotaphs crowned by deathsheads, followed by an installation at Castelli in 1980 called Second Study for a View from a Corner of Orion, and an installation at the Hirshhorn called Jornada del Muerto (the name of the desert valley south of Los Alamos) initiate a massively scaled and ob •

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viously emblematic meditation on death, the atomic bomb, and planetary extinction. How to take these works was not very clear to anyone who had followed Morris’s artistic career through the ’60s and ’70s. The Minimalist work of the ’60s and the antiform work of the ’70s shared a mode of meaning making. Whatever readings they receive derive from our response to the physical features of the objects and materials, the working procedures that fabricated or arranged them, the nature of the choices that selected and positioned them. Which is merely to say that they are foregrounded against a background of all the other objects and materials and techniques for production, disposition, and use of our contemporary world. In the ’80s works, physical and material properties are entirely subordinated to an overriding and graphically presented metaphorical discourse. Any meaning that is going to be read out of them has to pass through the metaphorical space of some dominant emblem. This would appear to be a fairly traditional Western European mode of art and meaning making. The main difficulty in interpretation here is how to position the artist in relation to this discourse. Is this the Roberta Smith problem? Not quite. It takes more than radical change in the mode of meaning making to raise the problem of inauthenticity. It requires some context setting that would create a primary scene employing this mode of meaning making that was sufficiently successful to be worth adapting to or ripping off. And of course there was one available. The Conceptual Art of the earlier ’70s had exhausted the appetites of the few collectors willing to pay art world prices for the rather exiguous physical products this art usually generated, and a dealer world starved for more clearly marketable objects rushed to assist the development of American punk painting, which was quickly assimilated to a German painting taste for a kind of revived Expressionism. Both deployed a crude and emblematic drawing style and a muddy palette over an Expressionist menu of thematics drawn from the junkyard of German and American urban decay; and under the name neo-Expressionism by 1980 this kind of painting had become immensely popular and financially rewarding. It was widely exhibited and written about in all the journals. And in the prose of Donald Kuspit, its most prolific American publicist, it was seen as an urgent philosophical engagement with the forces of destruction and death. In 1980 Morris did Project at Castelli, his mausoleum-like show of skulldominated proposals for cenotaphs, and at Sonnabend he exhibited his Second Study for a View from a Corner of Orion, an extraterrestrial view of disaster with skeletons riding clouds of twisted steel near the ceiling. No one could say he was closing in on the market for neo-Expressionist paintHave Mind, Will Travel

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ing. But the shows could be seen as establishing a claim on the discourse with death. Then in 1982 came the hydrocal reliefs, deeply embedded decorative moulds prolific in body parts and skeletal fragments, which by 1983 came to act as elaborate frames for apparently Turneresque, painted, pastel, watercolor, and oil images of brushy and swirling color whose undulating movements the frames echo and repeat in three-dimensional form. By 1986 these works were presented in an exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, accompanied by a catalog containing an extensive essay by Kuspit “The Ars Moriendi According to Robert Morris.” This would be the full Roberta Smith reading. But the context has to be drawn a little wider than that. By the 1970s almost all confidence in the modernist paradigm as it was understood in the art world had collapsed. Partly this was a consequence of the special and trivialized Greenbergian version of Modernism generally accepted within the art world, and partly it was a consequence of Modernism’s successes and the inflated estimation of their significance. In any event by the mid-70s the entire project of post–World War II American Modernist Art—by which I mean to include all the work of Abstract-Expressionism through Hard-Edge painting and Pop Art, and the Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and its continuations in the antiform sculpture and systematic conceptualism of the ’70s—successful in its own terms, had come to occupy a narrow museological space walled in by money and power where it was unable to engage significantly with the rest of the intellectual and social environment. Modernism had come to this pass from a very different sense of its career and mission. The end of the Second World War left the United States, which was largely undamaged by the war, with a great reservoir of savings, great productive assets, large foreign markets, a near total absence of serious economic competitors, and a great sense of confidence resulting from its victory in a war over what looked to most Americans like the pure forces of evil. If serious artists had no direct relation to this growing affluence, they were powerful participants in the cultural confidence that surrounded it. The first generation of Abstract-Expressionists were adults before the war, but they all came to their artistic maturity by the end of it. Which is to say that they finally managed to free themselves from the particular forms of Modernist painting—Cubism and Surrealism—that had haunted their work through the thirties and early forties, though they had long since exhausted their critical force and acquired the deadly status of connoisseur objects. And if their work figured as a kind of example of improvisatory, critical and exploratory work against the organizational  •

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structure and materialism of the increasingly successful society that eventually paid handsomely for their paintings, they were the last group of artists in the long career of Modernism to see themselves resolutely outside of and against the dominant culture. Their successors within the Modernist tradition—the generation of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Rivers and the Pop artists—were firmly married to the culture. If there was cultural criticism in their work, it took the same form as cultural promotions. The advertising image, the commercial photograph, the film still, and the TV image cheerfully mingled with paint. And for a brief moment during the early ’60s there was the illusion that art could enter into a significant communication in the public sphere, and that there was a public space. For many this illusion was fostered by the Kennedy presidency, with its image of a government presided over by intellectuals (remember “The Best and the Brightest”) and the promise of a hip, high culture (JFK was supposed to have written a book, and Jackie had dreamt of meeting Diaghilev). And the Minimalist sculptors, and the systemic and technological ones, the Hard-Edge painters and the successions of Pop and post-Pop figurational painters, with a few notable exceptions seemed to parallel, glamorize and glorify the society’s productive techniques. But the Vietnam War gradually opened a gap between the intellectuals who exercised power and the intellectuals who opposed it, revealing that no rational communication could take place between them. The sense of a social fabric tearing apart was furthered by the way the broad civil rights movement disintegrated into separatisms, Black Power and urban race riots, and the way the New Left splintered as the feminists seceded from a movement dominated by male commissars. All of this was punctuated by a sequence of assassinations—Kennedy, Oswald, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Someone even shot Andy Warhol—that repeated in blood the obvious fact that no rational discourse would or could take place. This became national knowledge in 1973 as the spectacle of Watergate unfolded before millions of watchers—the fundamental separation between language and action. Anyone who had watched the testimony for long hours and heard dubious memories produce chains of supposed fact that could only be supported by equally or even more dubious memories recited by respectable looking men who had been caught in unrespectable circumstances learned what the speech act theorists had been teaching in the academies—that the referential power of language disintegrates in a social setting where the unspoken social treaties underwriting its uses are broken. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Richard Nixon gave birth to American Postmodernism. It didn’t take very long for artists to generalize this understanding Have Mind, Will Travel

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to all signification and to conclude that not only was there no common ground in the body politic, there was no universally common ground in the phenomenology of the human body either, which much critical theory was coming to see as also a socially constructed representation. The essential failure of Morris’s interactive show at the Tate in 1971, while it may have resulted from the stuffiness of the English museum tradition, was also the consequence of the show’s minimalist phenomenology in a social context where an invitation to an apparently neutral and physicalized conception of the body was predictably seen by participants as an invitation to a fun fair. While Morris would intermittently return to his phenomenological concerns in various ways throughout the 1970s, they were simply extensions of his 1960s work and were encountering continually declining resonance in the art world, while he was already pursuing other interests. The contest of texts he presented in the two shows Hearing (1972) and Voice (1974) seem more like attempts to respond to certain aspects of the breakdown of the modernist paradigm that nearly everyone in the art world would soon come to call Postmodernism, while the Philadelphia Labyrinth (1974) appeared to have its origins in Morris’s older, modernist concerns with the physical body in space. But the mark of Postmodernism in the art world was a performative mode that expanded to fill the gap left by the fading significance of the autonomous object, and to that extent both the Tate show and Labyrinth, with their real and implied performances, responded to the new situation in spite off their abstracted settings. Still, what the new situation of the 1970s seemed to require was a kind of abdication from universalist claims. As the master narratives of history and art history collapsed, local and contingent narratives came to replace them. So the earliest and most effective new work invoked the most particularly contingent and local in the form of a floating and equivocal autobiography and novel approaches to the twin Modernist taboos of narrative and representation that were most evident in pieces like Yvonne Rainer’s performance This is the story of a woman who . . . (1973), Eleanor Antin’s epistolary photonovel The Adventures of 100 Boots (1971–73), Jonathan Borofsky’s dream texts and images, and virtually all of Laurie Anderson’s early ’70s performance and text works. Somewhat later, for a generation that seems to have spent most of its childhood watching television or shuffling the pages of Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Playboy, and Gentleman’s Quarterly, the master narratives encoded in literature were replaced by a master image reservoir located in the mass media, that produced the sense of an immense surfeit of images having no reference points beyond the constructed desires generating them. This led to the much overdis •

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cussed appropriations mode that was most effectively deployed by artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Sherry Levine, Barbara Kruger, and even David Salle, and was largely supported by fragments of late Modernist French theory. Both these modes—the performative, new narrative, and the appropriations mode flanked neo-Expressionism, which had in common with the new narrative, intermittent attempts at representation and, at least in its beginnings, a sense of a contingent and limited competence before whatever imagined reality confronted them. Because the one thing that unified most of the punk painting, bad painting, graffiti painting, Expressionist painting was its rudimentary technique, the near childishness of its means, and the pathos this evoked before the apparent cultural and psychic disasters it wished the weak instrument of painting to confront. But Morris had abandoned performance by the 1970s, his only experiment with narrative was The Art of Existence, and he generally avoided autobiography until he published “Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographies,” in Art in America in November 1989. In 1980, however, he turned to metaphoric representation—in giant installations whose most obvious property was magniloquence—a vast scale and a hugely amplified address on a commonplace theme. Are we to suppose that for a sophisticated artist like Morris an installation like the Preludes constitutes straightforward discourse? Each focal point of the installation is a proposal for a cenotaph. So consider the text silk-screened beneath the skull presiding over roller disco: cenota ph for a public figure The individual’s favorite possessions—the golf clubs, the shoes, the tie pin, the Ferrari, the bowling ball, the art collection, etc.—are carefully sawed in half. The edges of the cuts are filed or otherwise cleaned to reveal the precise cross-sections of the objects which are then embedded in a transparent plastic matrix. The objects are arranged so that the cross-sections face upward. The matrix forms a vast circular floor and a top layer of smooth, transparent plastic is poured as a finish surface. A large building is erected over this floor, the building is held up with a maze of elaborate wooden trusses. No pole or column intersects the floor. The appropriate Have Mind, Will Travel

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decor and sound system are installed. A suitable name is found. A discreet advertising campaign is initiated. Only the highest quality roller skates are allowed.

The golf clubs, the shoes, the tie pin, the Ferrari is a broad parody of royal burials like the Viking ship at Sutton Hoo. The texts are broad and sardonic and displace the semblance of solemnity of the installation, the way the skeletons climbing the twisted steel clouds of the Sonnabend show create a sci-fi disaster movie as they evoke the image of the drifting ruins of a wrecked space ship. “What were they looking for out there, Scotty?” In the Jornada del Muerto, helmeted black skeletons ride absurd phallic bombs. If we are looking at atomic disaster, we’re looking at it through a nearly comic book imagery. If these works seek to engage with social crises, they propose to engage through the most obvious of representational clichés. So they seem to position themselves in relation to the problematics of representation for a public art more significantly than they attempt to represent anything at all. And the sense they produce of an exasperated, communicative ineffectuality carries into the rest of Morris’s work of the 1980s through the decorative hydrocal reliefs that become fin de siècle frames for the sweetly colored Burning Planet paintings, which don’t function so much as paintings but as mere signifiers of “sublime” paintings reduced to the status of decoration—the nearly inevitable fate of this kind of expression, carried out here with the strong possibility of parody. But what do they parody? There are I think two possible readings. Since the frames suggest nothing as much as the German fin de siècle, German neo-Expressionism, particularly in its more expansive moments, as in Anselm Kiefer’s large, decorative, and essentially banal paintings, becomes a possible target. Parody works on whatever it’s closest to. Nerval walking a lobster in the Bois de Boulogne shared a walkway with any number of gentlefolk walking poodles. But Morris’s own ambitions for a grandly scaled, representational public art were even closer. Self parody is even more probable, especially if one remembers his 1974 S and M poster. Perhaps the work functions to parody both. But the paintings and drawings of the 1990 Corcoran show that produced the Smith review are in an entirely different vein. The paintings are literally large, often ten to twelve feet high or long, but the combination of images and texts that they’re composed of produces a rebus-like effect that discounts their size and makes them operate like oversize drawings. Because the image bank is drawn from a mélange of art history, popular magazines, and older works of Morris himself, even when their sources are obvious their emblematic significance is by no means clear, and is fur •

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ther complicated by the elliptical texts with which they live in an often enigmatic relation. If the hydrocal framed paintings were public, these paintings are not. They seem hermetic in their intentions, either deliberately puzzling like the products of a private emblem book, or analogs for memory or even, if one remembers Freud’s famous rebus metaphor for dream structure, analogs for dreams. The play of meaning in the drawings seems somewhat freer, where the voice of Wittgenstein speaks like an oracle among a floating mix of media images—Jackson Pollock, the Rosenbergs, Marian Anderson, Bernard Baruch?—meditating on the difficult relations between language and feeling and action. “For how can I go so far as to try to use language to get between pain and its expression” or “But the exclamation is so in a different sense from the report: it is forced from us—it is related to the experience as a cry is to pain.” The language is not hard to track the significance of, but the images are more indeterminate in their significance because their referential origins, more or less obscured by time, may count for less than their ambiguous appearance or the roles they play in a personal image reservoir to which a viewer can only have the limited access that we have in other people’s recounted dreams. We may have a fair idea of what the image of Jackson Pollock would count for in Morris’s imagination. But what does Marian Anderson count for? Or should we really ask what does the image of the black, openmouthed singer with the closed eyes count for? Passion? Expressive power? And is the pictorial position of this image, which is literally situated above three other images—of an earthwork, of a social grouping of people, of a struggling group in what looks like a swamp?—one of transcendence or distance? And what relation does this have to the Wittgenstein’s ironical line on the nonlogical power of experience, “Nothing could induce me to put my hand in the flame—although after all it is only in the past that I have burnt myself?” The paintings seem more simply structured, employing clear binary contrasts and mirror imaging, and sometimes they are much more obvious as in the comic diptych Enthusiastic for the Ratio, in which a great beast in a panel on the right sits quietly reading a very small book across from a “rationally” divided, colored panel on the left. Some, like the quadripartite Memory Is Hunger (1990), seem very simple and nevertheless are still not obvious. In her catalog essay, the curator, Terrie Sultan, identifies the title as a quote from Hemingway’s Movable Feast and the four figures distributed one to a panel counterclockwise as Goya’s Colossus, a somewhat blurred image of a Holocaust victim, a slightly dissolved version of Morris in his S and M poster, and a soldier (given the outfit he’s wearing, Have Mind, Will Travel

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it might as well be Hemingway in his guise as the Great White Hunter). Then there is the title printed across all four parts, above which printed somewhat indistinctly are the partially reversed and inverted Latin words ediscere (to learn by heart) and esurire (to hunger). If the relation between the white hunter and the dissolved image of Morris suggests a loss of power, and the Colossus contrasts with a victim the images of power and powerlessness, the title meditates on loss, on the grotesquery of both power and powerlessness, but the absence of connectives allows multiple relations between “to learn by heart” and “to hunger.” “To learn by heart is to hunger,” “to hunger is to learn by heart,” “all we learn by heart is hunger,” “we only learn by heart if we hunger,” and so on, through as long a sequence as we can or feel invited to imagine. So the parts are fairly simple and reasonably clear for an audience that can check a source and read a little Latin. But the relation of the texts to the images is at least as variable as the pieces of text to each other and this leaves the work with a clear but indeterminate discourse. But there is at least one work that is by no means this simple or this public. Time and Loss and Grief and the Body is a bipartite painting in which the image of a sailor, spyglass in hand, his feet anchored in the rigging of his ship and his body miraculously cantilevered out over the water is scanning the horizon for some distant sight on the right half of the painting, which is repeated on the left half in a more blurred image in which the sailor’s face has become a death’s head. The center of the painting bears the repeated words of the title painted in an illusory space over and under and overlapping each other. Sultan identifies the image and interprets it in a reasonable way, writing that the intensely athletic gesture of the leveraged figure of Buster Keaton, an image taken from the film The Love Nest (1923), represents an expression of searching and loss, a leap into the void that is also an act of physical prowess; to those familiar with the source, it also evokes a richly absurd humor. To those familiar with a second source of this image, its resonance doesn’t end here or simply in humor. The film still of Keaton appeared eighteen years earlier as an emblematic illustration for an essay by Yvonne Rainer, originally published in an issue of Les Levine’s Culture Hero devoted to Jill Johnston and reprinted at the back of Rainer’s book Work 1961–1973. Rainer’s essay is a nostalgic, comic and melancholy memoir recounting the intertwining of the two women’s lives and their complex relation in the art and dance world of 1960s and their eventual separation. It’s shot through with recollections of dancing, art making, parties, of breakups and reconciliations, accidents and illnesses, and through them flicker fragmentary memories of Rainer’s relationship with Morris and its ending. So the image of Keaton operates  •

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like an image in a dream, evoking not only Keaton’s athleticism and its loss, but through the association with Yvonne, the loss of a lover, the loss of a lover’s body, one’s own body, and the complex of youth, athleticism, creativity, and life that was the past. This painting, though fortuitously interpretable the way a dream may also be, is no more a public work than any other dream; and I suspect that there are other paintings and drawings like this among the works that were exhibited at the Corcoran. So where does this leave the question of authenticity? In spite of my own distaste for the biographical recuperative mode, the persona that emerges from Morris’s whole body of works is fairly consistent—a restless, ironic and intellectual artist who engages with whatever surrounding discourses happen to interest him and leaves them as soon as they cease to interest him. This kind of persona is very different from that of a Lewitt or a Judd, or even a Christo, whose works consist of a single stylistic gesture that is allowed to unfold over a wide field of manifestations. The recurrence of the gesture suggests a kind of persistence that occasionally verges on virtuosity within a narrow range of choices from the austere to the decorative. But it’s not as if Judd or Lewitt or Andre individually arrived at some idea of simplicity and elementary organization. Because it was not an idea, but a sculptural discourse with simplicity and elementarity that developed in the communal space of the American art world at the end of the 1950s, a discourse that for some artists seemed exhausted by the 1970s, though very few of those whose reputations had been made by it. And it’s hard to see why a persistent persona is more authentic than a nervously attentive and mobile one. A nomad is surely as authentic as a homeowner.

notes  Roberta Smith, “A Hypersensitive Nose for the Next Thing,” New York Times, Jan-

uary 20, 1991.  Ibid.  George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).  Roberta Smith, “The New Gustons,” Art in America, January–February 1978, 102.  Hilton Kramer, “A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum,” New York Times, October 25, 1970. For a full account of the controversy over Guston’s new figuration, see Robert Storr, Philip Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986).  For a general sociological account of art making and distributing networks, see Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).  Storr, Philip Guston, 47.  Many people saw these painted plywood objects as white. It was only later, when

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Morris had so persistently repeated his use of gray paint—to the point where it became something of a trademark—that the December–January Green Gallery show would be admitted to as not white but, in fact, “gray.”  Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” repr. in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 222–35.  Ibid., 224.  Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum (April 1968): 33–35; “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV,” Artforum (April 1969): 50–54.  Robert Morris, “American Quartet,” Art in America (December 1981): 92–105.  Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV,” 54.  Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” Artforum (April 1970), 62.  Ibid., 63.  The ad is reprinted in Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 94.  Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atllanticus, 391r, as cited in Serge Bramly, Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 174.  Robert Morris, “The Art of Existence: Three Extra-Visual Artists,” Artforum 9 (January 1971): 28–33.  Ibid., 30.  Ibid., 31–32.  Ibid., 33.  Ibid.  Ibid.  A more benign view of this work is taken by Maurice Berger in his otherwise excellent book on Morris: “In 1971 [in ‘The Art of Existence’] Morris parodied the critical fixation on creative and personal expression by devising an elaborated field of ‘biographical’ information about a group of fictitious artists” (Berger, Labyrinths, 103n10). The notion that this is a parody of something is suggested by the gradually mounting exaggeration of the accounts that evokes the figure of irony. But the direction and extent of the irony is not so easy to fix.  The letter is so curious that it is worth quoting in full (Artforum 9 [March 1971]: 8): Sirs: We may well be witnessing the twilight of Robert Morris’ artistic life. His article on three “younger” artists in your January issue seems to be an all-out attempt to put off the inevitable. He seems intent on assuring his place in the art of the ’70s, perhaps without contributing any of the products himself. By recognizing the lifestyles and works of three unknown artists, he attempts to reinvent himself once again and create a prototype of relevant activity through which he can survive another decade. He attempts a resurrection of his worn-out self through the unconventional nature presented by the three artists who, as explained by  •

Have Mind, Will Travel

Morris, wish to remain anonymous and outside the system. This kind of literary deception allows Morris to enter into a situation and come away with the essence while leaving the donors with nothing. His desperate need for recognition can barely be sustained by his present artistic activity. Morris has remained a rather amorphous figure who has had a great effect on contemporary esthetic. His intentions have been disguised to the present. The public is now on to him: rather than seeing him as the art world’s chief iconoclast, we choose instead to see him as a deceptive, yet pathetic, figure fading away. His past work has insured his credibility; time is his worst enemy. The public can no longer take him at face value, neither as a significant artist nor as a particularly sensitive weather vane. Most of those he has helped, as in the Castelli warehouse show, have sworn off further contact with him. He got these artists together in a formalized space, summed them all up, and put it all forth in a personalized form. Hardly responsible for that which he himself produced afterwards, his sense of politics and gift at manipulation, perpetuated this design. He has again done this through his involvement with the three artists in the article, as shown in the diagram taken from Marvin Blaine’s work . . . another piece of Morris’ art grafted from the thought and development of another artist. Mark Edwards Madison, Conn.  Ibid.  See Donald Kuspit, The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988).  Donald Kuspit, “The Ars Moriendi According to Robert Morris,” in Robert Morris: Works of the Eighties, exhibition catalog of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport, CA, 1986.  This was even true of Pollock. Clement Greenberg is very acute on this point. “Pollock was very much of a late Cubist as well as a hard and fast easel painter when he entered his maturity . . . Until 1946 he stayed within an unmistakably late Cubist framework” (Greenberg, “ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” in Art and Culture [Boston: Beacon Press, 1961], 217).  For a discussion of Morris’s Tate show and the variety of reactions to it, see Berger, Labyrinths, 121.  For a contemporary documentation of the declining fortunes of the object, see Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger Press, 1973). For a more recent critical interpretation, see Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance, The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).  Robert Morris, “Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides,” Art in America (November 1989): 142–51.  The proposal is illustrated in Metaphor, exhibition catalog of the Hirshhorn Museum, ed. Howard Fox (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1982), 58.

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 Inability to Endure or Deny the World: Representation and Text in the Work of Robert

Morris, exhibition catalog of the Corcoran Museum, ed. Terrie Sultan (Washington DC: Corcoran Museum, 1990), 50.  Ibid., 17–18.  Ibid., 18.  Yvonne Rainer, Work 1963–1973 (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974), 317.

 •

Have Mind, Will Travel

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

we tend to underestimate the elusiveness of language in the hands of both artists and critics rothko made many eloquent comments about art that is many compared to most artists and he wrote in a high rhetorical fashion but his comments all engaged with a number of issues that were available in the conversations going on at that particular time among the artists insider critics or intellectuals of the world in which he lived they were part of the scene when i arrived on the art scene i arrived in the late fifties as someone just entering into conversations with artists seeing artists studios i didnt start writing art criticism till around 1964 and i found the rhetorical cloud around rothko inadequate and tiresome his paintings seemed to fit too poorly in the expressivist rhetoric of abstract expressionism and just as badly into greenbergs quasi historical quasi formalist discourse and their popular access to a spiritual vocabulary was more than i could take it seemed melodramatic and unsupported by anything more than its own eloquence the paintings were certainly attractive but so what they invited close looking but i couldnt identify with any of the rhetorical systems surrounding them at the time a time during which i remember being attracted to the bluntness of frank stellas uninflected shields the repetitive bands of the black paintings seemed to me flatly assertive of a situation we were then confronting it seemed as if they were saying “all right this is the cultural situation we’re enduring this is the industrial world lets take a look at it” it seemed to me this was what the minimalists were doing although they may have been doing more than that so i come from the other side of this i was not originally an admirer of rothkos paintings i came to them later and after the fact on somewhat different grounds on these grounds i’d been invited to give a talk at a rothko conference

in san francisco last year and in the course of the talk i gave a brief account of some of what i took to be the real complexity of the chapel paintings after the talk an old friend bill berkson a new york poet and sensitive art critic of the period when tom hess ran art news and encouraged the kind of romantic and poetic criticism that characterized the magazine in those days but nevertheless a very sensible critic came up to me and said “david i was in the rothko chapel and those paintings just looked black” now i had seen them years before and i didnt remember them looking black at all i remembered them as suffused with color but i also remembered that another sensitive critic an intelligent critic whose work i knew fairly well arthur danto had also referred to these paintings as black now i have a great interest in fact a greater interest in fact than many art critics seem to have because art critics are involved not so much in description as in evocation and evocation is pretty much what language is best suited for we cant really describe a rothko we can talk about it but we cant really describe it in a certain sense you cant describe anything you can list some of its features and make some effort to say how theyre fitted together and by the selection of the features or the way you observe their connectedness you wind up with a representation but you cant describe it to someone who hasnt seen it or something very like it himself so I asked bill “what was the weather like when you visited the chapel” “as i remember” he said “it was raining heavily and it was a pretty cloudy day” “you didnt ask them to turn on the lights did you” he said it hadnt occurred to him that you had to ask them to turn on the lights now it turns out that the rothko chapel had a very odd relation to lighting rothko apparently had a great attraction to the idea of natural light for a while he was committed to having no other lighting in the chapel at all now the idea of being committed to having no other lighting in a place like houston where its muggy and rains often and was built over a swamp seems perverse and you wonder what you could expect to see on a day that was dark and cloudy you would have almost the same effect if you walked into a dark gallery in the late evening without any lights and tried to look at a bob ryman bob rymans white paintings would have become very gray and at certain times around midnight say you might have said “ive seen rymans black paintings” rothko was apparently willing to take this kind of chance but things worked out otherwise a supplementary lighting system was installed in the chapel but its light was provided apparently intermittently and in a somewhat mannerist relation to its necessity

 •

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

now i was in houston for some occasion i think there was some kind of meeting i would never go to houston otherwise i think it was a meeting of the college art association at which i was required to interview faculty candidates for my university which was the only reason i ever attended a college art association meeting and being there i figured i should go see the rothko chapel i’d seen rothkos before many of them and i’d viewed them with respect if not enthusiasm but this was a legendary work of very dark paintings with a controversial reputation in an out of the way place and i happened to be there so i went to look at them and when i walked into the chapel i was astounded by the fact that they were full of color dark color but color nevertheless when you walk into the chapel you usually enter from the south side the chapel is an octagon and you look directly in front of you to the north end where you see an apse and set back in this apse you see a triptych of three very dark panels theyre very dark but clearly marked by a painters hand lighting aside i believe its impossible for anyone other than a completely blind person not to see that these are painted panels that arrived at this level of darkness only after passing through a sequence of colored washes whose traces remain in unmistakable plum colored undertones that seem to be there no matter what you think youre looking at and i’m quite confused about how anyone can fail to see this whether you think this is important or not is another story because you can still say “so what” these paintings dont immediately command your attention they invite you to the possibility of paying attention by presenting themselves as a kind of gordian knot there are two ways to deal with a gordian knot alexanders way and a knot persons way in alexanders way he was presented with an incredibly intricate knot he takes a sword and cuts it in half this is the way of minimal art look theres nothing here there is nothing there but a severed tangle of strands yet you may be fascinated by the intricate sequence of over and underlapping strands and by the possibility of a coherent pathway that could turn it from a tangle into a knot that could somehow be decoded so you may be fascinated by the knot character of these works but why should i look at these black works why should i watch this process of adjustment of my eyes to this very dark set of panels the answer is that this is curious this man spent so many hours of his life working at this installation this is not a stupid man hes not an idiot and he worked for a long time dealing with this intractable range of visibility at the edge of invisibility that itself is somewhat fascinating how much of the darkness is a darkness you can see into how dark is

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

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the dark thats the first question i asked myself looking at this work and i’m using myself only as an example of a characteristic or representative person who didnt come with a bias for rothko which is apparently shared by many people there are apparently many people who can look at these paintings and instantly declare theyre being absorbed into the chaotic dark of the infinite night thats not exactly my response but i turned around and looked behind me i asked myself “whats behind me” now rothko who made some very acute comments about his work once said that he wanted his paintings to have the kind of presence that when you turned your back on them you felt them still there like the presence of the sun on your shoulders that may not be an exact quote but my memory will do because we will have to be dealing with memory anyway as we try to deal with the chapel its inescapable so i turned around and looked and there was a single panel reminiscent of rothkos classical paintings the stacked paintings theres a very visible reddish rectangle at the bottom that extends upward by two narrow vertical bands at its edges that continue and connect with a still narrower horizontal red band at the top of the painting to form a kind of window frame for a taller darker nearly black rectangle above it but this painting didnt have any of the subtlety of inflection that would have invited you to look at it very closely in the beautiful way tom crow inspected one of the classic rothko paintings it didnt have those drizzled edges and the remarkable tiny flecks of color this panel seemed to be there for a different reason sure if you walked up and looked at it closely you could find marks of its painting a hand is not a machine and even frank stellas can be regarded as having traces of a hand on them if only in the way the tape was ripped off after he sprayed the paint on if youre looking for a human hand youll find it even in a stella so clearly if you really want a hand in the painting in back of you you can find it i wasnt concerned about this i wasn’t about to justify it by handicraft or to demean it i was just curious why this painting whose format closely resembled the classic paintings was so uninflected and the only interpretation i could find for this painting was that it was there to remind us of rothkos earlier work and set up a kind of polarity on the north south axis between the uncompromisingly dark triptych on the north and the reminiscence of the classic work on the south from which he appeared to be taking leave and this made me wonder what is it he was taking leave of it for i felt myself surrounded by something i couldnt see all at once the very curious nature of the paintings with an apparent similarity to each other in their degree of darkness that were still not quite the same  •

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

how similar were the panels looking north from the south you could see the triptych set back in its apse and the two single panel paintings that flanked it on the angled walls to the northwest and northeast that were similarly dark and perhaps even less inflected were they equal in their darkness to the triptych or greater were they duplicates of each other without turning my head i could also take in part of either the west wall or the east wall each of which bore a triptych in which the central panel was slightly elevated above its two flanking panels so these triptychs are intended to contrast with the apse triptych in their darkness or degree of inflection? or only in their configuration are they the same or different from each other its hard to tell because you cant look at them at the same time now i had had an experience like this somewhat earlier nicco calas a very generous surrealist critic he was the one who got me to write the art chronicle for kulchur lita hornicks literary and art magazine he was an old friend of mine and nicco had at one point written or simply told me about a rauschenberg painting known as “factum 1” a colorfully spattered canvas that looked very much like an abstract expressionist work suggesting an impulsive and energetic application of paint not exactly a jackson pollock but still evoking an impulsive energy somewhat like that but then rauschenberg followed that work with “factum 2” which was an exact copy of “factum 1” undercutting the mythical status of spontaneity and improvisation in abstract expressionist work and demonstrating the absurdity of its claims because you cant really read the degree of impulsiveness or calculation in the work of a painter from the distribution of paint he cant be tracked by a critic the way the old frontier scout “shiftless sol” in altsheler novels used to track the passage of indians through the woods by how far apart the moccasin prints were and how deep or how disturbed the pathway was from which he could infer how long ago the indian had passed through how fast he was traveling how tall he was how much he weighed his sex his mood and everything but what he’d had for breakfast although some critics of pollock and de kooning seemed to read the mood of their indians pretty well but in this case they were defeated by rauschenbergs exact copy of “factum 1” in “factum 2” niccos argument sounded plausible to me i cited it in an article on harold rosenbergs criticism and then i had the misfortune of seeing the two paintings side by side “factum 2” is not an exact copy of “factum 1” if you bring the two of them together they look similar but different they look as much alike as any two paintings in a series that was generated by the same procedure in other words there appear to have the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

• 

been some casual rules for getting the painted marks onto the surface of the canvas a way of spattering from a row of paint cans containing different color paint lets say and they look about as much alike as any two paintings in such a series but they dont look like identical twins so i imagine nicco who is terribly smart somehow in my mind he feels present nicco was only doing what everybody does with memory remembering on the basis of a discourse he was himself involved in which was beginning to feel fatigue with abstract expressionism and somewhat exaggerating the ideological role of the rauschenbergs by a kind of hyperbole the two paintings were surely not generated the way a pollock was generated which i take it was generated partly by alcohol partly by an impulsive character and partly by an idea that painting was supposed to be an intensely energetic activity while the rauschenbergs were most likely done in a rather playful manner the procedure may have been as casual as certain jazz performances but not the super heated ones you dont have to imagine hot jazz you can imagine certain cooler jazz performances by someone like thelonius monk now monk may have been a very intense person but i’d lived in the village in the fifties and sixties and i’d seen him perform many times and in performance he had a playful and casual style in which he could get up and walk around the piano dropping occasional notes into the space like pebbles into a pond or leaning over and hitting a tone cluster with his elbow in a way that was lovely but never gave you the feeling he was being torn apart by his musical decisions and you can see that these rauschenbergs are somewhat like that and unlike the paintings in the chapel you can hang them on the same wall and look at them side by side while the chapel paintings call for comparisons that the shape of the chapel and the size of the paintings wont let you physically make what you want to do is figure out whether the four angled panels on the northeast and northwest southeast and southwest form a unit of similar or identical paintings and how they stand in contrast to the three triptychs of which the east and west triptychs form a subsystem in contrast with the north triptych so i kept trying to figure out how i could master the space but because this is a wrap around installation all you can do is go up and look closely at the individual panels and try to remember them as you retreat to a distance at which you can take in three walls at a time then turn and repeat this procedure with the other walls all the time struggling to remember exactly what it is that youve seen so it becomes a memory problem in which you begin to concentrate on trying to remember how intensely mottled is this panel with what shade of color how intensely mottled is that one and in what part of the canvas  •

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

nobody asked me to do this i wasnt there to make a report or to write an essay i was just trying to see what was going on and as i was doing this i thought i had it down there was a moment when i thought i had the whole thing down but then i realized that the light had changed i was there in the middle of a sunny day and a cloud must have passed and if a cloud passes overhead it changes what you can see i realized that a single cloud passing over the central light source could change the degree of visibility and color of the painting and this was beginning to make me very nervous as i was trying to figure out how i could discount the effect of the atmospheric condition on the lighting i am someone who likes to look at artworks for a long time i never understood the so called ten second glance i can look at a painting for an hour or maybe two if its the right kind of painting even though i’m not basically known as a critic of paintings i grew up on them and i’m used to looking at paintings for long periods of time if theyre worth looking at and these paintings became very worth looking at in fact i was becoming very excited by the problem of looking and trying to figure them out and i thought i’d even worked out a way to discount the atmospheric effects and even remember them but then i had a disquieting feeling i was thinking back to a time in the sixties when i’d seen the so called black reinhardts in a new york gallery ad reinhardt is simpler than rothko in the dark his darkness proposes a simpler paradigm his paintings are also not black paintings they invariably have blue and red undertones or more precisely theyre composed of very dark blue and very dark red but so close to black that it takes intense looking to reveal it i had written about this once for a german magazine called das kunstwerk many years ago and they work like this youre in a fully lit room with white or off white walls to which your eyes are accommodated by fairly narrow pupils but when you try to see into one of the dark paintings your pupils start to dilate but are afflicted by the glare of reflected light spilling into your field of vision from the white walls which stimulates your pupils to contract so you find yourself struggling to keep looking into the pool of darkness willfully struggling to keep your pupils dilated against any stimulus from the gallery light after a while this produces a kind of intense strain and you become slightly feverish from the strain and the feverishness of your feeling resulting from the eye strain produces a weird exaltation that becomes an analog for a kind of transcendence that is a fitful character of reinhardts painting but all of his dark paintings do the same thing this happens again and again and again with an insistency that reveals it as a parable for the transcendence of the art experience this is effective and powerful the the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

• 

rothkos are not that simple theyre equally dark and produce a similar eyestrain but they dont produce a feeling of exaltation what they do is produce a sense of anxiety as you begin to realize that what youre seeing after a long interval of intense looking has modified your ability to see the selective exhaustion of the dark registering nerves of the retina changes what you can see but you dont know how much so youre not sure whether what youre seeing youre seeing now with the same visual capacity that you saw earlier i was beginning to feel the stability of my self slipping as i found myself unable to stabilize my memory and i began to suspect that rothko was summoning me to another idea i dont know if he knew what he was doing i dont think artists always have to know what theyre doing artists often do more than they know theyre doing theres an interesting book with an intriguing title by stanley cavell called must we mean what we say that might have been called “can we mean what we say” i dont know if its possible to mean what we say i dont even know if its possible to say what we mean though these two questions are not equivalent its very hard to say what we mean or to know what we mean but its possible to move toward what we mean through language and thats in fact a job i engage with all the time and i know how difficult it is and how often i fail at it at least i think i fail at it i’m not sure about that either but the rothko is about the failure of the human ability to stabilize the world in relation to oneself while that self is in transition and failing as your eyesight is failing and your memory is failing and youre very gradually on a path that eventually ends in your dying as your eyes are fatiguing and your memory is straining to hang on to what you hope are the facts of the chapel and then you remember at least i remembered that rothko had been seen and described several times as staring long and intently into a sunset watching the declining light i dont think he was looking at the postcard beauty of the sunset nothing we know about rothko suggests that my friend doug messerli told me about a writing class he took once with isaac bashevis singer at the university of wisconsin it was winter it was late afternoon the classroom faced west and one sensitive student looking out the window suddenly cried out “my god look at that beautiful sunset” at which singer rose from the desk walked slowly to the window peered out and said “its doing it again” i’m afraid i also feel that way about sunsets i have no interest in the crepuscular and i suspect that rothkos attitude to sunsets was closer to singers than to the students at least i’m pretty sure he had a less than passionate interest in the sunset as a romantic moment  •

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

but there is nevertheless the question of the effect of declining light on visibility we have a lot of opportunity out here because we face to the west we once lived in a house on the bluffs right over the water in solana beach and we could hardly avoid seeing the sun go down and when you watch it theres always a curious perceptual question of whether the sun is slipping behind the ocean or sinking into it and then there is the dark that advances from the east coming to envelope the light in the west does the dark overtake it like a flood or mount as a barrier between us and the sun oh we know astronomically that the sun hasnt moved the light is still there and that really the shoulder of the earth has simply rolled up between us and the sun but the perceptual ambiguity remains the way on a dark night you can see the stars as glittering fragments applied to the surface of a black curtain or as small perforations opening onto a hidden world of light behind it and these ambiguities had something in common with the way of some of rothkos earlier paintings that often posed the question of where was the ground was it in the dark behind the light or was the ground in the light itself and sometimes it seemed that the upper part of a bright soft rectangle might lie behind the dark portion above it but in front of what seemed the same dark below it in ways that appeared to contradict common color theory the weirdness of the classic rothkos was that they seemed to produce situations in which every commonplace notion of color and luminosity got contradicted he has darks that seem like blunt interventions over passages of light and darks that seem to be giving ground to colored light welling up below them this is not the way of the chapel paintings but there is a long relation between luminosity and darkness that my friend sheldon nodelman in his marvelous book on the chapel invokes because of the history of light as a subject probably everyone knows the fanciful essay by panofsky dealing with the stained glass windows of the cathedral of st denis that traces its involvement with light back to sixth century neoplatonic writings on the theology of light light has always had a kind of imaginary power that can be invoked as an energy source but also as a blinding obstacle a fiery furnace a flaming vortex this is all part of the grand rhetoric of light that has its counterpart in pop writing and trash criticism which is not to be despised as bottom feeders nourished by fragments that float down from discourses above them because it may be that they well up from the bottom to nourish the elevated discourses above from sources in the womb of language itself in a certain sense we’re all bottom feeders working our way through the garbage dump of language language as we receive it is both a brilliant network of meanings and a garbage dump all the stupid history of human culture is embedded in our language along with the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

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most of its brilliance so we’re scavengers dealing with our garbage heap so when we’re dealing with the significance of light and dark in an artwork what part of the meaning network do we invoke do we draw on the sublime rhetoric of the physicists at alamagordo “brighter than a thousand suns” or the trashy image of the mushroom cloud that we saw all the time in the fifties which seems to have faded somewhat in the popular imagination with the brief moratorium on nuclear testing by the end of the fifties i suppose after all those years of mushroom clouds and air raid drills we got tired of the image of nuclear explosions and by the 1960s i dont think i knew anyone who gave a damn about the possibility of nuclear annihilation until the cuban missile crisis in 1962 and even then there was a kind of comedy about it i dont want to rehearse the whole scenario of adlai stevenson showing the nation unmistakable proofs of cuban missile sites in aerial photographs that were indecipherable on a tv screen but i was living about 130 miles out of new york in a town called north branch an old farming community in western sullivan county the russian ships were on their way bringing missiles to castro kennedy had threatened a blockade and i was standing in the bank at jeffersonville waiting on line to make a deposit when i got into a conversation with charlie summers a sweet guy who raised free roaming chickens and was also standing on line “charlie” i asked him “what do you think about the situation” “well” said charlie “if we have to have it out with them we have to have it out” “charlie” i said “how far would you say cuba is from new york city” maybe fifteen hundred miles he thought “and how far are we from new york” “about 120 miles as the crow flies” “what percentage error you think it would take for people to ask afterward why north branch was cubas prime target?” charlie turned white for the moment but he still had a schoolyard in mind and a bully you had to deal with not the blinding blast over hiroshima or nagasaki but there was another side to the luminosity of the nuclear explosion a romantic scientific side that carried along with it the promise of the unleashed energy of nuclear fission not merely the anxiety of the bomb the fifties may have been the age of anxiety for some people and probably to rothko to some extent but it was also an age of great promise of scientific and artistic breakthroughs the age of the semiconductor and the computer and also of rothkos classic paintings i was taught physics by a man who’d worked on the manhattan project he was one of the best teachers i ever had and my sense of the nuclear light was more  •

the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

mixed than this there was something wonderful about nuclear energy then it was a clean and inexhaustible source that wouldnt pollute the atmosphere with the hydrocarbons dirty climate destroying gases its just that its waste products would stick around for thousands of years and eventually kill you but there was a wonderful promise in this new radiance a kind of glowing in the dark thats still part of the metaphoric system we have to engage with as we try to interpret the paintings of the chapel whose darkness may be the inversion of these images of light still its not so much that the chapel is playing with this structure which it does do in the darkest part of the spectrum but the instability it evokes in you and your sense of your human fallibility it provides you a confrontation with a figure of your life experience of its contingency of how you cant control your fate because a cloud could pass overhead between you and the light that you cant control and you might not even notice or whats worse you cant remember i cant remember the face of my father admittedly he died when i was very young but still i’d seen his face i should be able to remember it i cant remember the face of some of my earlier girlfriends which is maybe more important than forgetting the face of my father i can call all of them up but i cant remember exactly what they looked like i can call up something like a schematic diagram i can pretend that i remember but to the degree that you cant remember that part of you has died and that part of you is dying thats losing its grip on what youve experienced so the chapel becomes a parable of dying not because of its somber coloring but because it requires you to remember and undermines your sense of your ability to remember and identify with your position as a spectator now this is the big change in rothkos work he wasnt doing this in the classic paintings though elements in some of the earlier work may have contributed to this way of looking and i suppose we could say that for several years he was moving along a pathway toward this way of working certainly from the seagram paintings though theyre more literary in their evocation of an entrance into an orphic underworld with their pompeian crimsons theyre a little more obvious than one might have wished and the harvard murals are also interesting along this line but the chapel paintings are purer and more uncompromising the seagram paintings are beautiful but theyre more obvious and theres nothing obvious about the chapel which is what makes it so effective its an uncompromising difficult and secular work challenging your possibilities as an observer and theres nothing seductive about it so that if you dont respond to its challenge thats fine theres something democratic and elitist the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

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about this work that doesnt give a damn if you dont want to experience it but if you try to experience it it offers you a confrontation with the existential condition that ultimately characterizes our experience in the world san diego 2003

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the existential allegory of the rothko chapel

Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

There is a well-known if not universally accepted modernist idea that an artist is consumed through use like food and that the more of him that is eaten the less there is left. This is an idea with ambiguous implications and has served mainly as a focus of opposition to an older idea of art and the artist as indestructible in proportion to their “greatness,” according to which the greater the artist, the more indigestible he is. Both ideas are based on facts of experience, one on the commonly observed phenomenon of a loss of appetite among art consumers for an artist who has fed the imaginations of a whole generation of diners, the other, on the long term durability of certain artists who, in spite of being “devoured” are periodically cast up again like indigestible pebbles. Probably no one could provide as good a test of these ideas as Marcel Duchamp. Toward the end of the ’50s, Duchamp’s then strange and evasive career seemed to offer pathways to a great variety of artists who saw the world ensnared in an obsessive concern with art as painting. Certainly Duchamp was not a painter, nor even a sculptor, at least from the point of view of 1955. Rather, an eccentric, an artist of the mind who on the basis of some very involuted strategies had produced a few curious paintings and mocking objects and played a lot of chess. And the word “produced” is a curiously inappropriate term for Duchamp, as inappropriate as the word “work.” For while labor may or may not have been involved in any given “piece” of Duchamp’s, it all seemed much less relevant than the idea of “a piece being offered” in a kind of uninsistent gambit. “Play” instead of “work” and a “game” instead of the seriousness of “art.” So Duchamp appeared as an indolent master who had given up art for chess. It may be hard to remember now, but Duchamp’s “body of work,” which was neither a “body” nor “work,” seemed much smaller then. This was before the publication of Lebel’s book in 1959, which lists only 208 pieces including juvenilia and ephemera, and long before the seemingly exhaustive

Schwartz volume of 1969, which ran the number up over 400. But because of the small body of work or, more precisely, because of the rationale that made it small, Duchamp became for the art world a manual of art tactics, the Clausewitz of the ’60s avant-garde. To the degree that they were known or understood his procedures were taken as paradigmatic and his objects as prototypes for the manufacture of art. For painters like Johns, Duchamp’s objects and constructions were the models of an absurd but logical grammar on which to base more paintings. For the sculptors they were sometimes paradigms, but even more often mere prototypes on the basis of which they tooled up and went into production. In this sense Duchamp seems not only to have been digested, but to have entered the blood stream and to have been excreted by the art world. And yet . . . “the personal ‘art coefficient’ is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” According to Duchamp this is “the personal expression of art in its raw state . . .” Yet also according to Duchamp, art in its “raw state” is indigestible. It has to be cooked or, in his words, “refined as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator.” If Duchamp was right this cooking leaves an indigestible residue, which in his metaphor would disappear. It is not so clear that this is what happens. After all the cooking and digesting, there are still the few peculiar constructions, eccentric objects and events, and the three boxes of documents along with a number of miscellaneous writings gathered together by Sanouillet and Arturo Schwartz and Richard Hamilton in their respective collections. The writing in particular does not seem to have been digested or even to be so digestible. Take a well known note from The Green Box: Employ “delay” instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in glass—but delay in glass does not mean painting on glass—It is simply a way of arriving at no longer considering the object in question as a picture—to make of it a delay in the most general possible way, not so much in the different sense in which a delay may be understood, but rather in the indecisive reunion of these senses. A “delay in glass” as one might speak of a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver.

What Duchamp has to say here is precise but nonetheless obscure. A delay of what, or more particularly, between what and what? Between some point preceding the Glass and some point following it, the Glass is an interruption of a temporary nature, a slowing down of some process or trajectory. A “silver spittoon” is a vessel fashioned of silver that temporarily receives expectorated materials that it will subsequently discharge into  •

Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

some drain. A poem in prose? What’s that? We may not be certain of what a poem is, but we know what prose is, more or less. Historically speaking the idea of prose, a Roman idea, was an idea of “straightforward talk” (prose = proversus oratio), which by a kind of folk etymology stood in direct contrast with verse (not poetry), verse (versos) imagined to derive from a verb vertere—to turn, and therefore “turned talk.” So verse was “roundabout” talk and prose was straightforward. Still, it wasn’t a question of prose or poetry. The turning of verse was the turning of lines. A poem was something else, could fit into verse or prose, a kind of mental entity or process. A “glass delay” in a mental process. Emptying from where into where? But a “retard” does not imply so clearly a temporary stop as the English “delay.” Rather a “slowing down,” a “deceleration” in a process that is continuing. For something like ten years Duchamp’s thinking “delayed” in the Glass and then passed, only to return in 1934 some twelve years later to the thinking as it was when it was hovering around the Glass. But this “thinking” was going on all the time and it was a particular thinking and had a particular character, some of which finds an obstacle to realization in the Glass. The Glass is a “delay” because it presents certain particularities, difficulties of realization for thinking. Some of the thinking is realized in the Glass, some of it takes on a particular and special form in the Glass, and is therefore only partially realized in it, and some of it escapes the Glass entirely. If Duchamp had intended to allow the “personal coefficient” to disappear, allowing whatever was realized in the objects to take their public place, there would have been no need to publish the documents, the three boxes of thinking (the Box of 1914, The Green Box and A l’Infinitif ). To be sure, these also take on the status of public art objects, but they are not easily digested at all. Consider a note from The Green Box (no. 19 in Schwartz): Establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes (air meters; imprisonment and rarefied air), in case of nonpayment simple asphyxiation if necessary (cut off the air) If this is a note for the Glass it doesn’t seem to be. There does not seem to be any context in which to relate it to the Glass or in which to conceive of its possible representation in it. The work it appears related to is the Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

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1919 construction 50 cc of Paris Air, which to be sure is made of glass. But the note itself, with its insistent articulation of the invisible medium we have only begun to recognize now that it is filling with ozone and lead and carboniferous impurities, does not seem to address itself to the same concerns as the bachelor machine. Apparently the now-vanished original piece had printed on a label the words “physiological serum,” which suggests that the object was constructed to represent a kind of “life insurance.” How long would 50 cc of Paris air last if your air was cut off ? (I once worked in a hospital repairing oxygen tents and I can testify it would not last long.) And by a kind of play on words it is possible to read Paris Air (a glass flask containing air) as a “delay in glass” also—a delay in dying. A short one 50 cc long. But ingenious readings of Duchamp objects are as common as weeds, and the mere fact that it is possible to find one or more plausible readings for any Duchamp object testifies to nothing more than the energy of the interpreters. The fundamental fact is that Duchamp’s boxes are containers of irreducible fragments that are presented as such. Consider note 20 in Schwartz: Conditions of a language The search for “prime words” (divisible only by themselves and by unity). This is part of Duchamp’s obsessive concern with language, manifested in many of the notes and throughout his work. But this hypothesis of words like prime numbers, what can it possibly mean? It is clarified somewhat by note 29: Take a Larousse dict. and copy all the so called “abstract” words, i.e. those which have no concrete reference. Compose a schematic sign designating each of these words. (This sign can be composed with standard stops) These signs must be thought of as the letters of the new alphabet. If these “Abstract” words are the “prime words,” what Duchamp was suggesting was that the fundamental words must signify fundamental relations, probably logical relations like implication, concatenation, negation, conjunction, and disjunction, or words like “if . . . then . . . ,” “and,”  •

Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

“not,” “or,” and so on, as well as a variety of relations implied as grammatical features of certain words or word orders, such as transitivity or reflexivity, etc. This is an idea of the fundamental underlying logical structure of mind and the consequent primacy of syntactical over semantic functions. What Duchamp seems to be suggesting is some sort of logical calculus of natural language. This becomes clearer as he goes on in the same note: . . . apart from the differences of languages, and the figures of speech peculiar to each, language weighs and measures some abstractions of substantives, of negatives, of relation of subject to verb etc. by means of standard signs. (representing these new relations: conjugations, declensions, plural and singular, adjectivation inexpressible by the concrete alphabetic forms of languages living now and to come.) However unsuited Duchamp’s vocabulary was for describing this, and however unclear he may have been about the implications of such a task, he seems to have been describing a proposed universal logical substructure for human language of the sort that has been proposed recently by the post-Chomskian left wing of linguistics. In Duchamp’s time only logicians and mathematicians had any interest in this subject and they were mainly concerned with its special application to mathematics. But Duchamp was not a logician or mathematician nor even a linguist, and the question that comes up is, “Why would he want to encode the fundamental structure of human linguistic mentality in an ‘artwork’ or ‘picture’ as he calls it?” It is true he never attempted to do any such thing, and he was obviously not competent to do it, as nobody else was or is. As a matter of fact, nobody has yet approached anything like a convincing analysis of the underlying universal structure of human language. But if it is obvious why he couldn’t do it, it is not so obvious, if one takes a standard artworld position, why he didn’t do it as well as he could. If for example such a speculation had occurred to Jasper Johns, and it most assuredly would not have occurred to him, it is quite certain that his insufficient competence would have presented no obstacle. Whatever rudimentary or absurd notation that Johns might have imagined, he would have employed in a painting. Because the notation and the speculation itself would have had no other purpose than to produce—by some means, then considered irrelevant to painting—another painting. In this context the “adequacy” Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

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or “inadequacy” of the notation would never have come into question. What possible significance could there be for Jasper Johns in anything that passed beyond the boundaries of art? No one can accuse Johns of interest in human mentality. It is a charge of which nearly the entire art world is totally innocent. Yet Duchamp was undeniably interested in this “unsuitable” idea and furthermore presented his discarded concern. It is an indigestible portion of his thought that perhaps connects with whole areas of indigestibility, at least for an art world that believes in the primacy (and self-sufficiency) of art. It is probably more reasonable to think of all of Duchamp’s pieces as “delays,” obstacles placed in the path of the mind, temporarily checking it or forcing it out of its former path and compelling it to seek some partial realization. They are “provocations” rather than objects; perhaps they are related to Duchamp’s idea of the “possible.” Possible represent a “possible” (not as the opposite of the impossible nor as related to the probable nor as subordinated to likely) the possible is only a physical “caustic” (vitriol type) burning up all esthetics or callistics A precise definition that removes the “possible” from its normal linguistic representation, which would consist of just those sets of oppositions that Duchamp has eliminated—the simple binary opposition of possible/impossible or the complex quaternary semantic field of probable/possible/improbable/impossible. Duchamp has laid out the only connotation he wants—the possible as a “physical caustic”—a provocation to change. One can imagine that for Duchamp there were two types of “possible”—a mental possible provoking an act, an unheard-of construction in the world burning away the normative (the aesthetically determined); the other sort of “possible,” a kind of obstacle thrust upon the mind from the outside like a foreign body. The proposals Duchamp makes to himself usually take the form of thrusting the mind upon some foreign body. “Make a painting of frequency”; “Take 1 cc of tobacco smoke and paint the interior and exterior surfaces with a water-repelling color.” Some are serious, some absurd. This use of the possible as a caustic is interesting because it is related to a fundamental idea of Duchamp’s. If we consider the “possible” without reference to “likeliness” as Duchamp suggests there are still fundamental limitations. Probing a wall, if you have  •

Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

a drill of a particular hardness and size, there may be any number of potential openings that you may make; but there are some places in the wall your drill will not be able to penetrate. This is an urgent consideration for a window-maker (a fenêtrier), which Duchamp admitted to being. What is it to make a window? It is to couple two distinct spaces in a limited way. It allows “vision” to pass through, but a window isn’t a door. It is a little alarming and at best somewhat foolish to go through a window. A door would “communicate” between rooms, while a window restricts the relation between the two spaces. It creates an ambiguous relation between them, which is why glass is an excellent medium for a window, since it is quite permeable to vision and inconvenient for the passage of bodies. The “pun” is another medium well suited for windows because it is an ambiguous (indecisive) coupling of two semantic spaces. Duchamp’s addiction to puns, spoonerisms, palindromes, and word plays of all sorts is well known. But the reasons for his interest in word plays is less well understood, so that it is worth examining a particular instance. Duchamp’s second window construction is called La Bagarre d’Austerlitz. It is well known that this title is a pun but the construction throws no immediate light upon what the second meaning of the title is. In fact the construction has no apparent relation to the obvious meaning of the title, The Brawl at Austerlitz, because it is merely a window with simulated brickwork and scrawled glazier’s marks on the panes. The construction itself is quite similar to Fresh Widow, which is a French window whose panes have been covered over with black leather, presumably because it is in mourning. Otherwise there are no clues. But if we take the similarity with Fresh Widow as a clue, by reading the French title once again with a slight difference in word and phrase juncture and without much phonetic alteration we can obtain the new title, La Bague, Garde d’Austères Lits (The Ring, Keeper of Austere Beds). This is a fairly probable reading, since it pulls the work together with Fresh Widow, though it does not have any obvious significant relation to The Brawl at Austerlitz, or more precisely, it has no convincing literary connection with it, save for the rather obvious likelihood that the “brawl at Austerlitz” produced a good many widows. Now it is an interesting fact that Duchamp’s puns usually are not coupled by strong literary connections. There are two distinct meanings generated by one graphemic representation. Which means that the two meanings (spaces) are not reshaped into one space, which would be something like breaking down the wall between two rooms. In Duchamp puns, neither of the two meanings assumes primacy, e.g., The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même), which also yields the well-known alternate reading, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

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Loves Me (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires m’aime). There is equal value in both readings because it is paradoxical that the (hopeless) “bachelors” should prepare the “bride,” and it is also interesting to see the artist (the titler) introduce himself into the bride quest. But neither reading is the “real” meaning, because there is no “real” meaning, because a “real” meaning suggests opening a door from one space into another and going through, that is to say, leaving one room for another. As Duchamp shows in his well known door piece (Door, 11 Rue Larrey), if you open a door you also close one. Again, the role of the window-maker was quite precise. It was even more precise than this, because a window allows vision continuous vacillation between the related but separated spaces, so that both separated sides of the window pane remain in the mind. Perhaps this is the fragile literary nexus between Fresh Widow and “French window.” At first sight they appear to be related by a slip of the tongue, a mere deletion of the “n” phone from both words, but if the mind is allowed to play upon “window” and “widow” it is tempting to extract from both lexemes a semantic feature of separation. The “widow” is a separated existence and the “window” separates. The image of the “widow” seems to have replaced the image of the (unmarried) “bride” and the “bachelors.” A “widow” as a darkened “window”? And the darkened panes of the Fresh Widow are replaced by the artist glazier of La Bagarre d’Austerlitz. It is marvelously poeticized. But there is an odd morality of isolation in this series of speculations upon communication and mind that Duchamp’s work seems to embody. The concerns with language, with transparency, with couplings, seem to hover about the ambiguous implications inherent in the ideas of human communication and knowledge. These human concerns stand outside the art world undigested and perhaps not digestible.

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Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder

Allan at Work

I’ve known Allan for such a long time, it’s hard to remember not knowing him. But before I knew him, I knew about him—the way most people in the art world knew about him, even if they hadn’t seen any of his early Happenings. I was already writing the “Art Chronicle” for Lita Hornick’s magazine Kulchur. Jerry Rothenberg and I were publishing some/thing, a poetry magazine we aimed to be open to experimental work across the arts, and I was talking to Robert Morris about using one of his lead pieces for a cover. We were going to print the scenario for Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and the text of some of George Brecht’s micro performance pieces. Bob suggested we might also want to include some of Allan’s work because he was interested in myths. I wasn’t sure what that meant or why Bob thought we were interested in myths. Maybe he thought that’s what poets were interested in. Or maybe he figured all artists were interested in myths—the Pop artists and Minimal artists in the myths of contemporary industrial and commercial culture—and Allan and Dine and Rauschenberg and Warhol in its detritus. When I got to meet Allan not long afterward, it was at the Factory, Warhol’s old studio, where I was going to get Andy to do a cover for the anti–Vietnam War issue of some/thing, We weren’t going to pay anything but, like most artists we knew, Andy was against the war, and I was writing an essay on his work for ARTNews. It was to be the first friendly notice Tom Hess would allow in the magazine, so I had a kind of claim on Andy’s attention. Allan was there with Ileana Sonnabend, who’d been considering underwriting a series of Happenings with a view to finding a way to make money out of them. But realizing there was no way she could market them, she took Allan to dinner instead and brought him along to the Factory, where she wanted to buy some Warhol prints. I believe she introduced us and then turned to talk business with Andy, while we exchanged a few words and waited for her to finish.

The place was filled with goofy activity. The walls as everyone knew were lined with aluminum foil. A horse standing by a pile of fresh manure was munching hay near the elevator. Nico was surrounded by a crowd of half naked teenagers shepherded by Gerard Malanga, who Warhol would turn to intermittently and give very precise instructions about mixing colors for the prints he was supposed to prepare. Nico was holding out a microphone and the kids were trying to improvise a soap opera. She offered me the microphone but I pushed it away and told her I’d have my say in print. Ileana finished and went off with Allan and I had my conversation with Andy, who was willing to do the cover and suggested a Vietcong flag. “What do we know about the Viet Cong, Andy?” I suggested we knew more about America and should do an American Legion slogan like “Bomb Hanoi.” That way everybody who was for the war would read the issue. “Great,” said Andy and I went away. The first time I saw Allan in action was at a performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera Originale in Carnegie Recital Hall, for which Karlheinz had persuaded Allan to play and act as the director. I don’t know what the German version is like, but in the American version that Allan seems to have put together himself with a little help from Charlotte Moorman, it was a carnivalesque affair with lots of things going on at the same time, lots of props—ladders and scaffolding, a trapeze hanging from the ceiling and lots of colorful people—the “originals” of the title—wandering in and out. There was a kind of audience, mostly on the stage at the end of the hall, while the action was down on the floor. Jackson Mac Low and I, who were recruited to simply read poetry no matter what happened, were seated at the edge of the stage. So we had an excellent view of the proceedings. Allan in his usual jeans was up on a scaffolding, whispering through a bullhorn, apparently to Jill Johnston who was having some kind of difficulties and had chosen this occasion to freak out. A woman came in with a whole bunch of cats and dogs on leashes tied to her waist. Bob Brown came in a kind of airport firefighting outfit and set off some smoky flares. Outside the building George Maciunas, who had decided that Karlheinz was a Nazi, had organized a tiny Fluxus protest of about six people with placards. Nam June Paik had to do something on the roof, but got kidnapped by two of Allan’s students and handcuffed to a fence. Allen Ginsberg came in looking like a professor out of a 1920s German movie with a little concertina and started a Hare Krishna chant. Allan in his role as director dispatched the willing members of the audience—mostly teenage kids—to find whatever scrap materials they could in the street and come back and build themselves a shelter. A few of the early birds came back hauling junk and bearing messages that the scavengers were wrecking and tear •

Allan at Work

ing things apart all along 57th Street. Allan went down to look and found Maciunas’s strike. He picked up a placard and started to picket alongside Maciunas and Henry Flint. George tried to shoo him away but Allan persisted till George stopped protesting. Then Allan came back upstairs and directed the rest of the seemingly chaotic work to its end in as quiet and orderly a way as he could. The first work of Allan’s I actually got to see was one of a series of Happenings he put together out on Long Island, uncharacteristically under the sponsorship of CBS. This one was on the Montauk bluffs, which at this site dropped abruptly sixty or seventy feet down to a rocky shelf of beach that extended no more than ten yards to the sea. At the bottom of the bluffs about twenty yards apart were two black polyethylene tepees. The script was simple enough. A group of volunteers provided with staves would go down to the small beach, assemble by one of the tepees and at a given signal start trekking across to the other. At that moment, firemen assembled on the bluffs above them would fire from pressurized tubes a vast amount of plastic foam, that would flow down the bluffs, engulfing the volunteers and make its way to the ocean, where it would blend with the white foam of the surf. But things got complicated because of the CBS sponsorship, and the involvement of the fire and police departments. The firemen were part of the event and were going to be on camera. The police were not. This seemed to irritate the police and they took out their irritation by misdirecting people or turning them away. Since CBS was sponsoring the event in order to film it, they undertook to direct the action but they had nothing like Allan’s calm. A very officious guy with a bullhorn kept ordering people in and out of the camera frame and kept changing his mind. “Everybody on the left move back! Everybody on the right move to the left! Everybody on the left move to the right! Everybody on the right move forward!” This was beginning to get on Allan’s nerves and I heard him muttering to himself “One more order from him and I call the whole thing off.” But the volunteers eventually descended to the beach. Elly—my wife—was in an activist mood and descended with them. They gathered around the black tepee on the right and at a signal from the guy with the bullhorn they started forward. He signaled the firemen and the foam cascaded down the bluff like a white lava flow. The volunteers were engulfed and Elly, who is very small, momentarily disappeared but rose up again covered with foam as the white flood rolled down to meet the surf. If this was the mythical look Bob Morris had in mind, it was pretty grand, but a homemade version of a Cecil B. DeMille spectacular in which the Israelites get engulfed by the flood. And it should have worked out as picturesquely for CBS, though Allan at Work

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they had a poor camera angle. There was a lone surfer out in the water who’d been hanging around all day, who had the only good angle. With a hand-held camera he could have had the perfect take. But like the true professionals they were, the CBS guys never thought of him. They put the wrong film in the camera anyway, and the whole event never got onto the screen. The Montauk piece may not have been the most typical of Allan’s early works, but it still displayed some of their fundamental characteristics. It was a painterly spectacle built out of the play of semiological oppositions and parallels—natural and synthetic, black and white, high and low, earth and water. The plastic foam and the white surf were nearly identical in color but offered the sharpest opposition between the natural and the synthetic. The black plastic tepee skins stood in sharp contrast not only to the natural white foam of the surf and the brilliant blue water, but also to the synthetic white foam of the fire retardant; and the polyethylene, which was as shiny as a black plastic raincoat, also stood out in “logical opposition” to the “natural” Native American housing form within which it was being deployed. The poles that formed the tepee skeletons were not “primitive” skinned tree branches but modern industrial products. So was the wood of the “archaic” staves employed by the participants on the beach, who were uncostumed and wore whatever mix of everyday clothing they happened to come in. Finally, the natural setting—the bluffs, the gullied slope, the deserted stretch of scree-covered beach, and the ocean stood in clear-cut opposition to the plastic foam, the cannons that fired it, and the whole assemblage of firemen, police, TV people and the milling crowd of spectators up above What was most striking about the Montauk piece was the sharp discrepancy between the grand scale, glamorous image that was its final result and the extreme simplicity of the logical means employed to generate it. In retrospect it seems to have marked a turning point in Allan’s work. Most of the American artists’ Happenings of the late fifties and early sixties—works of Allan, Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Ken Dewey—emerged from the experience of painters and sculptors and constituted an enrichment and expansion of their field of action from the virtual space of the gallery wall and off the base of traditional Modernist sculpture out onto the floor and into the environment, even when the environment was only the spectator’s standing room in store front or loft galleries. What they shared with historical Dada predecessors like Schwitters and Arp and Ernst was a collage sensibility that they thoroughly radicalized. What was their own was a colloquial vocabulary drawn from the midcentury urban American industrial  •

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landscape they inhabited, a Pop-Art sense of vernacular experience, and a carnivalesque desire to break down and obliterate the barriers separating art, audience and artist. The works, whether carefully scripted or sketchily programmed and partially improvised, were experienced as big, messy, noisy, and multiform. The Montauk piece was nothing like this. It may have been spectacular but it was precisionist and minimal in design and construction. The stave bearers assembled by one tepee. At a signal from above they moved forward. The foam rolled down the bluffs and engulfed them. They emerged from the foam, made their way to the other tepee and the piece was over. In the end it was experienced as a single image. This precisionism became more and more obvious as Allan’s work moved away from its fifties New York origins. The very next piece after Montauk was done in the Los Angeles area on the occasion of a retrospective of his works that was being mounted by the Pasadena Art Museum. Fluids had a lot in common with the Montauk work. It called for the construction at fifteen different sites around the Los Angeles area of a series of roofless rectangular structures to be built out of blocks of ice. The plan was large scale in conception because there were fifteen sites and the buildings were sizable—seventy feet long, ten feet wide, and seven feet high. But they were minimalist rectangular structures so thoroughly separated from each other across the far-flung extent of the Los Angeles basin that no one could see more than one at a time. During construction they presented passers-by with the scene of a team of workers laboring to erect a bizarre ice structure of obscure purpose, which on completion presented the gleaming image of a minimalist igloo slowly melting in the brilliant Southern California sunlight. Of course the image of the pristine, completed structure was only one of a whole sequence of images that the work generated between initial construction and final meltdown, which like most of Southern California’s architectural history, vanished without leaving a trace. But the image character of the piece, while very striking in a way that many of Allan’s pieces had been and would occasionally be, was not its only important feature. There was the conceptual art aspect of the piece that challenged the single-site theater of traditional artworks by distributing itself in the form of multiple “replicas” scattered across a broad geographical area that could only be held together on a map or in the mind. This was a mode that Allan employed before and would employ again, but was less important in terms of his artistic career than a much less conceptual and much more concrete aspect of the piece—the experience of the work involved in making it. Building the seven hundred–square-foot, seven-foot-high enclosure Allan at Work

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out of blocks of ice was a difficult job for the dozen or so art student workers who had been enlisted for each site. The ice blocks were heavy and cumbersome and cold. They had to be carefully fitted into place to make the building truly rectangular on a ground that had not been carefully leveled beforehand. Each worker had to adapt his or her work pace to the other members of the team. And everyone working on the piece had to deal with all the particular difficulties and contingencies that any serious construction job would entail without being able to rely on the established tools and techniques of the building trade because they were using an unfamiliar material. Yet all this effort was expended for its own sake and voluntarily by each worker, each of whom had to have some strong feeling of accomplishment on completion of a work that they all knew had no other purpose than to be built and then melt away. Ever since the days of public exhibitions there has always been an inside audience and an outside audience for works of art—the people closer to the concerns of the artists and the people who seem to have just wandered in from the street. This was as true of the Happenings in their storefront galleries as it was of a Franz Kline show at Egan or a Pollock show at Betty Parsons. In the days of the early Happenings the inside audience consisted primarily of the artist’s friends and associates, some of whom helped carry the work out. But over the course of time for Allan’s Happenings the inside audience became insiders in a new way. Unknown volunteers took over the participatory insider roles originally played only by Allan’s friends. They became the workers who collaborated with him to make the work happen. In a sense this was a democratic elite, because anyone could enter it simply by volunteering. But by entering into the work as participants, this group of insiders became insiders in a more profound way, because their experience of working came to be a very large part of the work’s aesthetic content. Over the next ten years of Allan’s work, this insider audience would come to be the only significant audience. The contingent audience of outsiders would be eliminated altogether or relegated to the very margins, and the experience of the work essentially restricted to the team or individuals who were so far inside the work they would have to be regarded as collaborators or co-creators. This desire to eliminate an outside audience was widely shared by the sixties avant-garde theater artists of all kinds, ranging from the minimalist Judson dancers to Living Theater and most of the Happenings artists. But Allan’s shift from construction of some sort of painting-derived theater to the triggering of a self-reflective articulation of a particular experience had other roots. Consider this passage from John Dewey’s Art as Experience.  •

Allan at Work

A man does something; he lifts, let us say, a stone. In consequence he undergoes, suffers, something: the weight, strain, texture of the surface of the thing lifted. The stone is too heavy or too angular, not solid enough; or else the properties undergone show it is fit for the use for which it is intended. The process continues until a mutual adaptation of the self and object emerges and that particular experience comes to a close. What is true of this simple instance is true, as to form, of every experience. The creature operating may be a thinker in his study and the environment with which he interacts may consist of ideas instead of a stone. But interaction of the two constitutes the total experience that is had, and the close which completes it is the institution of a felt harmony.

Substitute “ice blocks” in this text for Dewey’s “stone” and you get a very good description of the experiential aesthetics of Fluids. Now it may seem odd to invoke a philosophical work on aesthetics to illuminate the work of a practitioner of what Allan has insistently maintained was a program of “un-art.” But Art as Experience, which Allan had apparently read very carefully, offers a theory of experience that is at least as interesting as its theory of art—and maybe more interesting for Allan’s work. For Dewey all experiences have a common form, a narrative form, because, as he sees it, an experience is not continuous or instantaneous, but an articulated whole with a beginning and end that enclose a sequence of engagements between a desiring subject and a resisting object that comes to some kind of definite resolution. It is this common form of what Dewey calls all true experiences that lets him argue that all experiences have an aesthetic component. In his later work Allan takes this argument and runs with it, so that triggering concentrated, self-conscious reflection on any action undertaken, say vacuuming a floor or brushing one’s teeth, will become a way of making art, which Allan calls “un-art” because he prefers actions drawn from the colloquial sphere of human experience. In practice, however, Allan’s choices of actions are not so generalized and require more precise examination. Taking up the role of work in Allan’s pieces from Fluids on, Jeff Kelley reasonably enough invokes Walter de Maria’s 1960 proposal for a program of “Meaningless Work” that made its first appearance in 1963 in the Fluxus-oriented Anthology edited by Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young. It’s a Fluxus-type proposal, polemical, absurd and serious, that defines meaningless work as “simply work that does not make you money or accomplish a conventional purpose” and offers as examples—filling a box with wooden blocks, moving them to another box, and putting them back again; digging a hole and then filling it up; filing letters in a cabinet and Allan at Work

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periodically spilling them out onto the floor; etc., and cautions against activities like weight lifting, which though monotonous is not meaningless in his sense because it gives you muscles, and warns against sex, as against other forms of pleasurable work, because the pleasure could come to be understood as its purpose. According to de Maria, meaningless work is “potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art-action-experience one can undertake today” (italics mine). “This concept,” he adds, “is not a joke.” And indeed it isn’t—or isn’t completely. In fact, the main reason to consider it a joke is its name. Beneath the comedy, what de Maria was really proposing as the new artwork was a self-referential action. This was simply an extension of the idea of an artwork as a purely self-referential object—that is to say, an object having no other significance than to be reflected upon in terms of its structure, materiality, etc. Only in this case the object was an action. De Maria’s proposal was an early literary manifestation of an idea that had been percolating for a while in postwar avant-garde art circles. Among the younger artists of the time there was a great exasperation with the grandiose referential rhetoric that surrounded Abstract-Expressionism. They had lost patience with the notion of inner turbulence supposedly expressed by the paintings of Pollock or de Kooning or the mythical universals supposedly addressed by Rothko and Newman. They replaced the notion of external reference with a blunt version of a very old idea—that a painting was a flat surface with paint on it and sculpture a real object of definite materiality, shape, and form, whose entire significance derives from contemplating its material and formal characteristics. Now much, maybe most, of the significance of traditional artworks from Rembrandt portraits to Steinberg cartoons derives from their stylistics, but most criticism of these works will attempt to relate these self referential aspects to the targets of the representation. Even the critical discourse surrounding completely Abstract painters like Mondrian and Kandinsky usually attempts to find some external reference in theosophical doctrines or internal psychic states. But what distinguished the younger post–Second World War generation was their absolute exclusion of external reference and their total commitment to self-reference. The notion of the self referential object was so popular among the Minimalist sculptors and the Pop and Hard-Edge painters of the sixties that it came to serve as a necessary if not sufficient condition for an artwork. By the early seventies it had become nothing less than a mantra for conceptual artists and structuralist filmmakers. But even if Allan shared this idea with most

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of his friends, the full meaning of his interest in work is not adequately described by the notion of the self-referential action. First, it is probably better to think of the work done in Allan’s pieces as liberated work rather than meaningless work. It was work undertaken freely by volunteers for no purpose other than to be experienced and reflected upon—whether it was lining a roadside with tarpaper and cinderblocks, or refurbishing a deserted landing strip, or breaking rocks in a quarry, covering them with aluminum foil, or building wooden scaffoldings on the sandstone promontories of Vasquez Rocks. All of these actions were pointless in the manner of de Maria’s examples and their pointlessness was often emphasized by their reversal. There was, however, another way in which they were in accord with the proposals of both de Maria and Dewey. They were all actions that provided a definite sense of closure and completion, and a real if absurd achievement. There were no attempts to lift immovable objects or resist overwhelming forces. But beyond their formal properties, virtually all of Allan’s work choices were notably absurd. Absurdity is not a formal characteristic and it is not part of a self-referential reading. It derives from the way a given action, situation, or utterance fits or, more precisely, fails to fit, dislocates or disrupts some conventional stable cultural and social understandings, to which it must be referred to have any effect at all. So Allan’s work choices were inevitably referential by implication. Even If the frames of reference were not always completely determinate, the edge of absurdity was usually very sharp. Building rectangular igloos in sunny Southern California is terribly funny, as funny as planting palm trees above the Arctic Circle. Building a low cinder block wall, using bread and jelly as mortar was absurd in its own terms (Sweet Wall), because the mortar was nonsensical. But building it in Berlin in 1970 within a short walking distance of the grim Berlin Wall and then casually knocking it over had something of the same comedy effect that the Phil Ochs’s song “I Declare the War is Over” had in the context of our endless Vietnam War. But while Allan’s work choices almost always involved some action or outcome that was absurd, they weren’t always funny. A two-person game of “follow the leader” in which the follower had to keep on top of the leader’s shadow (Tail Wagging Dog, ca. 1981) could be stately and silly or exhausting and grotesque as the leader turned slowly or quickly in relation to the position of the sun and the follower ambled or scrambled after him. The absurd has remained a basic feature of Allan’s work, but its role transformed as the work developed and changed in the seventies and eighties. Work isn’t always physical and mental work can be as arduous as man-

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ual labor and, as Dewey points out, has the same experiential form. A certain precisionism in Allan’s character and developments in the culture and in his life in the seventies led him to devise a series of two person pieces involving Edward Hall–like engagements with formalized interpersonal relations. In some, like the three Time Pieces of 1973, the only work required was the concentration necessary to monitor and tape record one’s pulse rate (Pulse Exchange) or one’s breath rate (Breath Exchange) or both (Pulse-Breath Exchange) and climbing some stairs. But in a manner typical of Allan’s two-person pieces, the actions involved a series of escalating encroachments on each participant’s sense of personal space, accompanied by increasing degrees of absurdity. In the pulse piece, initially separated partners were required to monitor and tape record their pulse rates and listen to the recordings, to telephone each other and count out their pulse rates to each other and play the tape recordings, then to meet and climb some stairs together, repeating the process of monitoring, counting, tape recording and listening. In the case of the Breath Exchange this encroachment went somewhat further, because the two partners, who initially breathe into the telephone for each other, concluded by getting together and breathing into each other’s mouths for several minutes. In the final Pulse and Breath Exchange the piece concluded with the partners breathing into plastic bags so that each partner can inhale the other’s packaged breath. The required encroachments were certainly absurd and could, of course, be carried out in a great variety of ways ranging from the perfunctory or clinical to the farcical. But in the climate of the time these obligatory intimacies also evoked an image of erotic possibilities that could be counted on to produce a great variety of responses, depending on the character and personality of the partners. These intimacies may have been quite mild in Time Pieces, but they were more strongly marked in Comfort Zones (1975) and Satisfaction (1976). That Allan was quite aware of this is apparent from what he wrote to introduce the booklet documenting Comfort Zones. Everyone has an invisible bubble around their bodies. Among its uses, the bubble limits just how close someone may approach before one feels uneasy; it also precisely limits one’s approach to another. Among friends the bubble can shrink to a few inches while in public it may expand to twenty feet. In any case the bubble is always changing in encounters between individuals and groups.

While the encroachments required of the partners in Comfort Zones were quite formalized, the long durations of close-range eye contact and  •

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intense touch, the ritualized slow and rapid comings together, evoked intense responses from the seven couples participating, that ranged from newly discovered antagonisms to tenderness and even visionary states they were unprepared for. The erotic possibilities remained absurd but became even more explicit in Satisfaction, where the couples were turned into quartets, in which one member of the first couple, A, is instructed to request “satisfactions” from B. At the beginning of the piece A and B are separated, and A’s requests for attention are made telephonically, but then they get together privately and A’s requests for satisfaction are more intense. praise me (or) look at me (or) comfort me (or) feed me (or) kiss me (or) bathe me showing how B answering: unhh-hunh (or) unh-unh complying if agreeable For these requests and responses A and B are alone together in some private place, but later they are joined by a second couple, C and D, who come to witness and encourage the first couple and demonstrate for them ways to realize the same sequence of requests, which the members of the first couple can always choose to reject or comply with in a great variety of ways. While the piece was designed with all the formal patterning of a seventeenth-century court dance, subsequent discussion by the members of the four quartets who participated reflected a wide range of responses running from the farcical to the emotionally disturbing. Since the audience for these “couple-pieces” consisted entirely of the participants and since Allan’s only interest was in their working experience, post-piece discussion assumed great importance. In the earlier works subsequent discussion was casual and random, but in these pieces Allan at Work

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it became as formalized a part of the work as the postgame wrap-up of a televised football game. Although Allan tape recorded and transcribed many of these sessions, he never developed an adequate method for representing them. So while they have an electronic archival and textual existence, knowledge of them is mostly anecdotal and depends on the memory of the participants, to whom the post-piece discussion probably offered a kind a formal closure. As a participant in the Satisfaction piece I can testify to the mix of comedy and disturbance reported in the postpiece discussion at the M.L. D’Arc Gallery in April 1976, though I don’t remember many of the details. Though the couple-pieces of the mid-seventies were extremely interesting, they might have simply disappeared after their execution if Allan had not worked out an ingenious method for representing them. For many of these pieces he prepared a booklet—either at the urging of the sponsoring gallery or institution or out of his own desire to memorialize them—combining a very spare group of phrases indicating the actions with a series of photographs illustrating plausible ways of performing them and some prefatory or postscript authorial material. The texts were highly formalized, with the appearance and feeling of short poems. This was a textual form Allan had already employed by 1966 in the Great Bear Pamphlet, “Some Recent Happenings”: r aining

Black highway painted black Rain washes away Paper men made in bare orchard branches Rain washes away Sheets of writing spread over a field Rain washes away Little gray boats painted along a gutter Rain washes away Naked bodies painted gray Rain washes away Bare trees painted red Rain washes away The newer scenarios were as spare but interacted with the photos to turn the booklet into a novel kind of “Concrete poetry.” The photos them •

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selves were not documents of any performances, but deliberately staged either before or after the associated performance and played with a lowkey comedic intent that acted as a kind of disclaimer of their documentary veracity. Allan’s textual experiments with his scripts in the mid-seventies led to more radical approaches for offering instructions to performers. Three pieces from 1976—Pre-Socratic, Frame Works, and Frames of Mind—were the most extreme examples of this. In Pre-Socratic, which may have been the most enigmatic, the first page consists of nothing more than one laconic participial phrase, two present participles and two adverbs: telling a story of night and day clearing (enough) obscuring (enough) The second page offers a brief account of water loss extracted from some text like Cannon’s Wisdom of the Body, describing sweating by people and dogs, and a short account of the way desert travelers can save their lives by trapping condensation from the cold night air in a covered can. This is followed on the same page by the word “realizing” and four repetitions of the participle “sweating,” each bracketed by sets of two parenthetically opposed adverbs: (more) (less); (with) (without); (then) (now); (before) (after). While the scripts have textual affinities with George Brecht, the suggestion of narrative and the way in which the script offers itself up for interpretation is quite different. The script seems deliberately poised to emphasize the effort of interpretation on the part of the participants. This becomes the fundamental “work experience.” The second page of Pre-Socratic seems the easier to interpret because the sweating can be accomplished by fairly simple successive physical acts by any one of the participants or simultaneous, contrasted physical acts by two or more participants. The first page is more difficult. Although it seems clear that it requires one or more of the participants to tell a story either involving night or day or appropriate to one of these two times of day in the manner of Indian raga music, it isn’t at all evident how to interpret the “clearing” or “obscuring.” It isn’t evident whether they suggest clearing up or explaining the story or erasing its emotional effect, or deepening, complicating or casting some kind of cloud over it or its effects. Frame Works is a couple piece whose script consists of two short anecdotes: the first, one of those heartwarming stories from the AP wire that Allan at Work

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newspapers use as filler, about a woman who placed an ad looking for her long lost brother. “I am looking for Eddie Brown. Close to 50 years of age. I’m his sister. His last address was Hibbing, Minn.” A man saw the ad and telephoned. She asked him “Do you have any information about my brother?” “He’s speaking,” said Eddie Brown. Thus ended a separation of almost 50 years.

The second, a personal celebrity story of the irritation of Dory Previn about being persistently identified as the ex-wife of Andre Previn in spite of a long list of creative achievements during the six years of their separation, including an Oscar nomination for songwriting, seven albums, two books, seven screenplays, and a musical in preparation for the stage, concludes “ ‘What do I have to do to convince people I have my own identity?’ bemoans the brilliant authoress/composer,” in the words of Marilyn Beck of the Pasadena Star News. What to make of these two stories, each followed by a page of very enigmatic suggestions for behavior on the part of the participating couples— the first story followed by the sequence: couple couple couple couple space

(between) (entry) (space) (coupling) (couple)

while the second story was followed by the even more enigmatic sequence fitting fitting

(coupling) (coupling)

Frames of Mind is similar in its alternation of story and quite abstract suggestions for actions. All three pieces depended upon the participation of very able interpreters for them to have any effect at all, and Allan tended to regard the pieces as failures. They may have required artist participants to interpret them or, for anyone who wanted, to become artists to interpret them. It was my understanding that Frame Works proved very powerful for the drama critic Frantisek Deak and the performance artist Norma Jean Deak, when they realized it as part of a special section on performance art that we organized for the American Theater Association convention in Los Angeles in August 1976. Allan’s sense of the  •

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piece might have benefited from an extensive post-piece discussion session, that wasn’t possible because of the number of performance events scheduled for the convention. While Allan abandoned this type of instruction, his interest in storytelling persisted. This interest was probably inspired by the post-piece discussions, where the representation of the participants’ work experience inevitably required a resort to narrative. By the eighties his interest in photographic and video representation of his works seems to have waned, so that Allan’s career took a new literary turn as storytelling became the primary way of representing his work. From the beginning of his career as an artist in the late fifties, Allan had been publishing idiosyncratic essays, and they are very well collected in the University of California Press book The Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley. But by the eighties the main way in which Allan’s works could be known was by the stories he told about them. Some of these have been published, like the account of Trading Dirt (1982–1985), which showed up in “it seemed that we’d never been there,” an essay that appeared in the fall 1997 issue of TDR. But most of them simply get told, in conversation with friends or in more formal talks, and go on to become part of an Allan Kaprow oral tradition. I’ve come to know a lot of Kaprow pieces in that way and I have a powerful memory of many of them. I think of one in particular he told me of. It was a piece he did in the late eighties for the art department of the University of Texas at Arlington. It was a piece for solo players. Outside the five-storey, brick-and-concrete art department building Allan had deposited a large pile of cinder blocks. The idea was that each person working alone was to carry one cinder block at a time to some place along the steps of the five storeys of the concrete stairwell of the art building until he or she had disposed of the number of cinder blocks equal to his or her age, pause for a while, and then carry them one by one back to the pile. It was a long task—to be carried out in privacy, and volunteers signed up for eight-hour time slots. Without knowing who took part in this piece, I like to think I can imagine very well what the experience had to be like. I imagine counting out the number of stairs to the first landing, multiplying it by the number of landings to the top, then subtracting my age from this—to determine how many stairs I could cover with blocks—and then deciding how to divide the number of blocks among the stairs. Begin from the first step and deposit a block on every other one. That would work—for fifty years if there were a hundred steps. Deposit one every three steps if you were thirty-three. That would give you one extra for the fifth floor landing. Cluster the years of your life biologically? Grouping steps into infancy, three years; childhood, four to twelve; teens, thirteen Allan at Work

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to eighteen; youth, nineteen to thirty; maturity, thirty to fifty; age, fifty to . . . ? Or group them by experiences. I discover not everyone tells the truth. What year was that? Four or five. My Aunt Sylvia promises to take me to see a brilliantly exciting Russian war picture The Lives of the Red Commanders. We enter the movie theater and it’s a musical with Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy. At ten I steal the key to the glass cabinet where my aunt keeps the Encyclopedia Britannica and learn how the steam engine works. At twelve my mother remarries. I can escape her and live with my aunt. Could I work out the whole staircase this way—one cinder block for each weighty experience? That’s more than one for a year. Are there enough cinder blocks? Do I have enough time? Can I finish in eight hours? I still have to stop at the top and reflect. Maybe I have to arrange the task as “the way up” and “the way down.” Herakleitos says they’re both the same. But are they for anybody on the staircase? Are they equal? Gertrude Stein says “people are being old for a very short time.” For her the way down must be much shorter than the way up. For some people it’s undoubtedly the reverse. How to work this out if the act of unmaking always involves carrying the same number of blocks as the making. Maybe take them down much faster than you take them up. Figure this from the beginning, so it’s physically possible. This is all somehow suddenly very important. It’s my sense of my life that’s at stake. I know that Allan sees his work as “un-art” and wants to see its separation from art, envisioning it as simply an articulation of meaningful experiences from ordinary life. I’m sympathetic to this intention, but I find it hard to distinguish the existential power of this piece, which now exists only in the telling, from that of any other great work of art I’ve ever encountered. 2004 notes  John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigee, 1980), 44.  See Walter de Maria, “Meaningless Work,” in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978).  See Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).  Allan Kaprow, “Some Recent Happenings, Great Bear Pamphlet no. 7” (dist. New York: Something Else Press, 1966). The pamphlet contains texts for four scenarios.

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Literary Essays

Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in Modern American Poetry

A few years ago Roy Lichtenstein completed a group of works called the Modern Art series. The paintings—there were sculptures too, aptly labeled Modern Sculpture—were mainly representations of Art Deco settings, groups of recognizable abstract forms derived primarily from circles and triangles, situated in a shallow virtual space, derived from a late and academic Cubism, and treated to Lichtenstein’s typical, simulated Ben Day dot manner in uninflected shades of blue, red, yellow, black, and white, and sometimes green. The paintings were amusing. It was absurd to see the high-art styles of the early twenties and the advanced decorative and architectural styles of the later twenties and early thirties through the screen of a comic strip. It was also appropriate, since these design elements found their way into the backgrounds of Buck Rogers and the lobby of the Radio City Music Hall. At the same time there was something pathetic and slightly unnerving in this treatment of the style features that had long appeared as the claims to Modernism of Futurism, Purism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus. What is particularly unnerving about the series is what is most relevant to the subject of Modernism versus Postmodernism. Clearly the sense that such a thing as a Postmodern sensibility exists and should be defined is wrapped up with the conviction that what we have called modern for so long is thoroughly over. If we are capable of imagining the modern as a closed set of stylistic features, modern can no longer mean present. For it is precisely the distinctive feature of the present that, in spite of any strong sense of its coherence, is always open on its forward side. Once modern presents itself as closed, it becomes Modern and takes its place alongside Victorian or Baroque as a period style. Perhaps it was this sense that led furniture salesmen back in the fifties to offer us a distinction between Modern and Contemporary furniture, in which Modern referred to a specific group of degraded Futur-

ist and Bauhaus characteristics, signified by particular materials like glass and stainless steel or chromium, or by particular design features, such as the laboratory look or streamlining; whereas Contemporary signified merely the absence of any strongly defined period features. The pathos of Modern Art is particular to itself. There is after all nothing pathetic about Baroque or Victorian Art. But it was the specific claim of modernism to be finally and forever open. That was its Futurism, and now that its future has receded into the past it can be had as a sealed package whose contents have the exotic look of something released from a time capsule. This is true for Schoenberg and Varese, Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham, for Picasso, Malevitch, and Moholy Nagy, and for Eliot and Pound. There is nothing surprising about this. The impulses that provided the energy for Modern Art came from artists who had arrived at their maturity, as human beings if not as artists, by the beginning of the First World War. Since then the world has changed not once but twice. To read the letters or diaries of these artists is to realize that it would take almost as much effort to understand them as to understand the letters of Poussin. But while this is so evident to really contemporary artists as to be almost platitudinous, it is not so evident to anyone else, mainly because the truly contemporary artists of our time are known primarily to a community consisting of themselves. In a sense it is this capacity of the contemporary artist to recognize his contemporaries that is the essential feature of his contemporaneity. For two reasons, I would like to discuss the nature of this contemporaneity in particular for American poetry: because the course of American poetry from 1914 to 1972 is characteristic of the changes in our culture and attitudes, and because our poetry is in an extraordinarily healthy state at the moment and there is no need to consider what is being produced today as in any way inferior to the works of the supposed masters of Modernism. The most artificial and consequently the most convincing way to do this would be to compose a short continuous history of American poetry beginning at the turn of the century and showing how poetry and sensibility continued to change from salient moment to salient moment till we run out of salient moments. I will not do this because, whatever the ontological facts of change through time may be, it is a fact of our experience that it is the past not the present which changes. We go on for a long time, taking the present for a constant, much as the self. At some point we raise our heads and are surprised at what lies behind us and how far away it is. The first questions I would like to raise then are when and to whom did the career of modern American poetry appear to be over and what did this mean? Taken precisely these questions are very difficult to  •

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answer because, among other things, they raise the preliminary question of what modern American poetry was, and fluctuations in the answer to this question will produce fluctuations in the answers to the other questions. But in a casual sort of way it is possible to ask these questions in terms of the average, college-educated, literate American as of, say, 1960 (1960 is a turning point because it is the date of publication of Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, which presented the same college student moyen with evidence for an alternate view of the history of American Modernism). Allen Tate provides a standard list of masters in a 1955 essay that was reprinted as an introduction in his part of an Anthology of British and American Poetry, 1900–1950, which he compiled with David Cecil. It includes Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Marianne Moore, Ransom, Cummings, and Crane, and is more or less typical for the period during which it was given and for the kind of critic making it. A few years later (1962) Randall Jarrell gives pretty much the same list in his essay “Fifty Years of American Poetry,” but he includes William Carlos Williams and omits Crane and Cummings from the “masters” class. It is also worth noting that for this group of critics the period of Modernism, in Tate’s words, has “Frost and Stevens at the beginning, Hart Crane in the middle, and Robert Lowell at the end,” which situates the period of “modernism” roughly between 1910 and 1950, with Frost at the end of one period and Lowell at the end of the newer one. The fact that it is now 1972 and that the list seems open to reconsideration, to say the least, should not obscure the degree of agreement in established academic circles at that time on this history of the “modern American tradition.” From Pound and Eliot to Robert Lowell. This was the view held by the Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Poetry Magazine, and perhaps even the Saturday Review of Literature. If these authorities were concerned with Modern poetry in English, they would generally include Yeats and Auden and Dylan Thomas, though the precise relations of the English to the Americans in the “modern” tradition were not worked out in great detail, except that it was clear that Yeats was among the beginners (after Pound), Auden in the middle (after Eliot), and Thomas toward the end (much like Lowell). Almost all of the critics who wrote in these magazines held important university positions and taught this view of the tradition as an uncontroversial body of facts. The conviction that in 1950 we were at the conclusion of this period was as much a matter of agreement as everything else, though the feeling surrounding this conviction was somewhat equivocal. In a 1958 lecture “The Present State of Poetry” Delmore Schwartz offered this summary of the situation: Modernism and Postmodernism

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The poetic revolution, the revolution in poetic taste which was inspired by the criticism of T.S. Eliot . . . , has established itself in power so completely that it is taken for granted not only in poetry and the criticism of poetry, but in the teaching of literature. Once a literary and poetic revolution has established itself, it is no longer revolutionary, but something very different from what it was when it had to struggle for recognition and assert itself against the opposition of established literary authority. Thus the most striking trait of the poetry of the rising generation of poets is the assumption as self-evident and incontestable of that conception of the nature of poetry which was, at its inception and for years after, a radical and much disputed transformation of poetic taste and sensibility. What was once a battlefield has become a peaceful public park on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, so that if the majority of new poets write in a style and idiom which takes as its starting point the poetic idiom and literary taste of the generation of Pound and Eliot, the motives and attitudes at the heart of the writing possess an assurance which sometimes makes their work seem tame and sedate.

Or to quote Auden, “Our intellectual marines have captured all the little magazines.” Whatever one thinks of Schwartz’s equivocal characterization of the poets he is describing as the somewhat “sedate” heirs of Eliot and Pound, it is now baffling to hear him refer to new poets writing in a style which takes as its starting point the poetic idiom and literary taste of the generation of Pound and Eliot and find him quoting as a specimen of this style: The green catalpa tree has turned All white; the cherry blooms once more. In one whole year I haven’t learned A blessed thing they pay you for. The comparison between this updated version of A Shropshire Lad, whatever virtues one attributes to it, and the poetry of the Cantos or The Waste Land seems so aberrant as to verge on the pathological. At first sight it is nearly impossible to conceive what Schwartz could possibly have imagined the poetic idiom of Pound and Eliot to be, if it could have bred such children as Snodgrass. But the problem is not that Schwartz did not understand what Pound or Eliot sounded like or how their poems operated. His essays demonstrate his grasp of the individual characteristics of both these poets. The etiology lies deeper than that. It lies in his genealogical view of what implications are to be drawn from the work of these mas •

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ters, and how these implications validate a succession of poetic practices which inevitably move further and further from the originating styles to the point at which the initiating impulses have lost all their energy. In Schwartz’s view Snodgrass and the rest of the poets of the Pack, Hall, and Simpson anthology are merely “the end of the line.” The important question then becomes: how did the line arrive at this place? The easiest way to answer this question is not to explore the various aspects of the nearly stillborn descendants, but to find the next to the last place—the last living generation within the tradition. This group would include Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, and Delmore Schwartz himself. If we can understand the curve of connection that joins these poets to Eliot and Pound we can understand what this tradition of “modernism” was thought to be. Though he is neither the weakest nor the strongest of these poets Schwartz is in some ways the most characteristic of this generation. Schwartz’s first book of poetry, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published in 1939. It was greeted with enormous enthusiasm. Allen Tate described Schwartz’s style as the only genuine innovation since Pound and Eliot came upon the scene twenty-five years before. The description is strange, especially in view of Schwartz’s own more modest description of the poems as poems of Experiment and Imitation. The imitations were obvious. “In the Naked Bed in Plato’s Cave” is an exercise in what formalist critics like to call Eliot’s late Tudor blank verse. . . . Hearing the milkman’s chop, His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink, I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. The stony street Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand, The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience. But somehow the poem, like most of Schwartz’s poems, manages to jog along in the sound of Auden, from whom he had acquired the gift of versified platitude, which is so well exemplified in Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword, Threw it down, became a lamb. Swift spat upon the species, but took two women to his heart. which concludes in true cautionary style: Modernism and Postmodernism

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What do all examples show? What can any actor know? The contradiction in every act, The infinite task of the human heart. Not only does the sound belong to Auden, but the wisdom, often complete with capitalized nouns: May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn. Since the title of Schwartz’s first book is derived from the epigraph to Yeats’s 1914 volume Responsibilities, one might have expected some Yeats, and it’s there: All clowns are masked and all personae Flow from choices; . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gifts and choices! All men are masked, And we are clowns who think to choose our faces And we are taught in time of circumstances And we have colds blond hair and mathematics, For we have gifts which interrupt our choices . . . It is a selection from the imagery of Yeats screened through Auden’s bouncing sound. In fact, both the Eliot and Yeats in Schwartz’s early work are strained through a screen of Auden. Since Schwartz was twenty-five when the first book came out, the only surprising thing about this is Tate’s enthusiasm. For if, as Tate had argued, poetry is “a form of human knowledge,” Schwartz’s first book neither adds anything to it nor even takes anything away. As for Schwartz, the early work is smooth and trivial but the later work cannot even be said to attain this level. If Auden stood between Schwartz and the modernist masters, this fact was not peculiar to Schwartz for the blight of Auden lay heavy on the land. Shapiro’s “Elegy for a Dead Soldier” begins matter-of-factly enough in spite of the rhymes: A white sheet on the tail-gate of a truck Becomes an altar; two small candlesticks Sputter at each side of the crucifix  •

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but soon swings into Auden’s lush rhetorical style: No history deceived him, for he knew Little of times and armies not his own; He never felt that peace was but a loan, Had never questioned the idea of gain. Beyond the headlines once or twice he saw The gathering of power by the few But could not tell their names; he cast his vote, Distrusting all the elected but not the law. He laughed at socialism; on mourrait Pour les industriels? He shed his coat And not for brotherhood, but for his pay. To him the red flag marked a sewer main. Even Randall Jarrell, who in 1942 was struggling with a swarm of other voices, had contracted the Auden disease. But love comes with its wet caress To its own nightmare of delight, And love and nothingness possess The speechless cities of the night. At the same time that these younger poets were inundated by Auden they were very busy attempting to exorcise him from their minds. Schwartz sets the style for this procedure by dividing Auden into “The Two Audens.” One is “the clever guy,” the Noel Coward of literary Marxism, one who speaks in the voice of the “popular entertainer, propagandist and satirist.” This is the Auden of the Ego, an unauthentic Auden. The other is the voice of the Id, who is a kind of sibyl who utters the tell tale symbols in a psychoanalytic trance, that is, an authentic Auden. The first Auden writes lines like “You were a great Cunarder, I / Was only a fishing smack”; the second writes passages like: Certain it became while we were still incomplete There were certain prizes for which we would never compete; A choice was killed by every childish illness, The boiling tears among the hothouse plants, The rigid promise fractured in the garden, And the long aunts. Modernism and Postmodernism

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If the distinction appears oversubtle to us now it did not appear so to Randall Jarrell, who two years later in a somewhat schoolboyish essay tried to work out the precise stylistic differences that encoded the distinction between the more and less authentic Audens. For Jarrell this comes down to the distinction between an early Auden and a late Auden. Early Auden (the authentic one) employs a peculiar language; late Auden employs a peculiar rhetoric. Though Jarrell seemed at the time fairly satisfied with this tautology, he was apparently unable to provide any reasonable distinction between a “language” and a “rhetoric,” because he characterized both of them with the same sort of lists of stylistic literary devices, some of which he merely seems to like better than others. Four years later he returned to the Auden problem, this time approaching it from the point of view of changes in “Auden’s Ideology.” He finds not two but three Audens—Revolutionary Auden, Liberal Auden, and Fatalist-Christian Auden. It is hard to understand why versified Kierkegaard should appear fundamentally different from versified Marx. No matter what Auden says it’s still chatter. The difference between the Auden of 1930 and 1940 is merely that people are saying a few different things at the same cocktail party. The only position one can attribute to Auden is a mild contraposto, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the martini. Which is what is modern about his work. It is modern because he has a modern role to play. The scene is always some kind of party, “Auden” is the main character, and the name of the play is “The Ridiculous Man.” “Original Sin,” “The Oedipus Complex,” “The Decline of the West,” “The Class Struggle,” “The Origin of the Species” are the lyrics of a musical. There are no changes of opinion, because there are no opinions, just lyrics; there are no changes in style—even at a cocktail party a man may place one finger in the air as he moves to a high point. The Icelandic meters, Piers Plowman, the border ballads, syllabics are all made to jog along with a very modish sound. If there is something lethal in this outcome, it is not a viewpoint. Auden has occupied this position with his life. But Schwartz and Jarrell did not regard Auden as a Modernist master merely because he was a splendid example of a modern predicament. There are two verbal habits or strategies that Auden has always employed and that these poets regard as fundamental categories of the modern mind: appeals to “history” and to psychoanalysis. Talking about Eliot in a 1955 essay Schwartz refers to a “sense of existence which no human being, and certainly no poet, can escape, at this moment in history, or at any moment in the future which is likely soon to succeed the present.” According to Schwartz two aspects of this “view of existence which is natural to a modern human being” are “the development of the historical sense and  •

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the awareness of experience which originate in psychoanalysis.” Though the awareness of experience originating in psychoanalysis may seem somewhat fin de siècle or Wagnerian to us now, what Schwartz means by this is fairly clear. What he means by the “historical sense” is not so clear. One would normally suppose a historical sense to consist of some view of the relations between sequentially related epochs. Marxism supplies a kind of eschatological view of history and Auden frequently refers to this, along with several other views which are by no means consistent with it. Still, if you look for it, you can find several historical senses along with several antihistorical senses in Auden’s poetry. But a “historical sense” is the one thing you cannot find in poems like The Waste Land or the Cantos, which we may assume Schwartz would have considered the principal modern works. The Waste Land and the Cantos are based on the principle of collage, the dramatic juxtaposition of disparate materials without commitment to explicit syntactical relations between elements. A historical sense and psychoanalysis are structurally equivalent to the degree that they are in direct conflict with the collage principle. They are both strategies for combating the apparently chaotic collage landscapes of human experience and turning them into linear narratives with a clearly articulated plot. It is not easy to see what advantage such systems offer a poet unless he was convinced of their truth, which would, I suppose, mean either that it would be relevant to some purpose to use these systems as conceptual armatures upon which to mount the diverse and colorful individual facts of sociopolitical and personal human experience, or else that these systems conformed more perfectly than any other with a vaster system of representations to which the poet was committed for some valued reasons. If this was what Schwartz intended we would be confronted with a truly “classical” poetry which would devote itself to the particularization of general truths. While we might imagine such a poetry, we have never really been confronted with it. The poets of Schwartz’s generation never presented anything like the kind of detailed particularity of human or political experience in their poems that would have been a necessary condition for such a poetry of metonymy. Even if the poems had fulfilled this necessary condition, such a poetry would require either a commonly accepted theory of history or psychoanalysis or at least a precise knowledge of the details of such a theory and the additional knowledge that such a theory was being referred to, as well as a set of rules for referring the concrete particulars of experience to particular aspects of the theory. Such a situation only obtains for a few people in narrowly circumscribed areas of what we generally call science; that is to say, it obtains only for those who share what Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Modernism and Postmodernism

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calls a paradigm. Even in a rather trivially reduced form of this situation such as The Waste Land, where Eliot has himself advised us that the poem is built on the plan of a particular mythical narrative, there is no agreement on the way the particular parts of the poem relate to the myth. There is so little agreement on this that most critics who are involved with such concerns cannot decide whether the poem does or doesn’t include the regeneration which is intrinsic to the myth. For better or worse “modern” poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset, and when “history” or psychoanalysis are invoked they are merely well labeled boxes from which a poet may select ready-made contrasts. For relatively timid poets this strategy may have the advantage of offering recognizability of genre as an alibi for the presentation of what he regards as radically disparate materials, somewhat in the manner in which a sculptor like Stankiewicz used to throw together a boiler casing, several pistons, and a few odd gears and then arrange them in the shape of a rather whimsical anthropomorphic figure. In the main, poets have not resorted to a sense of history or to psychoanalysis because of the success of these viewpoints in reducing human experience to a logical order, but because the domains upon which they are normally exercised are filled with arbitrary and colorful bits of human experience, which are nevertheless sufficiently framed to yield a relatively tame sort of disorder. If there is any doubt that it is the “sense of collage” that is the basic characteristic of Modernist poetry, it is mainly because of the reduced form in which the principle of collage had been understood by the Nashville critics and the poets who followed them. Poets of this group, like Jarrell or Robert Lowell, tend to produce this attenuated collage with the use of a great variety of framing devices. In a poem only sixteen lines long Jarrell ticks off the names of Idomeneo, Stendhal, the Empress Eugenie, Maxwell’s demon, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, William Wordsworth, Charles Dodgson, and Darwin’s son, a fair-sized list of figures from the arbitrary procession of history, but the poem is carefully rationalized (framed) by its title, “Charles Dodgson’s Song.” The author of Alice in Wonderland ought to be able to sing history in any order, and the poem is presented as a supposed “inversion” of a supposedly “logical” view of history. But there is no logical target of the poem, which is not a parody at all. It is merely a pleasant historical collage with a title that takes the edge off. To poets like Jarrell, Europe after the end of the Second World War offered an unparalleled opportunity. It presented them with a ready-made rubble heap (a collage) that could be rationalized by reference to a well-known set of historical circumstances, and it is no accident that nearly half of his book The Seven  •

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League Crutches (1951) is devoted to a section called “Europe.” The strongest of the poems in this section, “A Game at Salzburg,” is also typical: A little ragged girl, our ball-boy; A partner—ex-Africa Korps— ln khaki shorts, P.W. illegible. (He said: To have been a prisoner of war In Colorado iss a privilege.) The evergreens, concessions, carrousels, And D.P. camp of Franz Joseph Park; A gray-green river, evergreen-dark hills. Last, a long way off in the sky, Snow-mountains. Over this clouds come, a darkness falls. Rain falls. On the veranda Romana, A girl of three, Sits licking sherbet from a wooden spoon; I am already through. She says to me, softly: Hier bin i’. I answer: Da bist du. This is a kind of covert collage, the girl ball-boy, the ex-enemy tennis partner, the P.W. camp in Colorado, the evergreens, concessions, carrousels, the girl on the veranda eating sherbet, the dialogue “Here I am, There you are.” And while it masquerades in the guise of a realist narrative, there is no narrative—or to be even more precise, what it shares with short stories of this type is the characteristic of a covert collage masquerading behind the thin disguise of pseudo-narrative. The poem would have been a lot more effective had it ended here, but Jarrell, who is obsessed with the necessity for framing at the same time that he is always tempted by his vision of the arbitrary, goes on for two more stanzas past some more local color—Marie Theresa’s sleigh and some ruined cornice nymphs— to the obligatory pseudo-epiphany in which such pseudo-narratives normally culminate: But the sun comes out, and the sky Is for an instant the first rain-washed blue Of becoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modernism and Postmodernism

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In anguish, in expectant acceptance The world whispers: Hier bin i’. Jarrell may have a strong sense of the arbitrariness of experience, but the experience is not so arbitrary that it cannot be labeled in terms of “local color” as well as the “revelational experience.” Still, “A Game at Salzburg” is the strongest poem in the book and is a marked improvement over “Little Friend, Little Friend,” in which the only poem that isn’t smothered in framing devices is the epigraph to the volume: . . . Then I hear the bomber call me in: “Little Friend Little Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see me, Little Friend?” I said, “I m crossing right over you. Let’s go home.” The only reason that Jarrell didn’t frame this piece was that he didn’t think of it as a poem. The use of covert collage was very widespread among the poets of the forties and early fifties. Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle abounds in it and employs a great variety of framing devices: collage as biography (“Mary Winslow,” “In Memory of Arthur Winslow”), as elegy (“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”), as psychological fiction (“Between the Porch and the Altar”), as history (“Concord,” “Napoleon Crosses the Berezina”); and there is a considerable overlap of genres in single poems. A sonnet like “Concord” is a fairly good example of this type of history collage: Ten thousand Fords are idle here in search Of a tradition. Over these dry sticks— The Minute Man, the Irish Catholics, The ruined bridge and Walden’s fished-out perch— The belfry of the Unitarian Church Rings out the hanging Jesus. Crucifix, How can your whited spindling arms transfix Mammon’s unbridled industry, the lurch For forms to harness Heraclitus’ stream! This Church is Concord—Concord where Thoreau Named all the birds without a gun to probe Through darkness to the painted man and bow: The death-dance of King Philip and his scream Whose echo girdled this imperfect globe.

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If it is obvious that Lowell has attitudes toward American history, it is even more obvious that they do not represent an historical sense. The poem is a collage made up of remnants of the past thrust into the present in the form of worn-out monuments. Thoreau, the Minute Man, the Unitarian Church share a salient characteristic for Lowell’s imagined tourists in their Fords; they are all out of the elementary school history text. King Philip would also share this characteristic, but he doesn’t make it into most grade-school histories. Lowell throws him into the list of contrasting figures on the battlefield of history to add the one that inhabits his mind along with the rest of them. The poem is filled with sets of clear and not-so-clear dramatic oppositions. Thoreau, the peaceful resister, against the Minute Man, the warlike resister; King Philip, the Indian rebel, who shares a feature with Thoreau (perhaps) in resisting the inevitable advance of technology (if we discount Thoreau’s pencil factory), and shares warlikeness with the Minute Man; the Irish Catholics who inherit the energy of Christianity (we all know about Irishmen), which contrasts with the pallid lack of energy of the higher-class Unitarians. The Irish probably drive the Fords; the Unitarians were there forever, at least since King Philip’s War was settled. The figures in the poem carry a barrage of coupled features— High Energy/High Value; High Energy/Low Value; Low Energy/Low Value; Low Energy/High Value—though in a number of cases the feature assignments are not by any means clear from the poem, only from a general likelihood, considering the places from which Lowell acquired the material. Thus, Melville’s “Metaphysics of Indian Hating” lies somewhere behind the poem, as does Hawthorne; but it is not clear how far behind the poem they lie. That is to say, it is clear from the poem that the arbitrary selection of figures who appear in it, including Christ, have strong evaluative interpretations attached to them, but it is not at all clear what they are or how securely they are attached. So that the attitudes toward history in the poem merely guarantee various charges of intensity. The poem, however, is securely situated in a genre that is more appropriately called “The New England Myth.” This is not so much history as a communal fiction carried out by Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, a host of minor writers, and, at the very beginning of his career, by T.S. Eliot, where we might have expected it to end for sheer lack of relevance to any contemporary reality. But it is from this reservoir of attitudes that Lowell persists in pulling his pieces. “Concord” is not a major effort for Lowell and whatever strength it has it draws from its position among the other pieces in Lord Weary’s Castle, but it is characteristic of Lowell’s manipulation of history, which turns out to be neither history nor Lowell’s manipulation of it. It is the New En-

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gland Myth reduced still further to the cryptic commonplaces of the sort of Partisan Review essay that used to draw upon the well-known ironic collisions of Hawthorne, Melville, and James with grade-school text books and Fourth of July speeches. It is cocktail-party intellectual history. It requires no theory and very few facts, and is a natural collage. In defense of Lowell, the poet, one may say that it has the singular advantage of appealing to a coherent group that is not interested in history or fact or poetry, but in its own conversation—the literary community of the New York Review of Books. So it is not surprising to find Lowell still exploiting the same strategy at the end of the fifties in “For the Union Dead.” This poem is on a larger scale, and because it is somewhat expanded it superimposes a screen of pseudo-narrative over its pseudo-history. Or more correctly the “history” is partially dissolved in a standing liquid of pseudo narrative. Where “Concord” begins with the anecdotal realism of the Fords stalled on the highway, “For the Union Dead” begins with a walk through South Boston: The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. This triggers the memory of watching the fish as a child, and emergence from this memory leads to the memory of a different walk across Boston Common. Here the Heraclitian flux of “Concord” is expanded to: . . . One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steam shovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sand piles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.  •

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There are several worn-out monuments of New England virtue (mythical virtue) here also: Colonel Shaw, who . . . has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound’s gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. . . . he rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die— when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. The usual “old white churches hold their air / of sparse, sincere rebellion,” to which pair is added William James, who could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Lowell, who always manages to get as much grade-school history into a poem as he can, turns the protective red lead paint on the brand new girders into “Puritan-pumpkin colored girders.” Only Squanto and the turkeys are missing, but this is probably for the very good reason that they do not immediately lend themselves to the dark view of New England history appropriated from Hawthorne et al. by the southerners of the Partisan Review. If the churches are “sincere,” they are also “sparse”— that is, Puritanical, rigid, probably even antisexual. The bronze statue of Colonel Shaw “cannot bend his back,” which looks at the least like some sort of abstract arrogance. (“The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier / grow slimmer and younger each year.”) For the inhabitants of Boston “Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat.” William James, whose wholesome virtue seems to have blinded him to St. Gaudens’s aesthetic limitations, apparently did not anticipate this. Although the poem at times seems so, it is not a form of cryptic southern propaganda. The ironies are merely obligatory parts of the poem’s machinery; grammar-school history is only a target for parlor conversation. William James knew about northern Negro lynchings and the famous draft riots and it is doubtful that Lowell would deny this. The “William James” of the poem is not William James, it is a “Great Optimist” speaking, also an invention of literary gossip. The real concern of this poem is with its urban collage—“la forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, helas! que le coeur d’un mortel.” “For the Union Dead” is so much like Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” that it is instructive to examine the similarities and differences between these two poems separated by a hundred years time. The Baudelaire poem is also Modernism and Postmodernism

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triggered by a walk past something that is no longer there: “as I was crossing the new Carrousel.” The Place du Carrousel, or that part of it situated between the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Louvre, had been occupied until about 1840 by a snarl of narrow streets that Louis Philippe started to clear in a vast demolition program that was completed by Napoleon III. The renovations were not completed much before the composition of the poem. So that for Baudelaire the area, for most of the length of his experience of Paris, had been the site of temporary structures and things rising and falling, a situation not unlike the post–Second World War renovation of the older eastern American cities like New York or Boston. It is hardly necessary to point out that the area around the Tuileries and the Boston Common have certain similarities for their respective cities. Baudelaire does not begin directly with a description of the city but with an apostrophe to Andromache, an image of loss which, it turns out, takes its point of departure from the presence of the Seine on the poet’s right as he faces the Louvre; but with the second stanza he moves directly into the city collage: . . . That little river Fecundated my fertile memory, As I was crossing the new Carrousel The old Paris is no more (the form of a city Changes faster, alas, than the human heart); Only in my mind can I see that camp of shacks, Those piles of roughed-out capitals and columns, The weeds, the great blocks grown green from the water in the puddles And the confused pile of rubble gleaming among the tiles. Where Lowell has an aquarium, Baudelaire has a menagerie that is no longer there. For Lowell: Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile . . . And for Baudelaire:  •

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There, one morning, I saw . . . A swan that had escaped its cage And with its webbed feet scraping on the dry pavement Dragged its white plumage on the rough earth Along a dried up gutter . . . In whose dust it nervously bathed its wings. These are both poems of intense nostalgia, where the city becomes the site of arbitrary historical change. The city as collage is a sort of model of the menace of history viewed as deterioration from some nonfragmented anterior state. The similarities in the poems are more surprising than the differences, which are to a great extent differences in presentational strategy. Baudelaire has no reason to suppose that he should not explicitly comment on the “meaning” of the presented material: Paris changes! But in my melancholy nothing Budges! New palaces, scaffoldings, blocks of stone, Old quarters, the whole thing becomes an allegory for me And my fond memories are heavier than the stones. The result of this is that he winds up as a figure inside the poem. Lowell plays it cooler. Though it is the poet who crouches at his television set, it is Colonel Shaw who “is riding on his bubble” waiting “for the blessed break.” Which may seem like a thin distinction, but it corresponds rather closely to Allen Tate’s distinction between a Romantic and a Modern poet. The Romantic movement taught the reader to look for inherently poetical objects and to respond to them “emotionally” in certain prescribed ways, these ways being indicated by the “truths” interjected at intervals among the poetical objects. Certain modern poets offer no inherently poetical objects, and they fail to instruct the reader in the ways he must feel about the objects. All experience, then, becomes potentially the material of poetry— not merely the pretty and the agreeable—and the modern poet makes it possible for us to “respond” to this material in all the ways in which men everywhere may feel and think . . . for to him [the modern poet] poetry is not a special package tied up in pink ribbon: it is one of the ways that we have of knowing the world.

With careful qualifications Tate is here defining his idea of the “modern poet.” His argument rests on two ideas: that all experience is a legitimate arena for poetry and that the interjection of the poet’s opinions into a Modernism and Postmodernism

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poem is an act of coercion that narrows the possibilities of response in the reader by constraining him to take up certain attitudes in regard to the objects presented. If you follow this line of reasoning, Baudelaire shares the modernist appetite for dealing with all experience . . . not merely the pretty and the agreeable, but he is not a modern poet insofar as he instructs the readers not once but several times in the ways they must respond to the objects he has presented. By this formula, subtract from Baudelaire his remaining Romanticism and we get Lowell’s Modernism. Since Tate was arguing for a poetry of pure presentation, in which the reader’s response to the “objects” in the poem is based entirely upon a kind of object semantics, he would seem to be for a poetry of pure collage. Given this attitude toward “modernism,” it is surprising that critics like Tate did not respond with great enthusiasm when a poet like Charles Olson appeared on the scene shortly after the end of the Second World War. I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said “la lumiere but the kingfisher de l’aurore” but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous! he got the color of his breast from the heat of the setting sun! The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd and 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous. This should have fit Tate’s theory perfectly. The objects are there in all their autonomy—the enigmatic mark on the stone, Mao’s injunction to action, the kingfisher as bird of the imagination, the kingfisher out of the natural history book. “The Kingfishers” is filled with many interjections, but none of them advises the reader how to react to the other objects in the poem. The interjected truths have an object-like status which they share with Mao’s words, the natural history text, the mythical material, the fragment of a contemporary party, bits of communication theory, the inventory of plundered Indian treasure, the elliptical anecdote of human slaughter. But if it fits Tate’s theory, Tate was apparently unaware of it; one may search Tate’s Essays of Four Decades, published as late as 1968, and  •

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not find a single mention of one of the most powerful poets and certainly the most graceful poet of the fifties. But Tate was not alone in ignoring Olson, and there is no obligation on the part of a poet-critic to try to take a reasonable view of the contemporary poetic situation. Certainly both John Crowe Ransom and Delmore Schwartz, who had more reason to consider a force as powerful as Olson when they were reviewing at the Library of Congress the state of American poetry at midcentury, managed not to notice him and to conclude, since they were apparently unaware of every significant younger poet in the country, that the newest poets appear much more often than not to be “picking up again the meters, which many poets in the century had thought that they must dispense with.” As a statement of fact this was a complete misrepresentation of what was going on in American poetry in 1958. An alphabetical list of poets besides Olson who had already published at least one book and who were not picking up again the meters includes John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, David Ignatow, Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Frank O Hara, Joel Oppenheimer, and Jack Spicer, to name only the ones that come to mind most easily. These poets were very different from each other, then as now; and some of them, perhaps as many as half, may have seemed to represent a neo-Romantic sensibility, which the southern formalists had opposed to a modern sensibility. Specifically a poet like Ginsberg might seem to have ushered in a return to Blake or Shelley (Romantic = Unmodern), and while this particular opinion is worth discussing, that’s not what happened. As usual, Tate is typical. In a 1968 essay he suggests that “much of the so-called poetry of the past twenty or more years [is merely] anti-poetry, a parasite on the body of positive poetry, without significance except that it reminds us that poetry can be written.” What is shocking about this suggestion is that it is based on what seems like a nearly trivial characteristic of this great body of diverse poetry: its disregard for metrical organization. In the paragraph I have quoted, Tate explains that formal versification is the primary structure of poetic order, the assurance to the reader and to the poet himself that the poet is in control of the disorder both outside him and within his own mind. This bizarre statement seems very far from the immense human dignity of Tate’s definition of the Modern poet: “Certain modern poets offer no inherently poetical objects, and they fail to instruct the reader in the ways he must feel about the objects. All experience, then, becomes potentially the material of poetry.” Certainly the assurance to the reader that the poet is in control instructs the reader quite precisely in the ways he must feel about Modernism and Postmodernism

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the objects. He must feel poetical about them, that is, he must experience no equivocal impulses that are likely to threaten the poetical frame that wraps these objects like a pink ribbon. It is the pathetic hope of a virgin for an experienced lover whose competence (detachment) is sufficient to lead her to an orgasm, and all to be achieved by mere maintenance of a regular rhythm. The great importance attributed to something so trivial as regularization of syllable accent by such relatively intelligent people as Tate, Ransom, and Eliot is so remarkable that it deserves an essay of itself. But it is probably sufficient for our purposes here to point out that the value attributed to this phonological idiosyncrasy is symbolic. So that when Eliot insists on the value of the ghost of a meter lurking “behind the arras,” it is because the image of meter is for him an image of some moral order (a tradition). It is this aspect of Eliot that is not modern but provincial. This becomes clearer in Ransom, who is very precise about the symbolic nature of meter. I think meters confer upon the delivery of poetry the sense of a ritualistic occasion. When a ritual develops it consists in the enactment, or the recital over and over again, of some experience which is obsessive for us, yet intangible and hard to express. The nearest analogue to the reading of poetry according to the meters, as I think, is the reading of an ecclesiastical service by the congregation. Both the genius of poetry and the genius of the religious establishment work against the same difficulty, which is the registration of what is inexpressible, or metaphysical. The religious occasion is a very formal one, with its appointed place in the visible temple and the community of worshippers congregated visibly.

You don’t have to be especially committed to ritual or religion to observe that this is a kind of poetical Episcopalianism. The Sermon on the Mount was also a religious occasion; it didn’t take place in a “visible temple” and wasn’t delivered in meter. But if the meaning of meter for Ransom is amiable and nostalgic, that is a triumph of personality. For Eliot and for Tate, as for their last disciple, Lowell, the loss of meter is equivalent to the loss of a whole moral order. It is a “domino theory” of culture—first meter, then Latin composition, then In’ja. This persistent tendency to project any feature from any plane of human experience onto a single moral axis is an underlying characteristic of the particular brand of “modernism” developed by Eliot, Tate, and Brooks. It is not a characteristic of Pound or Williams, and it is why Eliot and Tate will lead to Lowell and even Snod-

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grass, while Pound and Williams will lead to Rexroth, Zukofsky, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, and so on. The mentality behind this moral escalation is clumsy and pretentious. It has its roots in Eliot’s criticism, in which it is so totally pervasive that a single instance should be sufficient to recall the entire tonality. In his essay on Baudelaire, Eliot offers to gloss Baudelaire’s aphorism: la volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal. According to Eliot, “Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil (of moral Good and Evil which are not natural Good and Bad or puritan Right and Wrong). Having an imperfect, vague, romantic conception of Good, he was able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural life-giving, cheery automatism of the modern world . . . So far as we are human, what we do must be evil or good.” Which suggests that Baudelaire is, like Eliot, a moral social climber, energizing his sexual activity by reducing the whole complex domain of its human relations to a single moral axis with two signs: Good and Evil. The most amusing thing about Eliot’s reading is that Baudelaire in no way suggests that “the sexual act” is Evil; what he says is that the unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of [its leading to] doing evil—presumably because of the complex set of nonidentical desires, expectations, and frustrations and their consequences in so close a terrain. The “voluptuousness” is like that of stock car driving, which will certainly lead to injury, though one does not seek it. Baudelaire was not from St. Louis. This tendency to reduce all variation to clashes of opposites is part of what critics like Cleanth Brooks and I. A. Richards imagine to be characteristic of Metaphysical poetry. Richards provides a theoretical analysis of two types of poetry which becomes the basis of Brooks’s theory of the distinction between Modern and Romantic poetry. Richards distinguishes between a poetry of inclusion (for Brooks, Modern and Metaphysical) and the poetry of “exclusion” (for Brooks, Romantic and Unmodern). The poetry of exclusion leaves out the opposite and discordant qualities of an experience, excluding them from the poem, the poetry of inclusion is a poetry in which the imagination includes them, resolving the apparent discords, and thus gaining a larger unity.” From this definition it follows that these two types of poetry are structurally different: the difference is not one of subject but of the relations inter se of the several impulses active in the experience. A poem of the first group (exclusion) is built out of sets of impulses which run parallel, which have the same direction. In a poem

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of the second group the most obvious feature is the extraordinary heterogeneity of the distinguishable impulses. But they are more than heterogeneous, they are opposed (italics mine). This remarkable idea is based on a metaphorical vector analysis, in which it is absolutely necessary to imagine a poem as consisting of impulses” seen as directed movements in a single plane for which a fixed set of coordinates has been chosen. It is only when we make all these assumptions that we fully understand Richards’s idea of “opposed impulses.” They are magnitudes of opposite sign considered with respect to their projections on a single axis (toward or away from a zero point). It is because Richards has this precise analysis in mind that he substitutes the idea of opposition for the idea of “heterogeneity.” Heterogeneity does not immediately simplify into a contrast along a single axis. To support this simplified vector analysis further, Richards redefines “irony” as a single dimensional reversal. Irony in this sense consists in the bringing in of the opposite, the complementary impulses. This predictably leads to the tautologous observation that the poetry of exclusion is vulnerable to irony while the poetry of inclusion is not (because it includes it), which is like saying that Czechoslovakia was not vulnerable to the Russian Army because it included it). Brooks seizes upon this analysis and identifies both the nervous and elusive, quibbling style of Donne and his version of “modernist” tradition with this trivial idea of mono-dimensional contrast. That the idea is trivial will be come clear if we consider the situation of semantic contrast. For any two words in a language it may be possible to find a common semantic axis along which they may be ranked. For example: two adjectives, “colloquial” and “thrifty,” may be regarded as antonymic (possessing opposed signs) along the axis running from “Closed” to “Open,” with “colloquial” moving toward “Open” and “thrifty” moving toward “Closed,” though the extent to which either word is intersected by that semantic axis may not be equivalent or specifiable. Even “colloquial” and “blue” may have a semantic axis in common, e.g. Abstract-Concrete (which might be exploited by a poet like Auden in a hypothetical line such as “They lived in houses / that were colloquial and blue”); and while it’s obvious that from most view points colloquial will run toward Abstract and blue toward Concrete, it should be equally obvious that the number of possible axes would consist of all the innumerable antonymic pairs of the language and the most commonplace utterances would have to be mapped in terms of hyperspaces that defy the imagination. But no one has attempted such mapping except Osgood, and he has not been concerned with relating his Semantic Differential to poetry. The effect of this imaginary vector analysis was largely to reduce the idea of complex poems to an idea of ironic poems, which is to reduce the complex “hyperspace” of  •

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modernist collage (Pound, Williams, Olson, Zukofsky) to the nearly trivial, single-dimensional ironic and moral space of Eliot, Tate, Lowell, and so on. This is the reason for not recognizing Olson. It was the same reason for not recognizing Zukofsky. They do not occupy a trivial moral space. The taste for the ironic, moral poem is a taste for a kind of pornography which offers neither intellectual nor emotional experience but a fantasy of controlled intensity, and like all pornography it is thoroughly mechanical. But machinery is quite imperfectly adapted to the human body and nervous system, which operates on different principles. As a result poetry such as Lowell’s seems terribly clumsy as it continually seeks to reach some contrived peak of feeling while moving in the machine-cut groove of his verse. So lines like “I could hear / the top floor typist’s thunder” or “I sit at a gold table with my girl / whose eyelids burn with brandy” come to be judged by Lowell himself in other lines like “My heart you race and stagger and demand / More blood-gangs for your nigger-brass percussions,” but they are misjudged. Lowell attempts to energize a poem at every possible point and the result is often pathetic or vulgar; Baby Dodds didn’t push and was never vulgar. But it is the decadence of the metrical-moral tradition that is at fault more than the individual poet. The idea of a metrics as a “moral” or “ideal” traditional order against which the “emotional” human impulses of a poet continually struggle in the form of his real speech is a transparently trivial paradigm worthy of a play by Racine and always yields the same small set of cheap musical thrills. The appearance of Olson and the Black Mountain poets was the beginning of the end for the Metaphysical Modernist tradition, which was by no means a “modernist” tradition but an anomaly peculiar to American and English poetry. It was the result of a collision of strongly anti-Modernist and provincial sensibilities with the hybrid modernism of Pound and the purer Modernism of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. Because of the intense hostility to “Modernism” of Eliot, Ransom, and Tate, it was not possible for them to come into anything but superficial contact with it except as mediated through Ezra Pound, whom Eliot at least was able to misread as a fellow provincial, chiefly because of Pound’s “Great Books” mentality. This was a mistake, for regardless of the material that he was manipulating, Pound as a poet was an inherent Modernist committed to the philosophical bases of collage organization, both as a principle of discovery and as a strategy of presentation. But it was a fortunate mistake for Eliot, because whatever is interesting about The Waste Land is only visible and audible as a result of Pound’s savage collage cuts. Whatever is interesting and not vulgar—because it is the speed of the collage-cut narration that rushes you over the heavy-handed parodies and the underModernism and Postmodernism

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lying sensibility, which is the snobbery of a butler. The return of collage Modernism in the fifties had both semantic and musical implications. If it meant a return to the semantic complexities of normal human discourse in the full “hyperspace” of real language, it also meant an end to the ideal of hurdy-gurdy music, finishing off once and for all the dime-store eloquence of Yeats and the general-store eloquence of Frost, along with the mechanical organ of Dylan Thomas, as anything more than shabby operatic genres that might be referred to out of nostalgia or an equivocal taste for falseness and corrupted styles. The appearance of Olson in Origin and in the Black Mountain Review signified the reappraisal of Pound and Williams, the return of Rexroth and Zukofsky, and the later return of Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff, and Bunting; and it was quite appropriate for Williams to reprint Olson’s essay on “Projective Verse” in his own autobiography, because it was the first extended discussion of the organizational principles of this wing of Modernist poetry. Starting as he does from Pound, it is inevitable that Olson should see these organizational principles in musical terms. But Olson reads Pound very profoundly and locates the music of poetry in the origins of human utterance, the breath: If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not . . . been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that projective verse teaches, is, this lesson, that the verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.

It follows from the brief mythical description Pound gave to it in 1913: You begin with the yeowl and the bark, and you develop into the dance and into music, and into music with words, and finally into words with music, and finally into words with a vague adumbration of music, words suggestive of music, words measured, or words measured in a rhythm that preserves some accurate trait of the emotive impression, or of the sheer character of the fostering or parental emotion.

Pound’s is the expressivist theory suggested by Vico and the eighteenthcentury music theorists and lurking for a long time in the European imagination. Olson places this idea, or that part of it he is interested in, on the

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plane of a kind of psycholinguistics: the pressure to utterance is supported by a surge of breath, which is alternately partially checked and released by what presents itself as a phonological entity—the syllable—until the breath charge is exhausted at the line ending. So Olson’s “Projective Verse” is a theory of poetry as well-formed utterance, where well-formed means that it provides an adequate traversal of the poet’s various energy states. This is full-fledged romantic theory, and whatever weaknesses it has, it offers the poet a broad array of new phonological entities to discriminate and play with and it places its reliance on the well-formedness of the language itself. So Olson will seek to articulate vowel music, to play upon patterned contrasts between tense and lax vowels, or compact and diffuse vowels, or vowels with higher and/or lower pitched prominent formants, to dispose of these under varying conditions of tenseness or laxness, or brevity or length in the environment of differentially closed, or closed versus open, syllables, under varying accentual conditions resulting from different position in words, in word groups, in sentences and whole segments of discourse. To this Olson adds a final discrimination in the notation of pausal juncture, and of shifts of attention and general speaking tempo and pulse. This vast repertory of possibilities inherent in the language was partially exploited by Pound and Williams, though Pound’s overattachment to crude extralinguistic song and dance rhythms superimposed on the language tends to obliterate his linguistic refinement. It is possible that the weak point of this whole group of poets— Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Bunting, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, etc.—is the metaphor of music itself, for the music they have in mind is based on a relatively conventional organization of pitches and accents. But because they are not dealing with music but language, and because there is a very imprecise analogy between language and music (as for example in the case of so-called vowel pitch, where it is notorious that vowels do not have “pitches” but, all other things being equal, consist of variously amplified frequency bands impressed upon a fundamental carrier tone, they are not so seriously affected by the inadequacy of their theory of music (or dance), which still represents an enormous advance over the absurdly trivial repertory of possibilities offered by meter. It is this vastly enlarged repertory of possibilities that makes it possible for these poets to sustain with unerring, abundant and casual subtleties poems hundreds of lines long. Poems like “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” or “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things” are each cantilenas of nearly two hundred lines. They are difficult to give any reasonable impression of through quotes because the large curve of the music subsumes without

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blurring many sequences of intricately various detail whose sequential relations form a large part of Olson’s poetics. To indicate how original this unforced sound was, one is compelled to quote mere fragments: I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered about my mother, some of them taking care to pass beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record playing on the victrola, and all of them desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it, there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard displays, the dead roaming from one to another as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed to mere equipments Then this moves quickly back to his mother in the “rocker / under the lamp” (“she returns to the house once a week”) and, picking up on the bit of Indian song “we are poor poor,” swings into O the dead! and the Indian woman and I enabled the blue deer to walk and the blue deer talked, in the next room, a Negro talk it was like walking a jackass, and its talk was the pressing gabber of gammers of old women  •

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and we helped walk it around the room because it was seeking socks or shoes for its hooves now that it was acquiring human possibilities In the five hindrances men and angels stay caught in the net, in the immense nets which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels and the demons and men go up and down Walk the jackass Hear the victrola Let the automobile be tucked into a corner of the white fence when it is a white chair. Purity is only an instant of being, the trammels recur in the five hindrances, perfection is hidden I shall get to the place 10 minutes late. It will be 20 minutes of 9. And I don’t know, without the car, how I shall get there Which raises the difficult if somewhat academic question of whether this is a return to Modernism. In principle it is built on Pound, and some details, taken out of context, sound like Williams (“I shall get / to the place / 10 minutes late”); but other details sound of Surrealism, translations of American Indian poetry, and so on. In the end this powerful and light way of moving is Olson’s own. But even assuming that Olson and the other Black Mountain poets are thoroughly individual, which they are, it Modernism and Postmodernism

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is still possible to see them as renovating and deepening the Modernist tradition of Pound and Williams. There is certainly a transformation of Pound’s idea of culture. Where Pound set out on a course to recover the cultural heritage of poetry, what he had in mind seemed at times to mean a collection of touchstones. He was a collector of literary specimens. (But there was also the Frobenius, and Confucius, and the Founding Fathers, and so on). Olson shifts the whole emphasis into an attempt to recover the cultural heritage of humanity, “The Human Universe.” Similarly Robert Duncan, the other main theorist of the group, sets out to recover his version of the human universe and starts out to look for it in the exiled, abandoned, and discarded knowledges, hopes, and fears; magic; alchemy; the Gnosis; Spiritualism; etc. It is a deepening and widening of Pound’s cultural career, though to the extent that Pound was involved in a cultural career he was not any more of a “modernist” than Matthew Arnold. Unlike the Frenchmen who were his contemporaries, Pound had the advantages and disadvantages of provincialism. In 1914 Pound was still translating Latin epigrams, worrying about Bertran de Born, and advising his songs how to behave, while Blaise Cendrars had already completed The Trans-Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne of France and Panama or The Adventures of my Seven Uncles. There was nothing that Pound had written that could compare to the “Modernism” of: Those were the days of my adolescence I was just sixteen and I could no longer remember my childhood I was sixteen thousand leagues from the place of my birth I was in Moscow in the city of one thousand and three bell towers and seven railroad stations And I wasn’t satisfied with the seven railroad stations and the thousand and three towers Because my adolescence was so hot and crazy That my heart burned in its turn like the temple at Ephesus or the Red Square in Moscow When the sun sets And my eyes were lighting up old roads And I was already such a lousy poet That I could never go all the way to the end The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake Encrusted with gold With the giant almonds of the cathedrals all white  •

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And the honeyed gold of the bells . . . An old monk was reading the Lay of Novgorod I was thirsty And I was deciphering cuneiform characters When the pigeons of the Holy Ghost suddenly flew up from the square And my hands flew up too with the rustling of an albatross And those were my last memories of my last day Of my very last voyage And of the sea And I was a very lousy poet And I could never go all the way And I was hungry And all the days and all the women in the cafes and all the glasses I would have liked to drink them and break them And all the shop windows and all the streets And all the cab wheels whirling over the rotten pavement I would have liked to plunge them into a furnace of swords And grind up their bones And pull out their tongues And liquefy all those huge bodies strange and naked under the clothes that drive me crazy I sensed the coming of the great red Christ of the Russian Revolution And the sky was a nasty wound That flared up like a flame . . . Those were the days of my adolescence And I could no longer remember my birth . . . It drives on for more than four hundred lines of campy power, without a thought of the Odyssey or the decline of French letters, just the poet and a little French girl in the sleeping compartment of a train moving through Siberia past the dead and the wounded of the Russo-Japanese war. This is what we have come to know as the voice of the international modern style—Cendrars and Apollinaire in France; Marinetti in Italy, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Yesenin in Russia; Attila Josef in Hungary; and in the Spanish-speaking countries Huidobro, Vallejo, Neruda, and Lorca. But in 1917 and 1918 Pound was writing for Poetry magazine on the work of Gautier, Laforgue, Corbiere, Heredia, Samain, Tailhade, De Modernism and Postmodernism

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Regnier, and so on. Pound was twenty-five years behind European time, which does not mean that he was in 1890 Paris either. Pound never occupied Europe, present or past. He was living in American time, and in a truly provincial fashion he was trying to construct a literary methodology, a “language,” that Americans could use out of a nearly random array of foreign excellences. In the case of French poetry the excellences of Gautier and Jammes, say, are in direct conflict with each other, and cannot be combined. Pound, who was both intelligent and sensitive, was well aware of this, but apparently unaware of the fundamental direction of French (or European) poetry, a growing hostility to and finally hatred of literature. And how could he have realized that, since the one thing he loved was literature? This was also naturally American and provincial! America had so little real literature that it must have seemed obvious to almost all Americans of Pound’s generation and cultivation that what was required was a general reform of literary sensibility. The idea was that the genteel and trivial would fall by the wayside, and that a tough literary critical stance would result in literary masterpieces comparable to the Odyssey or the Canterbury Tales. The idea that these were not literary masterpieces and were not recoverable or even intelligible to “literary” men was not yet possible in America. But for the French it was another thing. Even in a sweet literary lyricist like Verlaine, the message of French poetry was clear: “what is alive is poetry; the rest is literature.” So Pound and Eliot, both quite fluent at French, cannot even read Laforgue, not the Laforgue of “Hiver” or “Dimanches,” the casual tossed-off lines, lightweight and ridiculous. Every one says that Eliot got his early style from Laforgue. Maybe. If you can imagine a provincial Laforgue amalgamated with Gautier’s hard line and Tudor poetry as soon as it comes over into English. In French Eliot is different, as is Pound, but there it’s possible to follow the actual sound of a French poet. Both Eliot and Pound carve at English, and when Pound doesn’t carve it’s all fin de siècle, like Swinburne. It is important to remember that the Americans were trying to get into literature and the French were trying to get out. And it is ironic that those of the French who didn’t follow Rimbaud or Lautreamont into their version of the antiliterary looked to Whitman to lead them out, while the Americans of the Pound-Eliot variety were embarrassed by the great predecessor because of his overt Romanticism and because of the antiliterary impulses embodied in the great catalogs and the homemade tradition of free verse. As Pound says in the poem to Whitman in Lustra, I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child  •

Modernism and Postmodernism

Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now it is time for carving. From the French point of view “breaking the new wood” is poetry, “carving” is literature. American poetry had not had this kind of Modernism since Whitman, and the Pound-Eliot tradition does not contain it. While Olson’s representation of the Pound-Eliot-Tate tradition as the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition went more or less unnoticed by anyone not directly involved with this recreation of American Modernism, Ginsberg’s amalgamation of Whitman, Williams, Lawrence, Blake, and the Englished versions of the French, German, and Spanish modern styles out of the chewed-up pages of old copies of Transition, View, Tiger’s Eye, and VVV produced instant panic and revulsion. This is probably the poetry that Tate was referring to as antipoetry in 1968. This was the only poetry that Delmore Schwartz knew the existence of back in 1958, outside the suburban lawns of the poetry by those he designated the “new poets”: Before saying something more detailed about the character of the majority of new poets, some attention must be given to the only recent new movement and counter tendency [italics mine] that of the San Francisco circle of poets, who, under the leadership of Kenneth Rexroth, have recently proclaimed themselves super-Bohemians and leaders of a new poetic revolution . . . Since these poets recite their poems in bars and with jazz accompanists, and since one poet aptly calls his book of poems Howl, it is appropriate to refer to them as the Howlers of San Francisco.

The wonderful thing about Schwartz’s response to this poetry is that it is couched entirely in political terms and takes the form of a defense of America presumably against America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956 I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? on the grounds that “since the Second World War and the beginning of the atomic age, the consciousness of the creative writer . . . has been conModernism and Postmodernism

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fronted with the spectre of the totalitarian state, the growing poverty and helplessness of Western Europe, and the threat of an inconceivably destructive war which may annihilate civilization and mankind itself. Clearly when the future of civilization is no longer assured, a criticism of American life in terms of a contrast between avowed ideals and present actuality cannot be a primary occupation and source of inspiration . . . Civilization’s very existence depends upon America, upon the actuality of American life, and not the ideals of the American Dream. To criticize the actuality upon which all hope depends thus becomes a criticism of hope itself.” All this artillery marshaled against a poem that goes on: America stop pushing I know what I’m doing America the plum blossoms are falling I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at roses in the closet When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid The success of the style can be measured by the degree to which the establishment critics responded to this poetry as antipoetry, antiliterature, and as sociopolitical tract. While there may have been contributory factors in the political climate of the cold war and Schwartz’s own mania, it is still hard to believe that this alternately prophetic, rhapsodic, comic, and nostalgic style could appear unliterary. But it did appear unliterary, primarily because the appropriate devices for framing Modern poetry and literature in general were nowhere in sight. Instead of “irony,” it had broad parody and sarcasm; instead of implying, the poem ranted and bawled and laughed; learned as it was in the strategies of European poetry, it was seen as the poetry of the gutter. Which demonstrates that a major factor that separated the Beat poets from the Academic poets was education, which the Beat poets had and the Academic poets did not have. They had been to school not only with Williams and Pound, but also with Rexroth, who managed to blend the Williams-Pound Modernism with the European Romantic Modernist style. So that it was natural for an alliance of sorts to form between the Beat poets and the Black Mountain poets. At about

 •

Modernism and Postmodernism

the same time a slightly more dandyish version of the European style appeared in New York. It was also “antiliterary” but advanced against literature the strategy of a gay and unpredictable silliness: Be not obedient of the excellent, do not prize the silly with an exceptionally pushy person or orphan. The ancient world knew these things and I am unable to convey as well as those poets the simplicity of things, the bland and amused stare of garages and banks, the hysterical bark of a dying dog which is not unconcerned with human affairs but dwells in the cave of the essential passivity of his kind. Kine? their warm sweet breaths exist nowhere but in classical metre, bellowing and puling throughout the ages of our cognizance like roses in romances. We do not know anymore the exquisite manliness of all brutal acts because we are sissies and if we re not sissies we’re unhappy and too busy.

It is a collage of poetic echoes, which gradually slides into a more straight forward assault: I don’t want any of you to be really unhappy, just camp it up and whine, whineola, baby. I’m talking to you over there, isn’t this damn thing working? . . . It’s not that I want you to be so knowing as all that, but I don’t want some responsibility to be shown in the modern world’s modernity, your face and mine dashing across the steppes of a country which is only partially occupied and acceptable, and is very windy and grassy and rugged. I speak of New Jersey of course.

In Frank O Hara’s hands it is a poem like a ridiculous telephone conversation, moving between a preposterous high style (“oh plankton / mes poemes lyriques, a partir de 1897, peuvent se lire comme un journal intime”), bits of gossip and pseudo-gossip (“John, for instance thinks I am the child of my own old age; Jimmy is cagy with snide remarks while he washes dishes and I pose in the bathroom”), bits of pop song and Silver Screen nostalgia, and sometimes a very precise “run” on real (unpromoted) and false (promoted) feeling: why do you say you’re a bottle and you feed me the sky is more blue and it is getting cold last night I saw Garfinkel’s Surgical Supply truck and knew I was near home though dazed and thoughtful what did you do to make me think

Modernism and Postmodernism

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after we led the bum to the hospital and you got into the cab I was feeling lost myself There were sufficient reasons for these different groups—Black Mountain, the Beats, and the New York school—to quarrel among themselves, and there were such quarrels. In one issue of Yugen Gregory Corso, representing the rhapsodic tendencies of the Beats, took a swipe at what he considered the pedantic musical concerns of Olson, and was promptly stepped on by Gilbert Sorrentino, who dismissed him as a presumptuous idiot. But quarrels like this were minor and trivial in duration. These poets all read together and published together in magazines like Yugen, which formed a common ground for the New York and San Francisco scene and for publications of translations of various European modernist poets. The bonds that held these poets together were more profound than any differences: a nearly complete contempt for the trivial poetry of the last phase of the “closed verse” tradition and more significantly the underlying conviction that poetry was made by a man up on his feet, talking. At bottom all their images of “writing a poem” are a way of being moved and moving, a way of walking, running, dancing, driving. The dance (held up for me by an older man. He told me how. Showed me. Not steps, but the fix of muscle. A position for myself: to move I do not seek a synthesis, I seek a melee. It’s like going into a spin in a car—you use all the technical information you have about how to get the car back on the road, but you’re not thinking I must bring the car back on the road or else you’re off the cliff. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep. It was not quite an idea of an oral poetry, not yet. Outside of Parry and Lord’s work on the south Slavic guslar poets and some well reasoned speculations about Homer and Beowulf, nobody knew much about that.  •

Modernism and Postmodernism

But a change was coming over the idea of writing poetry, perhaps reinforced by the proliferation of readings. Although these poets did not identify the “performance” of a poem with the poem itself, they also did not identify the text of a poem with the poem itself. Olson calls it a notation, and the idea of the text of a poem as a notation or score occupies a middle ground between an idea of oral poem and an idea of literature. It is easiest to see this in music, where it is abundantly clear that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scores are insufficient to yield a skilled performer enough information to play the music reasonably. An adequate performance of Bach or Mozart or Beethoven requires a familiarity with the conventional context that directs the performer how to read (interpret) a score. Obviously the figured bass tradition relied more on the musical civilization of the performer than did the later nineteenth century. And there was a lesson to be learned from this too. Who can play the Hammerklavier at the instructed tempo? And how much brio is con brio? This shifting view of the relation between text and poem, which was not something these poets were thoroughly aware of, led to two totally different conclusions in the poetry of the sixties: Concrete poetry, which assumes sometimes with marvelous perversity that the text is the poem, and direct composition on tape recorder. But for America both of these possibilities were played out in the sixties by many other poets. In fact it was the sixties that saw the great explosion of American poetry. If there were perhaps twenty or thirty strong poets among the Black Mountain, Beat poets and the first generation of the New York school, it is probable that the number of impressive poets to appear in the sixties is more than double that. For those of us who came into the arena of poetry at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets; the New York poets represented an “opening of the field.” They had swept away the deadwood, the main obstacle to the career of poetry; and they offered a great claim for the meaning of poetry: that phenomenological reality is discovered and constructed by poets. Speaking for myself I thought then and still think that the claim, when its implications are clearly articulated, is quite reasonable. It is part of a great Romantic metaphysics and epistemology that has sustained European poetry since Ossian and Blake and Wordsworth and is still sustaining it now. If the particular representations of reality offered by these poets of the fifties seemed less useful or adequate, this seemed less important and partially inherent in the Romantic Metaphysic itself, according to which reality is inexhaustible or, more particularly, cannot be exhausted by its representations because its representations modify its nature. The poets of the sixties simply went about the business of reexamining the whole of the modModernism and Postmodernism

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ernist tradition. By now we have had to add to the fundamental figures Gertrude Stein and John Cage, both of whom seem much more significant poets and minds than either Pound or Williams. This itself is the merest of indications. All of European Dada and Surrealism were reconsidered in the sixties; poets like Breton, Tzara, Arp and Schwitters, Huidobro, and Peret were reclaimed along with many others. But beyond this there was the recognition that the essential aspiration of Romantic poetry was to a poetry broad enough and deep enough to embody the universal human condition. We are better equipped now linguistically and poetically and perhaps shrewder about what is at stake in this type of project. At present there is now going on a total revolution in the consideration of the poetry of nonliterate and partially literate cultures; and this reevaluation is not a mere collecting of texts but a reevaluation of the genres, with enormous implications for the work of present poets. This surge of activity is already transforming the poetry of the sixties, which is itself far too rich to treat in this essay. 1972

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Modernism and Postmodernism

Some Questions about Modernism

Some time toward the end of 1973 Leonard Michaels, who was then editor of the U.C. Berkeley journal Occident, called and asked me if I would be willing to respond to a number of questions he and his fellow editors felt were provoked by the preceding essay, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” published in the initial issue of boundary 2 in fall 1972. I agreed and the questions introducing each section of this essay were composed by the editors of Occident. In your essay you refer to a “pathos” of Modern Art, “which is particular to itself. There is after all nothing pathetic about baroque or Victorian art.” Could you expand on that? The point seems clear enough when applied to Constructivism and Futurism, but surely they were the only Modernist movements that contained a formal claim to perennial openness. It doesn’t seem so clear how it would apply to The Four Quartets, say, or the poems in Ezra Pound’s Personae. Pathos isn’t a technical term, it’s a feeling. Suppose someone you knew— an older friend—that you’d been talking to on the telephone died a few months later and you received a letter from him written just before he died—maybe sent on by a relative—and you found that you could hardly understand it at all. You don’t have that kind of trouble with Milton or Browning. They were never close enough. Anything you hear from them that you can understand at all is a pure gain. What you never knew when it was alive will never go dead. But this is a general condition, experienced again and again, in which some part of a vaguely sensed terrain that is the present is suddenly cut in two by an abrupt defining line that leaves a lot of older friends stranded on the other shore. Yet somehow it seemed that this shouldn’t have happened to the real “modernists” because, at least at the plane of their fundamental intentions, what they were after was a

kind of universal openness. That they should appear arbitrary and freaky now seems somewhat surprising for artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian, Schoenberg and Varese, Laban, and Martha Graham. If you read something, say, by Martha Graham explaining how she started out to discover or invent a truly modern dance when she began teaching at the Eastman School in 1923, it appears at first sensible enough: The first morning I went into class, I thought I won’t teach anything I know. I was through with character dancing. I wanted to begin, not with character or ideas, but with movement. So I started with the simplest— walking, running, skipping, leaping—and went on from there.

All of which is intelligible and typical Modernism—the rejection of an arbitrary system of representation, in this case the cooch dance exoticism of Ruth St. Denis that was her immediate past—in favor of an exploration of dance as an art of movement immanent in the fundamental physical human acts of locomotion and gesture. At least it seems that way, until she goes on to say what she means in particular: By correcting what looked false, I soon began creating. I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.

And then you realize that you didn’t understand what she was saying after all. What would a “false walk” be? Or a “true one”? The two least likely attributes you could assign to movements are “true” and “false,” unless you have some kind of representational idea according to which a walk can become a kind of proposition asserting that it is “a liar running,” “a hypocrite skipping.” But then you realize she must have meant something else, because never in your entire experience of Graham dance have you ever seen anybody, her or her students or her imitators, involved in real (literal) walking, running, skipping, or leaping. Everything you’ve ever seen in Graham-derived dance is expressivist in its intention, and all movement is honed and idealized along that emotive axis. In Graham’s work, as in that of many other “modernists,” a universalist modern intention is swamped by arbitrary, period-locked romantic stereotypes. It turns out she wasn’t after the “significant gesture” but only a very special subset of “significant gesture,” the emotionally loaded gesture that is “fraught with meaning” and which is not “beautiful or fluid.” For all that, why shouldn’t modernist gesture be beautiful, nonbeautiful, fluid, jerky, fraught or facile, or totally neutral? This bizarre particularity of commitment to expres •

Some Questions about Modernism

sivism in such Modernists as Martha Graham and Kandinsky, or, at the other extreme, to a reductive elementarism and balance in Mondrian and the rest of the de Stijl group, makes their works much harder to understand than what seem to be their fundamental intentions, which sometimes makes us doubt whether we really understand their intentions. Now this problem is a little less clear in the language arts, especially in English, because there are relatively few examples of thoroughly Modernist work by Americans and Englishmen. Gertrude Stein is probably the only thoroughly Modernist poet we had. Joyce is a Wagnerian soup, and, like Pound and Eliot, is so bogged down with English schoolbook “high cultural” baggage that you have to struggle to disentangle his Modernism from the surrounding bric-a-brac. That’s why I don’t really understand the second part of your question. There’s nothing modern in Personae. At that time Pound was about as “modern” as Arthur B. Davies. Personae is a period piece full of fin de siècle language and poses, the work of an Anglicized schoolboy wearing Provençal, French, Roman, and Chinese costumes and writing “verse.” Except for a few attempts at Modernism in his imagist and vorticist guises, Pound doesn’t approach the Modern until the Cantos. Personae is likeable because it’s so foolish, but it wasn’t modern at the time, even though Pound held certain Modernist attitudes from the time of his involvement with Wyndham Lewis and Fenollosa around 1914. The Quartets is another matter. The work belongs to the ’30s, and it’s an excellent example of a late, hybrid, Modernist work. What I mean is this: the Quartets is Modernist in its narrational structure. The work is a set of variations on a pair of related commonplaces that you can consider the motivic material, if you want to think of the work in terms of traditional (nonmodern) music. The pair of quotes from Herakleitos that start it off say essentially that “the way up and the way down is the same” and “though there is a common truth (logos) most people act out of a private knowledge.” Taken together they could mean virtually anything, if you were concerned with Herakleitos; but Eliot uses them as a pair of dialectically opposed commonsense observations—namely, that “the way up and the way down is the same way” but “not for anybody going anywhere on the staircase,” which is something like a double gag. These comically opposed propositions—carefully dislocated from any context provide the material—that is, their opposition provides the material for the variations. The variations themselves consist of the act of providing partial contexts for these two commonplaces by means of rhetorical shifts that constitute social-stylistic or literary-stylistic and period environments. Which is essentially putting these platitudes through a series of rapid Some Questions about Modernism

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costume changes. These changes or variations are presented as a smooth but discontinuous sequence, if you are used to a poetry of conventional narration in which time and place and speaker are securely specified. If Eliot had numbered all the variations instead of numbering only larger sections, the poem might have looked a little less self-important, the essentially lightweight playfulness of the poetry might have been evident, and we might have avoided all the grave debates about what Eliot meant in the poem, and we could have dispensed with the Casebook on the Four Quartets, because it would have appeared quite clearly that the poem had no ideas at all, but merely played with different kinds of talk. But the excessive numbering would have interfered with the fast, elegant presentation and probably would have overworked the rather obvious musical analogy that Eliot had indicated sufficiently to suggest the poem was a typically modern “abstraction.” In fact, the work, with its rather smooth though sharp transitions, in which the edges of successive “pieces” are neatly dovetailed to each other, has a strongly unified overall surface appearance rather like the bland, middle ’30s Cubism of Arshile Gorky. By now your reference to two streams of Modernism, poetry running from Eliot and Auden up to Tate and the Academic poets of the ’50s, and the other proceeding from Pound and Williams to Olson, won’t puzzle many readers. Other discriminations and evaluations you make, might. I’m thinking of your references to Pound’s provincialism and particularly of your assertion about Gertrude Stein and John Cage that “both of them seem much more significant poets and minds than either Pound or Williams.” Pound was a provincial in the sense that he was always building The Five Foot Shelf of Classics, he just kept shoving different books into it. But the most profound sense in which he was provincial was his facility for combining ideas that would have been mutually irreconcilable if he really understood their implications. Anyone who in 1914 could combine the notion that “all arts aspire to the condition of music” with the first proposition of imagism, which advocated “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” would have had to be either a fool or a provincial. The first notion promotes total abstraction. Music envy is the mark of the Abstractionist. Almost all of the people who discussed music from the point of view of the other arts and aspired to its condition spoke of music as “an arrangement of tones,” which is something like saying that a human being is an arrangement of proteins; but it sounded like a wonderful idea if you were advocating a nonrepresentational art. The Imagist proposition advocates total com •

Some Questions about Modernism

mitment to representation. Mallarmé might have subscribed to the first position in the1880s and Stendhal to the second in the 1830s, and there’s no simple and sensible way of combining them. But Pound shows he’s not a fool by the ingeniously absurd way in which he manages to reconcile them. He asserts what is usually taken as the fundamental Modernist axiom: that it is the obligation of a Modernist art to define its possible operations as the manipulation of the elements of what is taken to be its uniquely distinctive medium. So it follows for Pound that “music is an arrangement of tones, painting is an arrangement of colors and forms on a flat surface, sculpture is an arrangement of volumes in three dimensional space, and poetry is an arrangement of images.” It doesn’t take much insight to observe that the kind of art you get from the fundamental axiom depends upon how you define the medium and its proper elements and operations. It is even easier to see that Pound has not placed the action of poetry on a structurally equivalent plane with music. Tones in music are distinctive and totally nonreferential—we would now probably say phonemic—while images are nothing if they are not referential or representational. This puts Pound in the position of advocating a modernist organization of quite traditionally representational linguistic elements for poetry while appearing to advocate much more radical possibilities for painting and sculpture and believing that he was a thoroughgoing modernist across the board. That’s what I mean when I say he’s provincial, his failure to understand the meaning of his commitments. But in terms of “modernism” he was too far from the action to know where the battle was, he was just standing in the way of the shrapnel. Gertrude Stein was our only pure modernist. I say this because I think we can assert with some strong reason that the main issue of “modernism” between 1908 and 1914 was the struggle over the issues of representation, and that the art that was the most “advanced” in this struggle was not music but painting. In a sense music was hors de combat because rightly or wrongly it had long been offered as the paradigm of a nonrepresentational art. It’s true that musicologists like Arnold Schering and Gerhardt Frottscher were publishing work at that time that provided the groundwork for a very different and sophisticated way of discussing music as a linguistically representational art, but nobody that I know of in the struggle around abstraction was involved with these positions. What is ironical about the whole business is that the music most of the avant-garde Abstractionists had in mind was the traditional music of the period between, say, the mid-seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, more often the period from 1700 to about 1880, and only instrumental music at that. What they were doing Some Questions about Modernism

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was offering the image of a thoroughly traditional and conventionalized musical system as the paradigm of language-like art, but an art conceived as a language without any semantics. You can still find this position in the writings of late and entrenched Abstractionists like Levi-Strauss. But because this was so much taken for granted in music, music was not involved in the struggle for abstraction, which it was thought to have been born with. In fact modernism in music consisted essentially of a breakdown of the quasi-linguistic system by about 1880 with the collapse of tonality under the mounting pressures put upon it by the demands for psychological and dramatic representation. But painting had always been considered a representational art in the West, and the struggle over “adequacy of representation” in various manifestations runs through the whole nineteenth century. It’s a complicated history, made even more complicated by the general notion that the distinguishing virtue of a painter was “style” not “direct representation”; but the struggle over adequate representation was fundamental to the issue of French Modernist painting throughout Realism and Impressionism. And to state the issue perhaps over concisely, the concentrated attack on the precise meaning of “adequacy of representation” by painting intelligences of the order of Manet, Degas, and the rest of the Impressionists opened up a Pandora’s box of ambiguities in what had seemed like a fairly straightforward notion. It turned out that what was thought to be a unified thing, the visual image (“the impression”), was a complex combination of conceptual and perceptual elements that show up most clearly in the work of Picasso and Braque in the paintings of 1908–1912. Those paintings draw most of their energy from the collision of conceptual and perceptual elements within what appears to be the fragile construct that we consider an image. These painters made a four-year career out of dramatic, comic, lyric, and even expressive explorations of the syntactical and semantic constraints limiting pictorial recognizability. Sometimes only the attachment of a title was sufficient to allow a viewer to recognize the elliptical representations of parts of well-known objects like guitars and people, which would otherwise have gone undetected, yet which, once recognized, seemed somehow adequate representations of some experience, like the simultaneous apperception of a man in a room and the city outside the window, several objects in the room, a piece of molding over the door and a part of an obtruding chair. But the point of attack was upon the elements and arrangements that go to make up an image, not upon the arrangement of already constructed images. Of all the writers in English only Gertrude Stein seems to have had a thorough understanding of how profoundly Cubism opened up the pos •

Some Questions about Modernism

sibilities of representation with this analysis. But then she was the writer in English with the deepest interest in language, the only one with an interest in language as language. I know almost everybody will object to this, but I’ve never understood why anybody thought Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, or Williams were innovators in language. Essentially all of their interest was concentrated at the level of rhetoric. The image, for example, as Pound conceived it was a psychological ensemble, “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”; but as he employed it, it was a rhetorical element rather than a linguistic one, or what could better be described as a presentational strategy mounted on the perfectly conventional English sentence. It really is not very different from the rhetorical figure Quintilian calls an image and warns lawyers and orators to avoid, because its detail is distracting and therefore more suited to the stage (“Who is that winding up his face like an old man with his feet wound up in wool?”). Eliot and Pound were much more involved with presentational and narrational strategies, the manipulation of sequences of pieces of discourse and their arrangement. Joyce comes the closest to an interest in language in his fascination with punning, which is an interest in arbitrary and often cross-linguistic homonymy. But Stein of all of them had a philosophical commitment to the problematic double system of language—the self-ordering system and the pointing system—and from the beginning of her serious work she had encountered the peculiar conflict between the two, even in her early stories. She also had a thorough awareness—shared by Joyce more than any other of her English language contemporaries—of another fundamental structural ambiguity of language: that utterance is play before it is address or discourse or representation. And sometimes this mad jingling play can throw light on something in the world (“Sometimes Melanctha was so blue that she didn’t know what she was going to do.”)—and sometimes swamp it in a grammatical or phonological ocean. But she was a writer with a profound representational commitment in all of its problematicalness, and she probed the subtlest distinctions of grammar for the most refined distinctions of meaning. There is probably nothing in the English language to compare with the seemingly infinite series of meaningful distinctions about living and aging and dying that Stein draws phrase by phrase for nearly twenty-one pages out of minute shifts in the aspect of the English verb in the litany that closes The Making of Americans. Coming with this refined grasp of the language as medium—and of language as medium—she was well prepared to understand the work of Picasso and Braque, who were embarked on a similar project in another medium and had in some ways made more progress than she had. It didn’t take her long to close the gap, and she was the only Some Questions about Modernism

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writer who did. Tender Buttons, which was written by 1913, is not derivative from painting, but it is the only language work that lives in the same time as Picasso’s Cubism. But Stein’s work was never adequately understood until fairly recently. I’m not really sure why, though I think it was at least partly because of the genre problem, the question of what it was she was writing. You have to remember that at that time most of the American poetry avant-garde made a big thing of the distinction between “poetry” and “prose” and that Stein started out as a writer of narrative fiction, or at least she presented her early work in the context of the “story” and the “novel,” which were generally considered “prose” forms. But by 1908 and 1909 she had embarked on a career that could not be defined in terms of “fiction.” Three Lives may superficially resemble the story genre, and she evokes a deliberate comparison with Flaubert; but her three “stories” are much less stories than the pieces in Dubliners and much more language constructions. And if this is at all true for Three Lives, it became more and more true for The Making of Americans, and was quite clear in the portraits like “Ada” or “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” that what you had were language constructions not stories. Yet they were presented in a “prose” format—with capital letters beginning what look like sentences, periods closing them, and periodic paragraphing. I’ve said it before, but I think it’s worth saying again: prose is a kind of Concrete poetry with justified margins. It is essentially characterized by the conventions of printing and the images of grammar and logic and order to which they give rise. But whatever it looks like, a characteristic passage from “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” is poetry in any intelligent sense of the word: There were some dark and heavy men there then. There were some who were not so heavy and some who were not so dark. Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene sat regularly with them. They sat regularly with the ones who were dark and heavy. They sat regularly with the ones who were not so dark. They sat regularly with the ones that were not so heavy. They sat with them regularly, sat with some of them. They went with them regularly, went with them. They were regular then, they were gay then, they were where they wanted to be then where it was gay to be then, they were regularly gay then.

This is a traditional phrase poetry in spite of the illusion of punctuation, with its seemingly orthodox commas and periods, that at times seem almost appropriate, but then become as irrelevant as flyspecks randomly distributed over a musical score. Stein’s language is as difficult to contain  •

Some Questions about Modernism

within the page punctuation conventions of “prose” as Beowulf or the lliad, which were maddeningly punctuated even in scholarly editions. But these same scholarly editions are quite careful to present the line breaks that will assure you you are looking at “verse,” which is not the same thing as “poetry” but almost the same thing for most people. Still there’s no reason why Stein’s prose punctuation should fool a poet, even though the prose costume probably contributed to the mistaken expectations for a certain type of narrative presentation that were from then on usually disappointed. This disappointment may have led to occasional mockery by people like Sinclair Lewis of what otherwise seems like straightforward poetry, with its measured out and chained phrases, locked together by shared recurring words that are systematically placed and displaced in the slightly varying pitch curves of the different length phrases and sentences. In a profoundly traditional sense, this is a very elegant prosody; but it is a prosody immanent in English intonation, not the arbitrary conventions of meter. Still, the poetry of the portraits resembled sufficiently a poetry of incantations and litanies that, for a poet with as sensitive an ear and as generous sensibilities as Pound, was not really a problem. After all he recognized at least three different kinds of melopoeia, including the litany, and was willing to assume others as yet unknown to him (“and with the subject never really out of my mind I don’t yet know half there is to know about melopoeia”). Pound may have been provincial, but he wasn’t really an Academic; or if he was an Academic, he was Academic in the only sense that ever gave a positive meaning to the word. I don’t think the novelty of her work gave Williams any problems either but that’s where the sympathy for her work ended—with the Pound-Williams Modernists. But even there the interest of her work was narrowly conceived, partly because these poets were surprisingly involved in the poetry/prose distinction, as most American poets seem to have been for the next fifty years. While the problem seems relatively trivial now with the ’60s in back of us, it’s easy to see that the meaning of poetry itself seemed to be at stake in the question thrown at all Modernist poetry: “what separates it from prose?” Generally the poets who got into the argument took one of two tacks. They either made problematic distinction between “poetry” and “prose,” like Pound, or else, like Eliot, they made an apparently banal distinction between “verse” and “prose” and as far as possible declined the gambit of what “poetry” was. But Eliot, who was assuming what looked like an antiModernist position in his criticism, could afford to do this more easily than Pound or Williams, self-declared Modernists, who had an obligation to define the scope of operations and the unique medium of “poetry,” a term they were unwilling to surrender. The problem is an old one and the Some Questions about Modernism

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issues develop in the West along torturous lines filled with traps, sacrifices, tempo shifts, and recoveries, all precipitated by the opening, which when handled by players of great skill on both sides of the question leads to no significant outcome because the insolubility of the problem is built into the opening. The basic idea out of which the question opens is what seems like a commonsense observation: that poetry as usually practiced is different from ordinary discourse; the next two moves are to identify all ordinary language use as ordinary discourse and then to identify ordinary discourse as “prose”; from there on the game is predetermined except for blunders. The point is that it’s worthwhile to question every single one of these assumptions. Even the first assumption, what is it? That poetry is different because it has a funny sound, a funny way of talking, and a funny way of thinking. Which is to say, it is distinguished by an arbitrary, conventional, overstructured, phonological arrangement (if you like Jacobsonian formalism); and by eccentricities of syntax and eccentricities of semantic structure or mode of representation (figures of speech and figures of thought, if you like classical rhetorical notions). But “distinguished” from what? Ordinary talk? It’s possible to attack the whole notion of “ordinary talk” and watch it crumble, and that’s my way, to assault the whole gambit; but Pound and Eliot as well, when he talks of poetry, take variants of the “Sublime Continuation,” articulated in slightly different ways by John Dennis, Vico, Bishop Lowth, and finally Wordsworth: poetry is emotional speech (what Dennis called “a pathetickal and numerous Discourse”). Pound tracks both the musicality and the mode of representation to the emotional origins of poetry (“The Serious Artist,” 1913). If I may say so, I think the emotion source is the most disastrous element of the Sublime theory, and it haunts most early-twentieth-century Modernism, but not quite as much as it haunts the whole of twentieth-century academicism. The reason for this is simply that the theory proposes to explain what is well known by what is less well known—the phonological and conceptual resources of language by the mysteries of physiology intersected by current events. The result is a pseudotheory rather than a theory. Probably Wordsworth was the experimental poet with the most refined mind and the most profound way of dealing with the problem. In the preface to the 1802 edition of the Lyrical Ballads he appears to decline formally the prose/poetry gambit: “much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science.” What he actually does is respond to a more fundamental-sense of the word prose, which you could call its etymological sense (“prose” from prosa oratio,

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Some Questions about Modernism

prosa from prorsus, shortened from proversus = “straightforward”; therefore “prose” as “straightforward talk,” which is opposed by a deft folk etymology to “versus,” supposed from Latin vertere = “to turn” and therefore “verse” as “turned talk” or “twisted talk” or “roundabout talk”). But the difference for Wordsworth between the domain of poetry and the domain of science is rather more subtle than a distinction between the language of the emotions and the language of fact. The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere, though the eyes and sense of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings . . . If the labors of men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition and in the impressions we habitually receive, the Poet . . . will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art, as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. (preface of 1802)

So that Wordsworth claims for poetry the phenomenological domain of all human experience, and if he had followed this claim back into his consideration of language he could have avoided the commitment to a language arising from “emotion” for a commitment to a language appropriate to illuminate the whole domain of human experience, whatever that happened to turn out to be. So it might have turned out for Wordsworth, the Modernist, that even in theory matter of fact and matter of poetry, like language of fact and language of poetry had a very great overlap. But Wordsworth was less driven by melomania than Pound, and he certainly was capable of much more “matter of fact” poetry than Pound, if that commonsense term means very much once it is really pushed. But a theory of poetry is worth very little if it can’t deal with Wordsworth’s “flatness” or

Some Questions about Modernism

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Lawrence’s, or Stein’s, when it appears. And any poetics that can’t throw light on Williams’s wheelbarrow poem or “The White Hunter” in “Tender Buttons” isn’t worth the name. The White Hunter A white hunter is nearly crazy One of your principal themes is that Modernist poetry is a poetry of collage. How would you compare that thesis with Kenner’s that the Cantos (and I assume he would say The Waste Land) use patterned energies, work like vortices? “Vortex” is really a Futurist term—in spite of Wyndham Lewis and Pound’s expressed distaste for Futurism. There are at least two works of Balla’s from the period between 1911 and 1913 that have the word “vortex” in the title, the earliest, I think, a work called Vortex + Spatial Forces of Glass that dates somewhere after 1911. Balla uses the word in pretty much the same way that Pound uses it—to express the sense of an energy center. If I understand Kenner correctly, what he is calling attention to is a particular aspect of modernist collage structures as they exist in poetry— what you could call the “motivation” for moving from one “piece” to another “piece” in a particular work. For Pound, in particular, the “moves” appear to be motivated by an idea of maintaining a sufficient energy level instead of by some compositional notion of appropriate arrangement. I would agree with Kenner that this idea of energy informs the Cantos and probably the work of many other poets, especially Olson; but I don’t see how you can say much about it unless you can talk about what provides the “energy” of a given “piece” of material, and I think that’s hard to discuss without a more fundamental discussion of the collage principle as a whole, which I thought was much better understood than it seems to be. After writing the piece in boundary 2, I found a lot of people asking me to spell out what I meant by “collage” when I said that “for better or worse Modern poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset.” I suppose the term is better understood in the “visual arts,” because it derives from the practice of pasting pieces of paper or other extraneous material into a painting in the manner of Picasso and Braque at about 1912. The early practice usually consisted of the introduction of a piece of wallpaper or some such thing in substitution for a painted depiction of it, but once the process of introducing these foreign, fragmentary ready-made materials got underway, the whole idea was quickly generalized by the Futurists, Arp and Schwitters, the Surreal •

Some Questions about Modernism

ists, and even Picasso himself to a principle of construction based on the juxtaposition of objects, object fragments and materials drawn from the most disparate contexts. The result was a work that no longer yielded an iconic representation, even of a fractured sort, though bristling with significations. This work tended to occupy a rather odd semiological space. It was clearly remote from the conventional notions of representation, yet it was so filled with reference that it couldn’t be classed with the Abstract, or rather nonobjective, work of Mondrian, Malevich, or Van Doesburg. What I mean is that the work operated in a middle space between representation on the one hand and the kind of constructional game of Mondrian on the other; and its operation oscillated between the two possibilities of representational reference and compositional game, depending upon whether you stressed the nature of the materials and the contexts from which they were drawn, or the arrangement of the elements. To a great extent traditional ideas of arrangement, of balance or equivocal balance, so dominated the visual arts of the early twentieth century that the strange indexical or referential properties of the collages of an artist like Schwitters seem to be somewhat submerged in artful arrangement and design. Yet in Schwitters and Arp, as in Picasso, Braque, and Gris, there are always the peculiar semantic structures built out of the metonymic functions of the objects and materials employed. I think it was Roman Jacobson who was the first to point to the function of metonymy in the work of the Cubists and Futurists, and his essay on metonymy and metaphor in Fundamentals of Language is one of the most suggestive discussions of the subject. Unfortunately he isn’t sufficiently precise in his analysis of either metonymy or metaphor to allow his ideas to be used without further development. What Jacobson suggests is that there are two fundamental operations through which language meaning is generated: one is a process of combination or contextualization, the other is a process of selection from a set of substitutes. He calls the contextualization operation “metonymy,” the operation of the substitution principle “metaphor”; and he sees the normal processes of language arising from the interaction of the two. The whole idea is something of an extension of the notions of classical rhetoric, where “metonymy” is a figure in which an object is evoked by naming an object closely related to it, the way a “lock” might be evoked by a “key,” a “horse” by a “cart,” or a “spoon” by a “fork.” Jacobson calls the relationship between these elements, in view of their closeness, a relationship of contiguity. Classically, metaphor is the figure where the name of one thing can be used to evoke another that is not necessarily directly Some Questions about Modernism

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related to it but in some sense equivalent—“swan” for “poet,” “fire” for “passion.” Jacobson extends this idea very radically to refer to what in linguistics you would call the substitution set—which is to say the set of possible alternates from which the particular selected sign is considered to be chosen. What Jacobson means by this is that if you speak of “a red wine” there is a substitution set of only three possible color terms “red,” “white,” and “rose” (pink). The meaning of any of these three color terms is defined by the space it occupies between the other two, and the ranges of the variables red, white, and pink are defined in the following way: any dark wine is “red,” any essentially translucent wine is “white,” except for the translucent pink ones, which are “rose.” The range of the variables is defined by the metaphoric function which partitions the meanings among the three variables. But the substitution set itself, or the scope of the metaphoric function is defined by the metonymic function of the context “wine,” which shrinks the number of color terms in the language to three. Whether it’s a good thing to use the term “metaphor” in this way is an interesting question; but the idea of metonymy seems more urgently in need of refinement. The idea of “contiguity” doesn’t seem sufficient to explain what happens when the notion of “color” is situated in the context of “wine.” The category of “color” in the environment “wine” is reduced from something like a ten-valued system to a three-valued one, and the category “color” has been modified to the point where its three values only accidentally indicate chromatic characteristics and primarily indicate wine “type.” But beyond this, the context of “color” characterization modifies the category “wine” to the point where you would be very surprised if a waiter told you they had “a nice house red” and he brought you a bottle of port, however fine it happened to be. Apparently there is a discourse context that is not “present” in the sense that Jacobson supposes when he speaks of the contiguity function of metonymy. The sort of people who speak about “red wine” do not apparently mean sweet wines or doctored wines. This is social knowledge provided by experience with such people and their conversations, but the cue to the applicability of the social context is provided by the juxtaposition of the color attribute and the wine. For this reason it may be better to suppose that “contexts” are evoked by the metonymic function of the elements presented, just as a potential “substitution set” is evoked by the metaphorical function of the elements presented, and that the juxtaposition simultaneously or sequentially of these presented elements generates cues which will combine to define or annul possible contexts within which the substitution set will be delimited. Consequently a “word” will in its metonymic capacity evoke a “neighborhood” of related “words.” “Forks” will evoke “knives,” “spoons,” “food,”  •

Some Questions about Modernism

“tables,” “ashtrays,” “air conditioning,” and “The Light Cavalry overture” or anything else through a chain of proximal connections that is not blocked by other contexts or lack of energy in the interpreter. Now this metonymic function is characteristic of the elements of collage, which are normally presented in such a way as to free at least some of these possible contexts that would generate representative association trains like the “spoon,” “food,” “tables” . . . “Muzak” series. The reason the collage elements are more or less free is that the strategy of collage involves suppression of the ordering signs that would specify the “stronger logical relations” among the presented elements. By “stronger logical relations” I mean relations of implication, entailment, negation, subordination, and so on. Among logical relations that may still be present are relations of similarity, equivalence, identity, their negative forms, dissimilarity, nonequivalence, nonidentity, and some kind of image of concatenation, grouping or association. These “weaker” logical relations allow a greater degree of uncertainty of interpretation or, more specifically, more degrees of freedom in the reading of the sign-objects and their ensemble relations. It’s easy to see the way this works if you merely compare two early 1920s Schwitters collages that are illustrated in William Seitz’s book The Art of Assemblage (Museum of Modern Art, 1961; pp. 54–55). A Painting with Stars consists of an arrangement of tattered newspaper clippings, pieces of colored paper, a checker, a disc tied or lassoed by a piece of twine stretched out across the surface of the collage, a rectangular piece of wire screen, apparently associated with or attached to a piece of wood stripping that might be part of its “frame,” on which you can see a fragment of a printed word r asti. The collage is emphatically designed in the obvious painterly sense of recurrent contrast of curve and straight line, and is filled with staccato variations of form—rectangle-trapezoid-trianglecircle—and contrasts between internal diagonals and strict verticals and horizontals of the framing edge. All of this rhythmic variation is right out of the handbook of pure painting. But the materials are something else. Some of the fragmented newspaper clippings very approximately translated read: open letter mathias the corrupt mpire bloody increa hunger Some Questions about Modernism

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In one sense the newspaper clippings are all members of the same class and are, in this sense, dominated by the relation of equivalence, but they add specific though ambiguous literary and political information of “corruption,” “empire,” and some kind of “bloodiness,” which in Schwitters’s elegant fragmentation of the gothic printed morpheme suggests also “revolution” because of the breaking up of “blutig” in such a way that the loops of the initial “b” and the seemingly terminal “g” appear as possible “o”s yielding the German morpheme olutio as a result of the tearing process applied to the pasted paper, which consequently comes to look like a poster partially torn off a wall. Two kinds of “representation” have crept back into the collage: a literary-poetic one (in the referential nature of the language pieces) and a visual one (in the suggestion of the poster-covered walls), both of which combine contextually to evoke 1920s Germany. In this sense the work is truly intermedial, operating with several kinds of literary genre and several kinds of visual construction. For example, it makes use of a range of contrasts of “color type” that has both a compositional (arrangement or design) significance and semantic significance— “painted color”—“printed color”—“inherent color” (the color of materials like wood, wire)—“physical transformation color” (resulting from aging, wear, soiling). Each of these color types can evoke at least one metonymic context, and these contexts interact with each other and with the verbal literary material, which also evokes several contexts. All of this is very evident, but what is not evident is the specific interaction that takes place, or, more precisely, there is a built-in and wide-ranging variability of reading situated between broad but well-defined limits. This collage also presents a good, though not especially important, example of the manner in which even an image of some kind of logical subordination can be introduced into a collage by positioning. Schwitters has placed the fragment of wire screening and the piece of wood stripping in such a way that they seem to share an edge and, though not clearly physically connected, they appear to be part of a single fabricated object—some sort of commercial screen. I say “appear to be” because the relationship is somewhat equivocal, which allows you to speculate upon whether you have one object or two materials, with the result that the metonymic contexts flicker back and forth between function and usage readings and material semantics. In this case it is not an especially important speculation, but there are apparently a considerable number of subtle ways of creating images of conceptual linkage through analogy with real or suggested physical linkages. So it happens that in the same collage, the piece of twine is looped around the paper disc that appears to hover above it; and this linkage suggests by analogy of position and connection a balloon with its fanciful association  •

Some Questions about Modernism

train that connects it to “child” or “innocence” or “festivity” or whatever, or even more fancifully to an image of the “moon lassoed by a string,” all of this in the violent atmosphere of empire and blood will combine to provide a tenuous image of a children’s party in a charnel house. Yet there is no clear support for these suggestions. I suppose you could try to “corroborate” them by looking for support for them or for refutations from the notebooks, letters, the Schwitters poems or the gossip of his surviving friends. And most likely you will come to no definite conclusion, except that these association trains are too weakly motivated to insist on. But the point is that because of the nature of collage weakly motivated readings flicker about the more strongly motivated ones, contributing to the “atmosphere” in which none are entirely obliterated. The play of metonymy in collage is not as limited as under the conditions of conventional pictorial representation or the conditions of that kind of specially pointed conventional language use that people misleadingly think of as “normal discourse.” You can find complex collage structures of this sort, where it is necessary to literally read the verbal material, even among the works of Picasso, though formalist art critics have persistently ignored the most relevant verbal jokes and anecdotes in their preference for what seem to them more important design or structural concerns. The times are changing. One of the most important features of “Postmodernism” is the death of “Formalism” in criticism and its associated “Abstraction” in art, both of which are being replaced with much more complex notions of reference and representation. Still, there are clearly collages that are quite easily contained within formalist concerns and in a sense justify that kind of analysis. The Schwitters Merzbau of 1921 (in Seitz’s book Assemblage, p. 56) and many of the later Schwitters works of the ’30s use the “pieces” of things pretty much like small plaques of color for traditional aesthetic arrangements based on academic notions of color harmony and notions of compositional equilibria. The metonymic function is still there, but it is quite submerged. Here it is restricted to a contrast between types of materials, (wire, wood, cardboard, paper), or mode of fabrication (lathe turned and knurled, sawed and planed, wire drawn and woven, etc.). Associations lead to nothing except a pleasant and bland sense of variation, which doesn’t encourage you to follow them up. Probably this is one of the main reasons that ’60s Modernism dispensed with all notions of “composition,” because of the deadly way in which “arrangement” smothers any interest in the presented object in favor of a banal pleasure based on recurrence phenomena or else treats it to the red carpet presentation of a “little king.” This hostility to arrangement is what led many of us to prefer the ready-mades, the Dada objects, Some Questions about Modernism

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and much more radical unitary pieces of certain Minimalist sculptors like Morris and Judd. It led some artists into a hostility to collage, because they saw collage in terms of its multiplicity of pieces. They reasoned quite correctly that if there are pieces there is arrangement, and all arrangements, no matter how “random,” are apprehended as some kind of order, because randomness is conceivable but not perceivable. Personally I share this distaste for ideas of arrangement and I don’t think anyone can be very interested in doing collage work now, mainly because of the predictability of its effect. Still I think it’s possible to identify the underlying logic of collage with a strategy of presentation rather than its habit of multiplicity of parts. So I tend to see Duchamp’s ready-mades and Arman’s “accumulations” as falling within the limiting conditions of collage. Certainly you can imagine as limiting cases the unconditional presentation of a single thing or the presentation of the same thing over and over and over and over again. Tonal music would be no less tonal music if you only played one note, or if you played one note over and over again with the mechanical regularity of a player piano. Arman’s “accumulation” objects are a lot more interesting in detail because the triviality of arrangement allows you to focus upon the precise differences seen among the general equivalence of the multiple cameras or paint tubes or whatever. Interestingly enough the early collage poems like The Waste Land or the Cantos are quite free of the aesthetics of arrangement. Either because of the weakness of formal arrangement as an experienced feature of long language works not subordinated to some single idea or because the poets were fortunately deficient in a banal aptitude. One of the things that makes The Waste Land difficult to apprehend as a compositionally designed structure is that you are usually unclear about what the part to part relations are. So if you’re reasonably sensible you will merely discard any attempt at a coherent overall reading, because it would be a violation of the poem’s character. Both the Cantos and The Waste Land are of course filled with recurrences of motif of some sort, but the structural relation between the “similar” parts is not sufficiently clear either to yield a convincing reading or to be taken as clear-cut formal repetition device. What you’ve got in The Waste Land is a kind of progress that approaches a narration or, even more, suggests the combination of several narration strands like some cutup Griffith movie; while the Cantos approach narrative because they are made up of pieces sewn one to the other by some kind of forward moving, smooth but not obvious association train that could end anywhere or not at all. I suppose it was only the apparently traditionalist cultural programs of these poets that concealed the direct relation to modernist collage, but it  •

Some Questions about Modernism

may also have been the conventional literary materials out of which they constructed their pieces—the snatches of obvious dialogue, the sermonizing, poeticized description, all taken from well known genres that distracted attention from the presentational format of collage. “Modernism and Postmodernism” is partly concerned with distinguishing modernisms which are usually thought of as cognate—for example, Eliot’s from Pound’s. Since Eliot and Pound are usually associated with Joyce and the Modernist prose movement your argument clearly would have consequences there too. Briefly what account would you make of the moderns in prose as related to the poets? Why do you ask about “prose”? It’s like saying to me, “you’ve been discussing modernist developments in mathematics and have developed a notion of modernist mathematical styles, how would you apply these notions of modernism to accounting?” The only way I can even approach the question is by supposing you don’t really mean “prose” writers; and I’m sure you don’t. Because if I said the only modernist prose writer is Wittgenstein, you’d say “That’s not what I mean.” And of course, it isn’t what you mean. Which is a relief for me, because I don’t really think that the notion of prose exists on the same plane as the notion of poetry. As far as I’m concerned there is the language art. That’s poetry. All of it. There are then genres within it. Like “narration.” And there’s a subform of narration. Called “fiction.” And a subform of that called “the novel,” a narrational form with an enveloping commitment to a certain notion of “reality,” constructed out of commonsense intuitions about character and objects, and social and psychological events, and probability. That’s not “prose.” The idea of “prose” is only an additional prop for a novel. “Prose” is the name for a kind of notational style. It’s a way of making language look responsible. You’ve got justified margins, capital letters to begin graphemic strings which, when they are concluded by periods, are called sentences, indented sentences that mark off blocks of sentences that you call paragraphs. This notational apparatus is intended to add probity to that wildly irresponsible, occasionally illuminating and usually playful system called language. Novels may be written in “prose”; but in the beginning no books were written in prose, they were printed in prose, because “prose” conveys an illusion of a commonsensical logical order. It’s as appropriate to the novel as ketchup to a hamburger, which is to say, it’s not very good but the hamburger wouldn’t go far without it. This is not to say that once you start to notate talk into “prose” that it doesn’t exert a coercive force upon what you say and how you say it. As with all notations it has convenSome Questions about Modernism

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tions, writing rules and the like, that will prevent you from saying a lot of things, or at least make it difficult to get those things notated clearly, or in their full energy and perspicuity. It will also encourage you to talk in such a way as to make it easier for you to use the notation. So the conventions of printing and the “prose” notation that developed out of it encouraged the use of only certain kinds of language and discouraged other kinds in the books that were printed in “prose.” That’s why the last chapter of Ulysses and a lot of other parts of the book are not in “prose.” Because Joyce was finally getting to the stage-Irish blathering poetry he wanted to make and getting loose from that dreadful Dublin novel, even if he had to use every piece of fin de siècle mythical garbage to help him get free. Modernist? Here is this absurd, nearly blind, Irish scat poet living in Paris, Trieste, Zurich, putting the most irrelevant, arbitrary high-cultural fragments into an Irish soap opera. He’s a modernist in the sense that he exploits the phonological weak spot of the language, the pun—Finnegans Wake operates in an amazing way like Louis Zukofsky’s Catullus translations. At any given place in the Wake you can convert nearly any string of words into a more or less acceptable utterance, of some more or less bizarre type, with a degree of relevance to a kind of progressive line of thought in a stageIrish accent. This fundamental cantus firmus of Irish talk is not always the most obvious reading you would get from the graphemic notation Joyce employs. Like a cantus firmus in a motet, this talk is occasionally subordinated to other voices making outlandish and marginally related puns in a variety of other languages, if you can imagine these other languages largely in terms of spelling or pronounced in a somewhat odd way that will allow the stage-Irish English to share a phonological string with some thing like German for a brief moment—something which is nearly impossible if you pay close attention over any length of utterance. Joyce is Modernist in his language commitments somewhat in the way Gertrude Stein is Modernist. That is, Joyce breaks the long narrative down to a flickering representation that flares up and dies down fitfully as the language slips between talk and a Dada playfulness. So counting them, you’ve got Gertrude Stein and Joyce. Later maybe there’s Beckett. The rest of them are writing “novels,” and one novel is more like another than it’s like anything else at all. It may be interesting for some other reason, but there’s no room to be “modern” in it because the essential property of “modernism” is the application of the fundamental axiom—the radical definition of the medium, its legitimate operations and their scope. The idea of applying the fundamental axiom of Modernism to a subgenre like the novel is too trivial to consider.

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Some Questions about Modernism

Frank Kermode is typical of critics who would say that only one Modernist revolution has occurred (and who would agree with you that it’s fast receding) but who would deny that any real “Postmodernism” has evolved. How would you respond to that position, and particularly to his assertion in Continuities that “neo-Modernists tend to make the mistake they often scold other people for, which is to attribute too much importance to the art of the period between the Renaissance and Modernism. By constantly alluding to this as a norm they despise, they are stealthy classicists, as the paleomodernists, who constantly alluded to Byzantine and archaic art, were stealthy Romantics.” I’d like to agree with Kermode. I’d also like to disagree with Kermode. But how do you get him to sit still long enough? If he wasn’t a licensed academic, with a long string of academic publications behind him, I’d say he was a collage artist. What he has to say about Modernism is a jumble of insights, prejudices, information, and misinformation thrown together on the few occasions he looks over his nineteenth-century booktops. He’s never really discussed Modernism, he’s merely responded to a seemingly random set of occasions on which aspects of what look like Modernism appear to have been proposed to him and suggested such a discussion. But supposing that the collage of reviews in Continuities were an essay and it had a point of view, that point of view, toward which the piece drifts as toward some consolatory asymptote, would be that what is now being presented as modern is not new, but merely an extension of early-twentiethcentury Modernism, and that this earlier Modernism is merely an extension of Romanticism. To this he adds the suggestion that whatever this nucleus of attitudes and ideas may be, we would do well to look for it in the seventeenth century, or further back, if we were well enough educated, and that the better part of its intelligence and energies would be located in the earlier periods. Is this true? The only way to find out is to stop begging these questions long enough to ask them, in detail as well as in lofty and somewhat empty generalities. Do, for example, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Robert Morris “attribute too much importance to the art of the period between the Renaissance and Modernism . . . as a norm they despise?” The statement is ridiculous. So much for the details. As for the general theory, if you like you can construct a single tradition of Modernism going back to the end of the sixteenth century, characterized by the serious questioning of traditional representations of reality. You could push it back further, if you want to include the assault

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on Ciceronian rhetoric. If you don’t want to go to that extreme and if you’re prepared to discount the fact that their questioning largely concerned the representation of physical reality rather than humanly experienced reality, you could situate your point of origin in Galileo and Gilbert. But if that seems pushing it a little, it’s easy to pin the whole “movement” on Bacon and Descartes, the twin theorists of experimental Modernism. You could argue that Bacon proposed the form of the experimental novel (all novels were experimental then) in the Advancement of Learning (Book II, ch. xxii, sec. viii–xiv) and that Descartes had accordingly written one in the combined work that the Discourse on Method, the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry truly constitute. In your support you could argue that Descartes had described the Discourse (within the Discourse and therefore reflexively) as a novel: For my design here is not to teach a method that each ought to follow to direct his reason well, but only to show in what manner I have attempted to direct my own . . . So I offer this work as no more than a tale [une histoire] or a fable, if you prefer, in which you may find several examples you can imitate and others, perhaps, you may have no reason to follow, and I hope it will be useful to some, offensive to none, and that all will take pleasure in my openness.

According to plan, Descartes then invents himself as an exemplary experimental man, beset by a snarl of traditional knowledge in his struggle to find the truth (“for I have always had an extreme desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false, to see my actions clearly and to proceed with assurance in this life”), which he naturally accomplishes. Now there is a great value in considering the Discourse and its subsequent chapters as a novel—first because it is very much like many other novels, War and Peace, say, and it is certainly more intelligent; and then “Descartes” is such a wonderful character, a little bizarre perhaps—according to the story he invents analytic geometry as a convenience, because he finds it easier to remember lines by numbers and numbers by lines—but he’s not any more bizarre than Raskolnikov or Watt. And in some ways he’s more “realistic” than most novel heroes, in that he is one of the very few who does a significant amount of real work that you get to see—the scientific discourses. So Descartes’ novel is not only the first, but the best. Moreover in constructing his novel this way Descartes follows Bacon’s experimental way (the “way of probation”), where knowledge “is delivered as a thread to be spun on . . . delivered and intimated in the same method wherein it was invented.” This is Bacon’s plan for a knowledge that is “induced” rather  •

Some Questions about Modernism

than represented, and it is part of the attack on the traditional mode of representation (the “magistral way”), which depends upon “a contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver.” Specifically what this does is to shift from a system of representation to a system of exemplification, in which the method of presentation, referred to the materials presented becomes a model from which meaning is inferred, as in Arp’s description of a poem by Kandinsky: A poem by Goethe teaches the reader, in a poetical way, that death and transformation are the inclusive condition of man. Kandinsky, on the contrary places the reader before an image of dying and transforming words, before a series of dying and transforming words.

An art of representation gives way to an art of “exemplary” presentation, and Bacon and Descartes father the process pieces, not only of Kandinsky and Arp, but John Cage. All this may be true, but it doesn’t explain enough of what we really want to know. What is Modernism? Is earlytwentieth-century Modernism the same as or different from post–Second World War Modernism? Is it over, and is what is now going on sufficiently different to deserve the name “Postmodernism?” First, I would like to suggest that Modernism is definable in terms of a single fundamental axiom: that it is necessary to begin from a radical act of definition or redefinition of the domain of the elements and the operations of the art or of art itself. I would like to suggest that this axiom is both necessary and sufficient to define Modernism in the grand sense that goes deep into certain aspects of Romanticism—and if you restate this axiom more generally to determine the domain of human knowledge, its relation to truth (the object of knowledge), the appropriate methods for discovering it, representing it and communicating it, you arrive at the Modernism of Bacon and Descartes as you pass backwards through Kant. A specially restricted form of the axiom is the fundamental proposition of early-twentieth-century Modernism: that it is necessary for art or an art to define its medium, its elements and operations in terms of what is distinctively peculiar to it as determined from a fundamental reading of its history. I think it is clear that the relation of poetry to truth, which is a question of domain, not of medium, haunts all great Romantic art, which had rejected the more modest role of existing “to divert and to amuse.” Poets like Wordsworth launched a powerful claim to truth through a complicated poetic argument that adjusted mind to nature in the medium of the image, while poets like Keats split “truth” from “value” and lined up poetry on the Some Questions about Modernism

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side of “value,” giving this new domain of truthless value the name “imagination.” Though I suppose in a rigorously logical poem like “Lamia,” Keats rides bravely into the cul-de-sac of his own strategies—that the truth of an illusion is an illusion of truth. The struggle over domain is a fundamental issue also in the so-called Realist painting of Courbet, Manet, and perhaps a good deal more of Impressionism than is usually admitted. But in early-twentieth-century Modernism, the question of domain tended to be fought over the specific issue of medium, mainly because the question of what an art should do became a question of what it could do while still retaining the character of art. You can think of this struggle as in some ways similar to a great research paradigm, to borrow a term from the history of science, in which artists offer hypothetical definitions of art or of their art in terms of specific works or bodies of work that constitute examples or counterexamples, which may often challenge, seriously or comically, the artists’ own or other artists’ definitions. From about the end of the 1880s the defining axiom gets applied to the question of whether representation is the “medium” through which art “communicates” or “expresses” whatever it is that a deep reading of the tradition of art suggests it should communicate or express. So following a long line of Symbolist and Art Nouveau argument Kandinsky in 1911 offered in counter examples the proposition that representation was not the necessary medium for art, because the disposition of colors, forms, and lines was sufficient for all the tasks of painting. If you accept, as Kandinsky did, a particular Romantic definition of domain—that art is concerned with the expression or communication of emotional psychic states of the “artist-seismograph” who responds to the spiritual perturbations of nature—there’s something dazzling about what he achieves in his early work: the success of Romantic landscape painting minus the picture. If you go the route of Cubism you question the meaning of representation as the medium, which is to say, you examine precisely the notion, hardly ever honored in fact, that the medium of painting is a representation of a visual image by analyzing the visual image under conditions not so specially favorable to coherency as the Impressionist mists or sun-dazzled atmospheres, and you watch the image splinter into its component parts of perception, apperception, and conceptual information of various sorts and levels. Now while this analogy of a research program has considerable value for articulating the underlying unity of what may look superficially like very different attitudes in early Modern Art, it tends to obscure the fact that these propositions and counter-propositions function in art somewhat differently than in science. In one sense they seem to resemble more

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Some Questions about Modernism

closely a research program in technology rather than science, because if you advance an absurd hypothesis and come up with a valuable invention you’ve succeeded. Only scientists care whether or not Land’s explanations of color introjection are correct as long as he can produce a color transparency from black and white negatives with monochromatic light. But even this kind of successful “invention” isn’t necessary, because if an artist advances a totally absurd hypothesis that yields no significant consequences, we may love it just for the sheer arrogance of the assertion. Surely we love the poetry of John Ashbery or of Robert Duncan because of the magnitude of its preposterousness. Still, I wouldn’t underestimate the underlying logicality and relevance of some of the most absurd seeming Dada proposals. Arp describes the seriousness with which the Dadas undertook their program of redefinition. At Zurich, disinterested as we were in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we gave ourselves to the fine arts. While the cannon rumbled in the distance we pasted, recited, versified, we sang with all our soul. We sought an elementary art, which, we thought, would save men from the curious madness of these times. We aspired to a new order which might restore the balance between heaven and hell.

Arp’s elementarist concerns were specifically related to the definition of the “medium.” From 1915 to 1920 I wrote my Cloud Pump poems. In these poems I tore apart sentences, words, syllables.

And while it’s easy in the typically vague manner of academic criticism to refer this back to Rimbaud’s Alchemy of the Word, the fact is that Rimbaud’s experiments with language structure never approached what Arp describes. Arp himself did not carry out his own experimental intentions in as full a way as he suggests. One reason for this is that he tended to accept a Romantic notion of domain, as he defines it, not too far from Blake, and this commitment to particular sorts of Romantic results tended to deprive the work of its full possible range. The Cloud Pump poems, like many Dada pieces, are often simple playful variations on romantic commonplaces, minus a few minor grammatical selectional constraints on the distribution of nouns, which Arp distributes and redistributes in a series of musical improvisations, of which “Kunigundula” is as good an example as any:

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the unsuspecting sky bears the inscription kunigundula the sky trills like a polished weathercock the cotton dolls ride their stone ships through the sand of the clouds the church towers polish their feet with leathern dragons freedom leads motion to the clotheslines the ammonites and dragons pledge themselves to saw the feet off motion motion pumps itself a cellar full of larks 2 the leathern cocks bear sawed off feet into the clouds the trilling noblewomen ride dragons through the polished sky the towers are of leather the cocks of freedom are unsuspecting and therefore stuff the weather in their sacks the sack of motion is a leathern ship [. . .] And so it goes on musically, pleasantly and freely; but to say of this work, as Arp does, “I tried to break down language into atoms in order to approach the creative” is a kind of aesthetic overkill. Dada poetry is in many cases a pure pleasure, the pleasure of utterance moving from representation to the sheer play of the language system in the mouth—which is surely even more deeply rooted than the use of language for communication or representation. But this play of categories almost never reaches in early modern work the sustained power and mysterious elegance of Gomringer’s Book of Hours or Jackson Mac Low’s Pronouns of which I offer the “40th Dance” as a small sample: Many begin by getting insects Then many make thunder though taking pigs somewhere, & many give a simple form to a bridge, While coming against something or fearing things. A little later, after making glass boil, & having political material get in, Many, while being in flight, Name things. Then many have or seem to have serious holes & many question many,  •

Some Questions about Modernism

Many make payments to many, & many seem to put examples up. Finally many quietly chalk a strange tall bottle. Yet Dada poetry can be brilliant, as Tzara often demonstrates: preamble = sardanopalus one = valise woman = women pants = water if = moustache 2 = three cane = perhaps after = decipher irritating = emerald vice = vise october = periscope nerve =



which I find similar to but more dazzling than Eliot’s celebrated Fire + rose = 1 because Tzara doesn’t depend upon the tedious body of ecclesiastical cliché for the play of his metonymy. Still, it is probably valuable to consider Eliot a Dada poet himself, as Harold Rosenberg in one of his most lucid moments suggested. Anyone who could identify the spiritual and cultural resources of Europe with the Anglican Church and royalism has thrown in his lot with Dada. Probably Eliot’s strong connections with Dada humor and experimentalism would have been a good deal more obvious by now if a fair proportion of urban Jewish intellectuals had not been convinced that the decline of Christianity and the discontinuation of Latin in high school meant the sky was falling down. Perhaps the main difference between the Dada poets and the Eliot/Pound Modernists was essentially a difference of anxiety levels. As Tzara put it Is poetry necessary? I know that those who write most violently against it unconsciously desire to endow it with a comfortable perfection, and are working on this project right now;—they call this the hygienic future. Some Questions about Modernism

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They contemplate the annihilation (always imminent) of art. At this point they desire more artistic art. Hygiene becomes purity oGodoGod. Must we cease to believe in words? Since when have they expressed the opposite of what the organ emitting them thinks wants and desires to think? Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth. I still consider myself very charming. But early Modernism didn’t really get a chance to play itself out in a single continuous development for a number of reasons. One was that the early Modernists were often incapable of carrying out their own propositions, because of their own inevitable and often unconscious attachment to their immediate past. Kandinsky was a very good painter, but nobody in his right mind would say that his paintings rely on the direct force of color and form. They rely on a kind of cryptic anecdotalism, playing games with equilibrium and disequilibrium and manipulating a conceptual “tempo” based on shifts of brightness and size and so on. Nobody ever got to see painting as a sheer wall of color until the Clyfford Stills and Barney Newmans of the early ’50s. Nobody ever got to see pure drawing (without anecdote) till Pollock. Similarly nobody began to see the full strength of collage modernism in poetry until Olson. Gertrude Stein may have been richer, but the full range of her work was only beginning to appear with the publication of her works by Yale in the ’50s. What’s more, her work came to be appreciated in the climate of the ’60s, when many younger poets had arrived by different routes at similar concerns. Her partial obscurity was a consequence of the generally academicizing climate that came over almost all the arts in the late ’20s. Almost all Modernism was obscured by some trivialized version of the earlier work. In painting this consisted of a degenerate form of synthetic Cubism that could be applied mindlessly to either industrial decoration or political propaganda, or else a kind of equally flaccid geometricism that aspired to surfaces of Mondrian and de Stijl. Modernism in poetry was smothered by a pathetic and nostalgic traditionalism, represented in America by the southern poets who centered around the Sewanee and Kenyon Review. It was only by the end of the Second World War that artists in all the arts were able to force open the doors that had closed. Once they got the doors open all of the issues suggested by the early-twentieth-century Modernists were explored and led to inventions that the early masters had never dreamed of. Somewhere in the late ’50s the most interesting of the new Modernists simply abandoned  •

Some Questions about Modernism

the Romantic domain assumptions of psychological motivation or personal expression supposed to underlie construction. Or more precisely, perhaps it abandoned them. For it simply disappeared like the wraith that it had been. Artists as different as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, Jasper Johns, Jackson Mac Low, and many others simply constructed their work from a method, the sole value of which was that it provided a mechanism for getting from one place to another in construction. This happened in Europe as well as America and is as clearly seen in Stockhausen and Gomringer and the European kinetic and optical artists as it is among the Americans. The point is that Modernism—to play itself all the way out—had to step away from the Romantic domain definition in order to determine to what degree the application of the fundamental axiom for defining the medium was necessary and sufficient in itself. This resulted in a new version of the fundamental axiom: it is necessary to define the medium of action, the elements that are acted upon and the operations that are performed upon them to make a work or a body of works. The defining act had become a mechanism for generating work or, to use the somewhat more appropriate computer terminology, a program. Clearly this version of the axiom does not require distinctive uniqueness for the medium because the medium is not permanent. It is not “the medium” of art or of an art, it is “a medium”—that is, a temporary arena— which may be used several times or once and abandoned without regrets. This was the Modernist position developed from the middle ’50s and it played itself out quite brilliantly with many successes, with Cage’s poems (called Lectures), with the systems poetry of Mac Low and Gomringer, with the painting of Stella, of Lichtenstein, the sculpture of Morris, Judd and Lewitt, Serra, some Judson dance. There were plenty of successes, and there were also successes that appeared to be obtained in the same way and were in reality quite different—the paintings of Warhol, the dance of Yvonne Rainer, Smithson’s sculpture, Kaprow’s events. But I don’t want to provide a catalog. The main thing was that by about 1967 or 1968 it was becoming clear that the whole issue of domain would have to be raised once again, because what separated “success” of a program from “failure” appeared to be based upon something more profound than programming skill or ingenuity could explain. My own sense of it was that the choice of a mechanism that “worked” usually carried with it domain implications of a very different sort than the ones that “failed.” Now the notion of a work “failing” or “succeeding” in the period between the middle ’50s and the middle ’60s was not only unpopular, it was really quite irrelevant, because we were surrounded by such an abundance of Some Questions about Modernism

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exciting works. In a sense, that period is over, and Modernism in that sense of the word is concluded. By which I don’t mean to imply that artists of any intelligence will go back to some imaginary premodern condition, which is impossible. And I certainly don’t want to suggest that there isn’t significant work going on now. There is. But all of it seems to be beginning from reconsiderations of the domain question—somewhere at the place at which the Romantics blew it—at the level of the question of art’s claim to truth and what that would mean. The Romantics were insufficiently prepared to make that claim. What I see as a postmodern condition is the reopening of that question in much more complex terms than we have ever seen before. Spring 1974

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Some Questions about Modernism

radical coherency

don wellman wrote asking me if i would write something do something for an issue of a magazine he was putting out something on or rather approaching radical principles of coherency and i wasnt really sure what he meant and i suspected he wasnt either and i liked that so i thought i would certainly do it because i wasnt sure of exactly what he had in mind and he had said to me in the letter why did you stop working in the way that you did in a book like meditations say and how did you get to the talk poems youre doing now and i hadnt thought about this very much or not recently maybe never and i like thinking about it now especially in the light of the idea of radical principles of coherency which i hadnt thought about much either up to now because i had been working in what i felt was a sensible way taking pieces of language that had been parts of continuous discourses and assembling them and disassembling them putting them down next to each other one after another in accordance with what i would call collage strategies and don wanted to know why i had stopped doing that and why i was doing talk pieces instead and whether i ever did any of the other work anymore and the answer to that couldnt have been terribly simple and i suppose he was aware of that though its easy to give a simple answer to anything but whether its an answer i believe is another story though the issue of my belief may be extraneous i give you an answer and then its your problem you believe it or you dont believe it but i wanted to think about this not so much about why i stopped doing one thing and then did another but i wanted to think about what i was doing and what i used to do in the light of the notion of coherency which i specifically wanted to think about the idea of what we consider coherent why we consider it coherent and the different ways of thinking things are coherent that are based on different organizing

principles and it occurred to me that the way i had been working the way a lot of people are still working taking pieces of things that were once parts of certain larger things usually continuous things you would consider coherent like discourses of some sort or another and i was taking pieces of language from these discourses and putting them together or next to each other in new ways i thought interesting and when i did this i kind of thought of myself as a reader as much as a writer that is i thought of myself as taking this material and laying it down and enjoying what happened when i did it or not so much enjoying it as looking to see what happened and then going on now taking something from here now something from there sometimes changing what i was taking either by taking or breaking it loose or in laying it down or sometimes just changing it by handling it and i would read it each part or the sequences of parts and i would enjoy them each part or the sequences of parts or maybe not sometimes i would simply regard them with a kind of interest in the curious way they came together because this was new they had never been together before and i wasnt sure what made them go together now or while i was putting them together or next to each other except that they had made a kind of quick sense while i was doing it and now they had to be interpreted or read these things that once were parts of different things and now were together and the problem of course or one problem was that if i took a piece of something from a manual on aeronautics and something else from leonardos writings on water and something else from the watch tower the jehovahs witness magazine i would when i heard these fragments coming the jehovah witness travel guide to paris leonardos reflections on the motions of water recognize the sources the continuous discourses from which they had come and since this was of no great interest to me i was not the best audience for my own work and there is a certain way in which i found this a little depressing not being my own best audience i like being my own best audience it is one of the greatest rewards of a poets work the possibility the likelihood or even the inevitability of being the best audience for his work though some might consider this a disastrous condition and a dreadful reward for serious work but i do not i like being the best audience for my own unalienated work and in this case i was not the audience would surely not recognize all the sources the original discourses from which these pieces had been drawn though they might recognize the notebooks leonardos notebooks are surely known to some subset of the people who read my poems and they might recognize these fragments even if i  •

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mangled them a bit in handling changed something here and there when i felt like it but the others wouldnt know and even fewer would have read the watchtower or awake or if they had they would not necessarily have attributed this spiritual tourist guide to that source and if they did it would be unlikely that any significant portion of my audience would have identified both the jehovahs witness guidebook to paris and the notebooks of leonardo and somewhat more likely that they would not have known either but i would really not have been able to tell which of my readers knew which portion if any of the sources of my pieces of discourse and i could hardly tell what organizing principles my readers would employ to make sense of the poems i wrote so there was a kind of free relation between us me and my readers and i liked that and took pleasure in it and thought it should be beneficial to us all and i think that probably many of the poets who are now called “language poets” have some of the same pleasures of not knowing what their audience makes of the constructions they put together while they are aware of the sources from which theyve taken them and probably enjoy taking them and sometimes perhaps the poets are lucky enough to forget where theyve taken them from and then they enjoy their work even more and it occurred to me that this was something like a situation i encountered the other day when i took my mother shopping my mother is an elderly lady about seventy five or six whose memory is becoming regularly worse and she called me desperately saying that she needed to go shopping she had holes in her shoes she said and needed shoes now she was not short of money she could have gone to get shoes but she’d become bewildered as to where to go to get them shes having this kind of trouble so i said ok i’ll come and help you get shoes i’ll take you shopping i said there are other things you need too probably she says “yes i need underwear and a blouse” and i said ok and i figured i’d take her to a shopping center so i got into the car and went to where she was staying a kind of hotel for elderly people and i got her into the car and she said “i really have to have shoes you can see these are falling apart” and they were falling apart and i said “ok well get you shoes” so i took her to the sears store at university town center and i parked the car in the parking lot and first of all this shopping center doesnt look like anything shes ever seen before shes never seen one of these places because shes from new york where they dont have california type shopping centers or they didn’t in her experience and shes suddenly arrived in what looks like an enormous drive in movie parking lot and she may not have known what radical coherency

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that was either but there are all these cars and we get out and there are cars coming from all sides coming slowly but still coming and she clings to my arm as we walk through the lot and she says “is it that big building” and it is not a tall building but a long and wide building long enough and wide enough to house an armory though it doesnt look like one and i say “yes its that big building” and we walk in and i look at her as we are walking in we’re entering between kitchens and work clothes mens work clothes i see her looking at a shower stall a spinning ventilator for a kitchen roof one of those cylindrical shafts originating from the top of the oven and projecting through the roof and surmounted by a little crown shaped fan that spins your waste gases away and this surrounded by various sinks and marbleized counters in the section on our left and on our right mens denim work clothes and my mother is holding my arm and walking by all this looking to find where shes going to get the things that she needs as we proceed straight toward a leather shop and i realized that i needed a band for my wrist watch so on the way past i glanced toward the leather counter and saw that they had big brimmed leather hats and belts and no saddles but they didnt have any wrist watch bands i noticed as we went by and i led my mother toward an area filled with shoes and my mother looked at the counters and cases and racks of shoes and she said “well i’m not sure what kind of shoes i should get” she said “maybe i should get something comfortable like tennis shoes” and i said “well maybe so” now there were two parts to the section of shoes there was one part clustered around the central counter and cases where they sold shoes and there was a second part where they sold bargains in shoes and every kind of shoe was there there were running shoes and shiny high heeled shoes for dress wear and dull leather oxfords for smart business wear and there were alligator leather shoes and patent leather shoes and dull brown and clay colored plastic shoes with squat heels for indiscriminate wear and there were oxfords and sandals and wedgies and slippers and sneakers and zoris and flip flops and they were arranged in display cases and on sculpture bases and on counters and in the bargain section lying tangled in piles on shelf after shelf and my mother stood there and looked and she couldnt see any shoes so i said “maybe we should get you some other things you need first how about underwear” she said “i must have a brassiere” now i’m not a great authority on brassieres because my wife hasnt been wearing brassieres very much since the origin of the womens movement and thats been a long time and nobody i know wears brassieres very much except on

 •

radical coherency

special occasions but my mother comes from a time when women always wore brassieres so i said lets go find one and we go looking for brassieres but she says “i dont want to spend a lot of money” and i dont really know what a lot of money is for a brassiere but i know better than to ask her because she’ll tell me one or two dollars or some price that she remembers from an earlier time when she went shopping for brassieres so we make our way to a section of the store called the budget system because it appears that there is a section of this store or rather a subsection of the clothing section of this store that is the budget system here everything sold within the section is summarized by a selection of examples from each subsection only sold at a lower cost in other words examples of all kinds of clothing are sold here together but cheaper and there is a kind of boundary a boundary terrain that separates the summarizing budget system from the ordinary subsections of the clothing department theres a boundary between lounge wear say lounge wear is where they sell kitchen robes and muumuus and terry funwear and terry jumpers and it doesnt look to me like the place where they would have underwear anyway but not far away next to it and not separated from it by any boundary there seems to be a place where they sell what they call intimate apparel which gradually eases into terry funwear muumuus and kitchen robes and they have lounging robes and shorty pajamas and all sorts of sheer and diaphanous and maybe comfortable clothing thats mixed up with other not so sheer but comfortable clothing like kitchen robes which as i think of it ive never seen anybody wearing but across this boundary like a river of terrazzo flooring terry funwear seems to continue on the other side though its within the domain of the budget system and when you cross the river it gets cheap or maybe it doesnt but its supposed to so we crossed the river and it didnt seem to get much cheaper but it got complicated because terry funwear immediately disintegrated into levis mens shirts for women glamorous tie around crepe blouses with puffed out sleeves and i knew my mother wouldnt like them nurses uniforms the nurses uniforms approached another boundary line at right angles to the one we had just crossed at the edge of that boundary line were greeting cards and on the other side of the terrazzo river that we had just crossed and around the turn of the wall behind lounge wear there were giant bottles of coca cola and a place where you could apply for credit and if you looked further further over if you got desperate you could buy cheese and i realized that was outside our domain and it was beside that on the other side of the river

radical coherency

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so i figured lets leave that alone and get back over here near the nurses uniforms because bounded by the nurses uniforms and the cheaper version of the terry funwear somewhere toward the center of it no it wasnt actually toward the center because at the center were the glamorous crepe blouses but edging into the corner there was something white and sheer that looked like it might have been brassieres so i said to my mother “well lets go find you a brassiere what size are you” she said “i’m a 36 b” so we went looking for a 36 b and when we found it she said “i dont like that kind” and it was to my unpracticed eye a more or less ordinary white brassiere except that maybe its surface was decorated with a kind of lace “well” i said “what kind do you want dream fit? cross banded? contour cupped?” i’m reading off the signs and shes looking at the contour cups the strapless and the wired brassieres the wireless telegraphy bras after all they have “legtricity” stockings why not telegraphy bras but she says “no i just want a maidenform bra” and i said “maidenform?” and i seemed to remember that when i was a kid in new york there were lots of ads in the subways and on the buses in which you would see a picture of some crowd scene like a museum or a zoo or the opera and all the people would be sitting or standing around perfectly dressed and doing whatever they were supposed to be doing except for one beautiful girl who would be doing whatever she should have been doing but wearing only her snappy looking underwear “i dreamt i went to the opera in my maidenform bra” and i suppose my mother also remembered those ads “i dreamt that i went to the zoo in my maidenform bra” and also remembered a snappy looking bra that maybe she’d also once worn but that was long ago in scranton or new york and we were in san diego now i said “mother i dont think they have maidenform bras here look theyve got ‘dreamfit’ theyve got ‘shadow patch’ ” she said “i dont know” i said “why dont you try on a 36 b its going to be 36 b” and i pick one for her but she says “isnt there a saleslady here who can help me out” and there are no salesladies who can help you out in this place or i cant see any but edging off toward the fringe of the budget terrain there is another terrain called the fashion place and over in the fashion place there is a very slim glamorous young woman who looks as though she might know about such things and i figured there was probably a fitting room around the corner over there where my mother could try on her 36 b and see whether shes grown or shrunk or remembered correctly the size that she used to be so i gently steer her over toward there while shes looking around at the clothes that we’re passing or for a lady to help her and i point her toward the glamorous young woman at the counter of the  •

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somewhat more fashionable place and suddenly my mother is out of the area that was the budget place she crosses the border which is not noticeable its like going from la jolla to pacific beach or rather like going from pacific beach to la jolla two towns grown together distinguishable only by a gradual upward shift in price there is nothing to cross but you cross it at one point you were in pacific beach and now youre in la jolla and everything costs more and looks costlier the fashion place was suddenly overwhelming and my mother was overawed by these vaguely fashionable clothes that suggest subtly the 1930s as in other more fashionable stores similar subsections would suggest this more emphatically and we enter and i say to my mother “i think they have a fitting room in there where you can try it on” and my mother looks doubtful so i ask the lovely young woman and she smiles reassuringly at my mother a very lovely smile and assures her that the fitting rooms are right around the corner and my mother is even more overawed by the slender loveliness and fashionability of the girl and her smile and she looks at me uncertainly as the girl takes her arm and gently shoves her toward the fitting rooms which my mother moves toward obediently but tentatively looking back plaintively all the way and as i see her disappearing into the curtained doorway she looks very sad a little white haired lady with an orange hat wandering around the corner tentatively attempting to try on the bra that shes holding while still walking around the corner with her clothes on and i keep thinking shes going to figure this out and she’ll finally get into one of those little rooms and try it on and we’ll find out whether or not it fits and i wait an awfully long time and the girl is smiling at me itll be all right your mother will eventually get the bra everybody buys bras and tries them on and they eventually find one that will fit but my mother finally comes out and she says “i dont really think this brassiere will do” she says “you know i’m not very big maybe i can sew it to make it fit” and the girl says “but they have many more bras in all sizes over behind lounge wear they have a bigger selection there than in the budget place” my mother looks doubtful “i really could take it in by sewing it here” she says “i’m very small” and the girl says “so am i but there are sizes for everybody” and while we we’re having this conversation i’m thinking i figure that maybe i should take her through to intimate apparel over behind the loungewear but my mother hates the idea of crossing that river of terrazzo flooring once again passing through terry jumpers and through junior coordinates and the perfumes the perfumes colognes and toilet waters on the left as you sail up the river to the left of loungewear and pass perfumes and toiletries the exercycles the electric shavers and face radical coherency

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brushes and wind up near luggage once again across from bargain shoes and i see shes afraid of that voyage and its a tough voyage so i say “mother the selection is better over there because they have more expensive ones and more of them its really ok we can afford it the money is not a problem” she says “i dont know if i really want to” but i take her arm and insist that its all right we’ll go over there and we’ll find one and it will fit perfectly and then i start looking all over again for her size and we find it but she doesnt like this one because its cut too low and that because its too sheer and shes a little depressed by the luxuriantly flamboyant bikini styles crowding her on all sides which dont look appropriate for her station in life at seventy six and shes feeling depressed by all this and she says “cant we just go home” and i say “but mother you came here because you needed to buy things at least lets get you shoes” so i steer her away from the depressing lingerie and we travel over to the shoes and she comes slowly along with me and she stops here and there to look helplessly about while i keep trying to get her to the center of the shoe world and finally i leave her for a moment to finger through the stuffed shelves while i scout on ahead to see if i can find something more or less plausible to show her and when i return to where i left her shes standing there looking quite cheerfully at a pair of blue sneakers with a picture of snoopy embossed on them and in round bright letters the word “boss” “these look wonderful” she says “i think i’d like a pair of these” and i say “what size are you?” and she says seven and a half and i go scrambling through the pile of sneakers to find a seven and a half and i cant find one but i take heart that shes been wrong before and i find her a six and a half finally it turns out shes a six which we eventually find and i say to her “are you sure this is what you really want mother i thought you wanted shoes” she said “these fit wonderfully i like these” so shes got a pair of blue sneakers with two little snoopys and the word “boss” printed on them and i said “dont you need socks” she said “yes i do” “what i do is cut down regular stockings and make socks out of them ankle high” i said “we could start by getting you anklets and it would save you the trouble” she said “oh do they have those?” i said “yeah lets go through the hosiery section” and we look through the legtricity and sheer and dark panty hose and we can find knee length stockings and thigh length stockings and panty hose or socks for athletes or children but no anklet stockings i ask somebody else i manage to find another handsome young woman walking among the shelves and i ask her do you have any ankle length stockings and she says “we do but we’re out of them but we have calf height and knee height” and now whats beginning to interest me is that once there was a kind of coherency a  •

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fully articulated system of hosiery that included waist height stockings panty hose and obviously thigh height stockings and knee stockings and calf stockings and ankle stockings and maybe also toe stockings but whatever the system contained at this particular moment all thats left of the system is whats left on the shelves and such logical structure as we can infer from whats left and whats left turns out to be calf height and my mother is once again getting depressed so i grab three pairs of calf height stockings and assure her that she can cut them down to anklets when she gets them home but she thinks theyre a little too light too sheer “well” i say “theres the smoky type” and i grab some of the smoky style and i give them to her shes got three of them now and she says thats too much money i said “mother take it lets get out of here and get the rest of the things you need how about a blouse?” and i start grabbing blouses from the other side of the river again “this is a nice looking blouse” i say “why dont you take it how about something glamorous looking mother wouldnt you like one of these to stand in on the terrace of your house overlooking the ocean while youre having cocktails with your friend the real estate broker and his friend the lawyer and the neurologist and youre all looking at the sunset” and i take one of the tie arounds and give it to my mother “youll look great in it i’m sure” she says “i dont want one of those i couldnt wear it i have nothing to wear it to” i said “what if i take you out to dinner in a fashionable la jolla restaurant youll look glamorous there holding a margarita in your hand smoking a cigarette in a holder it will be wonderful” “no” she says “i cant really its too expensive” “no” i said “its cheap theyre selling it at fifty percent off it says so on the label” she says “what was it originally” “fifteen dollars” “thats too expensive thats seven and a half dollars thats terrible i dont buy blouses for that” “well” i said “what about shoes now youve got sneakers you still need shoes” she says “i want to go home” now thats one of the reasons i abandoned collage which is organized something like sears by and large and while it is sometimes entertaining or illuminating to consider this kind of organization to inspect the parts from which it has been assembled and speculate upon the discourses from which they might have been taken to restore the missing parts or merely take pleasure in the juxtaposition and collision of these fragments of otherwise unrelated or arbitrarily related things that are now parts of some new and totally unfamiliar yet partially familiar thing and this can be something of a pleasure and even dazzling this simultaneously incoherent coherency this sense that you are considering some precarious unfamiliar thing that is always about to dissociate itself into bright shards and doesnt or radical coherency

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a dazzling jumble of shards that keeps threatening to assemble itself into a fairly dull familiar thing which you hope it doesnt and i understand this pleasure in regarding sears as a work that was done for you yet there are other kinds of organization that i find interesting banal coherencies for example that can become somehow suddenly interesting there was a professor when i was in college a professor of french literature a balding little man in an ordinary dark tweed jacket and gray pants and cordovan shoes who one day appeared wearing a gray chamois glove with a pearl button now there he was in his professional tweed jacket and his ordinary striped shirt and tie with a stickpin but wearing a single gray chamois glove with a pearl button and it was not especially noticeable except that he didnt take the glove off in classes or at coffee with guest lecturers or in conferences in his office with students and while no one made very much of it no one could figure out when they thought of it why this dumpy little french professor with the watery blue eyes and slightly bulbous red nose was wearing one gray chamois glove but soon things became slightly more coherent he started appearing with two gray chamois gloves and some time later apparently having found his way to a thrift shop he had bought himself perhaps for seventy five cents or a dollar an old alpaca morning coat in splendid condition but he still looked funny wearing his blue or pink striped shirts and the thin dark tie with his morning coat and chamois gloves and the cordovan shoes that professors used to affect in those days but before long he was wearing black pumps striped trousers and stiff white dress shirts with a softly knotted flowing tie then he acquired a walking stick and disappeared which is to say that he had acquired a banal coherency that was not so banal at new yorks city college in 1953 and he had acquired it progressively growing more and more coherent each week and more banal till the final moment at which point he disappeared and thats also a form of coherency or rather a movement from and toward coherency ive found interesting at one time there was at city college a conventional coherency of which this man was a part at some point he began to become less coherent for a time he became a form of incoherency that gradually evolved toward an absolute if discordant banality and at that moment disappeared and this movement i have also found interesting but not so much nowadays now i am more interested in the kinds of coherency that develop sometimes rather startlingly out of the way the human mind works as it faces the exigencies of everyday life that is i’m interested in the way the mind works because i dont know how the mind works in this area i’m very ignorant but fortunately as i find fortunately or  •

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unfortunately so is everybody else specialists in the working of the human mind dont know very much about it which surprises you or rather it surprises me it may not surprise you it surprises me because things happen with the human mind that are very peculiar and startling and reveal unlikely situations that require nearly no cultivating only to be attended to and sometimes you cant help attending to them my little boy hes no longer a very little boy blaise hes thirteen years old he was going to sleep and feeling sentimental he was sleepy and couldnt sleep and in spite of being thirteen he was being sentimental usually hes a cheerful noisy kid who sounds a lot like the poet hes named after blaise cendrars thats his name and its turned out to be the right name for him but today he was being young and sentimental and he said “why dont you put on the sleepy time music daddy you know the sleepy time music you always put on that record by fields” “fields” i said “fields?” “you know” he said “w.c.” and sure enough it was the debussy flute viola and harp sonata that we always used to play for him when he was agitated since he was three so it occurs to me that there are ways that the mind organizes things that are rather startling that are more surprising than what you can do mechanically that are more surprising than what i can do by planning to sit down and cut the pieces up or surprise myself by shaking them in a hat or getting a machine to shake them in its hat for me and i like shaking things in a hat no matter whose hat but you dont normally come up with things that are quite so surprising when you do that or at least i havent for a long time by shaking things in hats and i think sometimes even trying to formulate merely to formulate a kind of sense out of someones most conventional narrative just to try to make sense of it appears to produce a radical coherency that i had never anticipated for example when my grandmother was dying and i had never fully understood this my grandmother was a very elegant lady a sort of high class european style lady from a kind of european jewish background and she was dying and when she was dying she was dying for a while she was weakening and she had taken to bed now she was a very lively lady by temperament so she was not someone who liked being in bed and at one point while i was there i came in and she was protesting and at the time i thought she was protesting being in bed and it would have been very much like her to say to hell with this and try to get up and do something but she was protesting obscurely she kept saying over and over again “theres not enough room not enough room” and i kept trying to listen because she had become very weak and was speaking radical coherency

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vehemently but in a very soft voice “go away theres not enough room” and i couldnt tell whether she was chasing away the people who kept coming into the room her daughters who were coming and going and trying to help her or me and they kept asking her “mama whats the matter mama whats the matter” and she says “not enough room” she says “give him some money” and they said “what? what do you mean money” she said “put it in the can” she said “theres not enough room go away” and they werent sure whether she was yelling at them or driving something out of her bed she said “give him the money and let him go away” she said “take it away at least take off his hat” and they kept staring around whose hat? what hat she says “its terrible” she says “that black beard” black beard? she said “please give him the money every year i give them money” every year she gives them money? who? and i never heard any more of this story she died and recently recently thinking of this scene thinking of this rambling set of words it occurred to me that i could imagine a coherency i mean i have no conviction about what she was really talking about yet i knew that every year every year she used to give money to an orthodox jewish organization for which she had no particular affection and no special interest in and every year they would come around always one guy in a long overcoat with a big hat ear locks and a black beard used to come with a tin can and people used to put money in it and give him a glass of tea and my grandmother always gave him money and a glass of tea and i suspect that probably if she had given him the money he would have gotten out of her bed and she might have survived

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radical coherency

The Stranger at the Door

In 1965 in the second issue of the magazine some/thing that I edited with Jerome Rothenberg, we published the following text: Excerpts from gloss for an unknown language Tablet 3 Line Character 17

9

Image formed by a moving object for the duration of one breath.

31

7

An object formed by the intersection of an imaginary sphere with objects of the reference language. (Here used to describe a plano-convex section of flesh/earth).

31

8

Used by an observer standing at the edge of a body of water to denote an area of water surface in front of the observer and the area of earth of equal size and shape behind the observer, considered as one surface. Tablet 10

6

4

Everything within the bounds of an imaginary cube having its center congruent with that of the observer, and an edge of length equal to the observer’s height.

23

9

A verb apparently denoting the motion of a static object. (The meaning is not clear.)

Tablet 13 19

3

A unit of time derived from the duration of dream events.

45

2

The independent action of two or more persons, considered as a single action.

It was the longest of a series of texts by the sculptor George Brecht, some of which had originally been printed on individual cards and collected in a cardboard box designed by George Maciunas and issued in a limited series under the title of Water Yam by Fluxus in 1963. In the magazine they appeared under the title george brecht Dances, Events & Other Poems between the table of contents and a chapter of what the contributors’ notes referred to as Rochelle Owens’s “encyclopedic novel-in-progress,” Elga’s Incantation. The title was as I remember supplied by my coeditor, because Brecht was out of the country and had simply left us a pile of manuscript copy. Together with the layout, in which the smaller pieces, for purposes of economy and clarity, were printed two or three to a page with their margins staggered to maintain their separate identities, the title tended to suggest somewhat equivocally that these texts were all to be considered poems. Equivocally, because the title itself—Dances, Events & Other Poems—in its use of the word “other” suggests that these “dances” and “events” are also “poems” and raises the question of in what sense these texts might be poems while also being dances and events. Taking as examples the pieces three yellow events and three dances: three yellow events

I.

yellow yellow yellow

II.

yellow loud

III.

red

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The Stranger at the Door

three dances

1. Saliva 2. Pause. Urination. Pause. 3. Perspiration. it seems probable that in the Fluxus box both of these texts would have been regarded as scenarios or instructions for performances somehow to be realized by a performer/dancer. A Judson dancer might have realized the instruction “Saliva” by spitting, begun the second movement (“Pause”) with a rest, then urinated in a bottle and rested (“Pause”) again, and concluded with a set of violent exercises leading to “Perspiration.” He could have interpreted the three yellow events with a series of lamps that flashed “Yellow” and “Red” or might better have unrolled bolts of colored cloth or paper or painted them and realized the noise with a tape of hammering or a pneumatic drill or simply yelled after the fourth yellow. This would all have been within the context of the game of interpretation between a scenarist-inventor (composer poet, artist, choreographer) and a realizer (musician, actor, installer, dancer), a performance genre that had been established in the contemporary art community since the late 1950s and is abundantly illustrated in the Fluxus-oriented anthology published by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low. Mac Low’s own 1964 publication, The Pronouns: A Collection of 40 Dances, is probably the most brilliant and extensive example of the “dance-instruction poem,” which Mac Low explains in the following way: The poet creates a situation wherein she or he invites other persons & the world in general to be co-creators.

and in his “Some Remarks to the Dancers” specifies precisely how he means this: In realizing any particular dance, the individual dancer or group of dancers has a very large degree of freedom of interpretation. However, although they are to interpret the successive lines of each of these poems—which The Stranger at the Door

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are also dance instructions, as they see fit, dancers are required to find some definite interpretation of the meaning of every line of the dancepoem they choose to realize. (67)

These remarks are both definitive and explicit; and, though perhaps somewhat more explicit than some other practitioners of the instruction genre might have liked, together with Peter Moore’s photograph of various danced realizations of The Pronouns, they indicate how well established this genre was for the early 1960s art world. But appearing in some/thing was a bit different. Even if there was some overlap—we published George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, and Carolee Schneemann in this issue under the cover of a Robert Morris lead piece—our magazine was directed more to the contemporary poetry world, which was a somewhat different audience. Since a genre is a theater of operations that is defined by the audience that comes to it and the memories of previous performances they have attended there, as well by the nature of the site— because what tends to determine our understanding of the nature of a site is our memories of the performances we have seen there and our dreams of the performances we might some time put there—we could have expected to see quite different generic significances attributed to these texts. And in fact, by publishing them the way we did, we were promoting these differences to get a poetry-reading audience to see these verbal pieces as poems. But Brecht’s texts were not poems in the same way as Mac Low’s, who considered himself a poet, called his texts poems, performed them at poetry readings as well as in concert settings, and published them in literary magazines. Moreover, however strange they might have been verbally to a conservative poetry audience that required poems to consist of more or less grammatically well-formed and semantically perspicuous utterances that expressed the psychological state (usually intense) of some plausible speaker (James Wright, for example), most of Mac Low’s poems should have satisfied another of the requirements of this Romantic poetics. They were very musical—in that they were marked by arbitrary phonological and intonational play, though more in the manner of Gertrude Stein than William Butler Yeats. Still, to an audience for whom Gertrude Stein was a poet, and so for the only people we took seriously, Jackson Mac Low was clearly a poet. But George Brecht was another matter. It is a considerable distance from Mac Low’s “8th dance: making something narrow and yellow (on the pronoun: ‘We’)”: We make some glass boil, & we have political material get in,  •

The Stranger at the Door

& we make some drinks, crying, seeing danger, & making payments, & all the time we seem to put examples up. Then we do something consciously & we name things. Afterwards we quietly chalk a strange tall bottle. We question each other while we do something down on the floor, attacking each other at times, but never stopping our questioning, and always reasoning regularly. We number some things or some people & we page some of the people, & either we harbor poison between cotton or we go from breathing to a common form while we skirt a rod, and then again we harbor poison between cotton or we go from breathing to a common form while we’re doing waiting, like someone awaking yesterday when the skin’s a little feeble; but each of us has an instrument, & we go under as anyone would who awakened yesterday when the skin’s a little feeble; afterwards we’re being red enough; we walk, we rail, and once more harboring poison between cotton or going from breathing to a common form, we’re finally doing waiting. (21–22) to George Brecht’s two signs

silence no vacancy The Stranger at the Door

• 

or the untitled * Three of them were the same size, and two were not. But for us this distance was not so great as to obscure their family relationship within the great genre of poetry, which for us was a superordinate genre—the language art, not the microgenre synonymous with verse and based primarily on a distinction however tenuous from prose. From the very beginning as editors we were completely uninterested in the verse/prose distinction promoted by the neoclassical essayists following the lead of Eliot and Auden. Our first issue began with a selection of Aztec definitions collected by the Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagun a few decades after the conquest. In his preface Rothenberg introduced these texts, which he called “Found Poems from the Florentine Codex,” with a short account of the collapse of the great Indian civilization and the fragmentation of “that archaic system, fixed in ritual and myth” that “had been wrenched from them.” The survivors, Rothenberg suggests, had a “need to preserve the potency of the real by a regular overturning of primary beliefs,” a task to which they were stimulated by Sahagun’s project of compiling a record before they vanished of The Things of New Spain. To this accounting they brought a vast assemblage of their gods, their days, their signs and omens, their sacrifices, their songs, their defeats, and in the midst of this collection they appear to have compiled a list of definitions of terms for the simple things of their lives— rocks, birds, plants, trees, implements, topographical features. the precipice

It is deep—a difficult, a dangerous place, a deathly place. It is dark, it is light. It is an abyss. a mushroom

It is round, large, like a severed head. Here according to Rothenberg “we can draw close to them, can hear in these ‘definitions’ the sound of poetry, a measure-by-placement-&displacement, not far from our own,” different from their songs and hymns collected by Sahagun and others, which “has its own goodness” as “part of the fixed world before the upheaval.” But only these definitions participated fully in a freedom that was, in our view at that time, more important  •

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than whether they were intended as poems or not. “For surely,” the preface concludes, “it should be clear by now that poetry is less literature than a process of thought & feeling & the arrangement of that into affective utterances. The conditions these definitions meet are the conditions of poetry.” I would probably, even then, have put this a bit differently, but I am still convinced, as I am sure Rothenberg is, that these Aztec definitions meet the conditions of poetry, or perhaps more precisely that it is not worth while to define a set of conditions for poetry that would exclude them. These questions of necessary and sufficient conditions qualifying a work for entry in a genre is really a central issue for the concept of genre, but it is often confused with the related but somewhat different question of genre definition. Genre definition may be a futile pursuit because culturally well-established genres with a long history like poetry, as Aristotle’s famous essay seems to demonstrate, may be embarrassingly difficult, or even impossible to define in a compact and nontrivial way. But new works are continually being proposed for inclusion in established genres and judgments are constantly being made about the suitability of their candidacy. The history of Modern Art is filled with accounts of well known critics confronting works that they declare are not “painting” or “music” or “theater” or “dance,” only to be answered by others that what they have been confronting is indeed and for certain very good reasons “painting,” “music,” “theater,” or “dance.” These arguments about genre membership have rarely if ever proceeded from definitions of the genre to an examination of the candidate’s qualifications. Probably this is so because very few people educated in art feel confident in sweeping definitions of a terrain in which they have experienced as much anxiety and effort as pleasure and conviction, but also because it simply seems the wrong way to go about it. The negative critic, when not simply outraged, usually proceeds by identifying the absence of some single feature of the new work that he or she regards as an indispensable attribute of all genre members or, alternatively, the presence of a feature that is antithetical to such an attribute. In fact this indispensable attribute is almost inevitably merely a marked feature of all members of some favored subgenre. So for Robert Frost or Allen Tate “formal versification” was the indispensable attribute of poetry, for Stanley Cavell pervasive “compositional choice” the indispensable attribute of music, while for Michael Fried the “literalness” of Minimal Art was antithetical to art, or at least to “Modernist” painting. The tactic of defenders is to connect some fundamental feature or features of the new work with some feature or features of members of an apparently legitimate though not currently dominant subgenus, or with an The Stranger at the Door

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insufficiently marked feature of a dominant subgenre. This was the point of connecting Whitman’s free cadences to the cadenced prose of the King James Bible and the rhapsodic verse of the Hebrew prophets, of connecting Satie’s Gymnopédies to plainsong and Gregorian chant, earthworks to Stonehenge, or Happenings to collage. These tactics can be convincing or unconvincing, brilliant or trivial, as the connections are fundamental or inconsequential. What most convincing arguments of this type have in common is some way of deepening our sense of the tradition of the genre and of art by articulating some hitherto unknown and consequently unforeseen productive line of play that will allow the genre to continue to satisfy our needs. It appears to be this kind of game that keeps a genre alive once it has developed to the point of general recognizability. This seems evident from the fate of opera which, as long as its patrons and performers regarded it as a museum art all of whose creators are dead, counts as an extinct species until some composer like Philip Glass with a band of collaborators attempts a new kind of dramatic musical spectacle that restores it to the condition of an endangered species. So in the case of the George Brecht texts, I believe we saw in them something new that revealed the existence of an insufficiently marked and indispensable poetic tradition. His “two signs” joins a line that connects ways of working as diverse as Frances Densmore’s translations of Chippewa songs, the English version of Japanese haiku, and a singular poem from Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” two signs

silence no vacancy extricated from two discrete worlds—a recording studio and an apartment house window—come together to gloss John Cage’s famous observation that in the supposed total silence of an anechoic chamber you can still hear the sounds of your nervous system and your blood circulating. So silence becomes a place where there is no vacancy, as the cup that you empty is not truly empty because it’s filled with air. The operation of mind invoked here to make sense of this brief text is very close to that required for Issa’s haiku one man one fly one big guest room  •

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where a single fly measures the magnitude of the empty guest room, or Buson’s on the temple bell a butterfly sleeps with its two scales of sleep from which both bell and butterfly may wake together, briefly. What is interesting about these works—their conceptual brilliance, which is illuminated by the Brecht poem, seems even more pointed in translation, that strips them of the particular excellences of the Japanese language and verse, and releases into English a new mental poetic power. This power is also invoked by translations of American Indian poetry. I think particularly of Frances Densmore’s translations of Chippewa songs. song of t h e bu t t er fly

In the coming heat of the day I stood there. or m a ple suga r

Maple sugar is the only thing that satisfies me. which disdain poetically conventional “musical” devices for an intense concentration and a mysterious elegance of tempo and focus that create the image of a purely mental “music” independent of symmetry, repetition and jingling, strangely similar to that singular poem of Gertrude Stein, a poet by no means averse to symmetry, repetition and jingling, “a white hunter”: a white hunter

A white hunter is nearly crazy. This poem goes off like a rocket and leaps out of the semantically fractured text of the rest of “Tender Buttons” with such piercing clarity you The Stranger at the Door

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can easily forget that you have no idea what it refers to. At the very least there is this image that always comes to me as the all white silhouette of a man in pith helmet and safari clothes projected against the black map of darkest Africa—a silhouette drawn so taut it must surely break and is therefore “nearly crazy,” and while such a response is not literary criticism, something of this tense polarity of white and the implied black must be invoked for any reader, stretched to its breaking point at “nearly” and shattered on the word “crazy.” If the poem hadn’t been written in 1913 one might have to think of it as a deadly image of Hemingway, for whom it could have served as an epitaph; but since it was written too early for that, I like to think of it as an arrow waiting for its target. Now as I go over these series of work with family resemblances that group themselves around the George Brecht texts—the Aztec definitions, the Densmore Chippewa songs, Stein’s “White Hunter”—I begin to see other poems that come to join them—Ezra Pound’s “Papyrus” and “In a Station of the Metro,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow”— and this suggests a whole new set of works that might follow out from them as a set of possible consequences: Jerome Rothenberg’s “Sightings,” Robert Kelly’s “Lunes,” some of my “Meditations” . . . This list could easily be extended, but I believe this family grouping as I have sketched it out is still too narrowly framed. Suppose we return to one of Brecht’s longer texts, “two definitions,” which reads 1. Something intended or supposed to represent or indicate another thing, fact, event, feeling, etc.; a sign. A portent. 2. A characteristic mark or indication; a symbol. 3. Something given or shown as a symbol or guarantee of authority or right; a sign of authenticity, power, good faith, etc. 4. A memorial by which the affection of another is to be kept in mind, a memento, a souvenir. 5. A medium of exchange issued at a nominal or face value in excess of its commodity value. 6. Formerly, in some churches, a piece of metal given beforehand as a warrant or voucher to each person in the congregation who is permitted to partake the Lord’s Supper. 2. (a cup and saucer) These are dictionary entries. The form is familiar. Perhaps they’ve been modified by subtraction, though the first one seems literal enough. But here they evidently serve a quite different purpose, because the dictionary

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is being run in reverse. We habitually go to dictionaries to find definitions of terms we have in hand but with whose usages we are unfamiliar. Here we are given a family of usages that cluster around an unknown term. On their own, these usages seem almost as diverse as the members of a genre. They are queerly related, and queerly different—a memorial of affection, a piece of metal, a medium of exchange. Taken all together this definition presents an odd list of actions that you have to think about several times as you work your way up and down the list before you try to guess at the word that unites them—token—which then takes on a new life surrounded by all this history when you’ve finally guessed it. So this text invokes a family of poems, not so popular now, but with a long history—the riddle—and gives it a new life in contemporary terms, as it turns the dictionary into a possible anthology of riddles by reading its entries in reverse and cropping them of their normal function. But it also calls for family membership with texts of Marcel Duchamp or Joseph Kosuth, though perhaps more faintly when we read the second definition 2. (a cup and saucer)

where the possibility of satisfactory solution is denied because there aren’t enough clues to tell whether you have the right answer or not, and the impact is mainly made by the rhetorical tactic of an abrupt scale shift from the copious first definition to the sparse and enigmatic second, which gives the work something of a joke structure as it seems to say “you’ve solved the first one smart guy, try this.” As Brecht’s “two definitions” opens up a line of connection to riddles and conceptual art, his excerpts from “gloss for an unknown language” open in yet other directions. Once again we are dealing with lexicography, but here the lexicon is a selection of translations of presumably problematic words from a text recorded on tablets in some other language. Unlike Armand Schwerner’s tablets, which may as well have been suggested by this work as by Kramer’s Sumerian translations, Brecht’s text has none of the impulse toward lyrical though fractured speech, and all of the interest is focused on the significance of the terms and our need to imagine a possible world in which they could apply. This brings Brecht closer to Wittgenstein than to Schwerner. Though the conceptions implied by some of these terms are from our point of view decidedly eccentric, they are nevertheless imaginable. In Tablet 3 we encounter

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Line Character 7

9

Image formed by a moving object for the duration of one breath.

which suggests a strongly apperceptive and perhaps kinesthetically oriented society with a powerful interest in the measurement of their most fleeting perceptions. Tablet 13 at line 19, character 3 yields: “A unit of time derived from the duration of dream events,” which is open to at least two crucially different interpretations: this is a society that has found a method of measuring dream events “scientifically” by rapid eye movement or EEG or some unknown sophisticated device of technologically advanced civilization; or it is a kind of ritual knowledge such as an Australian aborigine might have had of the “dream time” and sacred happenings within it. In the latter case we know less, because we don’t have any idea what the event measuring would be like. Still, it is even possible to speculate on a society that combined both the technological and ritualistic orientation to the dream. In both cases we may have entered into the genre of a science fiction. In Tablet 10 at line 6, character 4 we have a unit of conceptual organization: “a cube having its center congruent with that of the observer,” in which the observer is embedded as in a kind of three-dimensional Vitruvian space frame that, though apparently odd in its extraordinary precision—having “an edge of length equal to the observer’s height”—could be conceived as relevant to the extreme body sensitivity of these people and their strong awareness of proximate objects. This heightened awareness of objects behind as well as in front of the observer appears also in character 8, line 31 of Tablet 3, where an observer standing at a shore takes note of both the area of water surface in front of him and the equal area of earth behind him as a single unit. It also indicates, somewhat more obviously, a riparian or littoral culture or at least a culture that attributes some importance to the shore. This is the kind of imaginary anthropology that is invoked by Kafka’s In the Penal Colony or better-grade science fiction. But of course it is not saddled with a story to tell or even a complete landscape to depict, it merely sets up suggestions of a culture we are invited to conjecturally imagine on the basis of scanty evidence. Then there are the completely absurd or paradoxical entries, like line 23, character 9: “A verb apparently denoting the motion of a static object. (The meaning is not clear.),” which last comment like most of the footnotes of Schwerner’s scholar translator, calls as much attention to the comic pathetic plight of the translator as the absurdity of the text.  •

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Whereas the gloss for character 2, line 45 in Tablet 13 evokes a fundamental paradox. The independent action of two or more persons, considered as a single action—a man zipping up his pants while his neighbor’s wife sues her employer—may be loosely conceived as simultaneous events, in a sense, perhaps as metaphorically connected or as equivalent, or even identical from a certain perspective; but an event isn’t an action, which we think of in relation to the idea of an agent. As long as multiple equivalent actions have distinct agents, we can’t imagine how to think of them as a single action if we are to continue to make sense in the language we call English. The idea is, so to speak, ungrammatical. Of course one point of this “gloss for an unknown language” is to suggest the possibility of another language in which ideas that are “ungrammatical” in our language might be “grammatical,” or to allow us to decide whether some ideas that seem logically possible and therefore in our sense grammatical are in fact fundamentally illogical and ungrammatical for any language we can imagine, if this gloss has provided a truly adequate translation. Naturally, it is always possible that the translation may be faulty. The impulse to this sort of speculation connects “gloss for an unknown language” to works like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations or even to the Tractatus and appears to draw them into its orbit: if A is a relative of B, B is a relative of A, and they are both members of the same family. I have on other occasions argued the case for consideration of the Tractatus as a poem, but it is not really relevant to the issue here. It may be that the “gloss” and the Tractatus are constructed out of the same kind of materials but are different kinds of buildings. What I am trying to show is the way the notion of genre operates and has operated as a generative force in the world of radically contemporary art and poetry. In this context the George Brecht texts are typical in that their candidacy for membership in the genre of poetry appeared to us at the time as both questionable and desirable, as did just about all of the works we found most interesting and powerful—Cage’s lectures, the whole range of Mac Low’s random and partially random texts from the Asymmetries to the Presidents and the Light Poems, all of Gertrude Stein, the Aztec definitions, and a great family of texts generated from “primitive” and modern performance and conceptual artworks. This list might suggest, as it probably has suggested to neoconservative critics that the sole purpose of proposing such work for genre membership—they would probably say “for inclusion in the canon”—is an absolute lack of fit and consequent suitability as instruments of a traditional avant-garde intention to shock. But a questionable fit is unlike either an The Stranger at the Door

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absolute fit or absolute lack of fit. It is more like an uncertainty about a strangely resembling foreigner presenting himself at a doorway and seeking recognition as a family member, a situation that calls for a kinship search perhaps involving possible affiliations with quite remote ancestors or merely peripheral relatives. This exercise in kinship analysis has been one of the most fruitful aspects of post–Second World War avant-garde art activity, but it has certain surprising historical precedents. It is well known that Aristotle in the Poetics, following Plato and possibly a widespread Greek cultural understanding, accepted imitation (mimesis) as the common feature of all art, of which the Poetics served as a full philosophical defense, primarily against Plato’s attack in the Republic. But what appears to have escaped notice is that in postulating imitation as the defining feature of all art, and imitation through language as the defining feature of poetry, Aristotle was able in the very next passage to propose several radically new candidates for inclusion within the genre of poetry—the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchos and most pointedly the Socratic dialogues—a piece of dialectical judo that allowed him to cast his old teacher as a poet and member of the same class he had exiled from his Republic precisely because of the common commitment to imitation. The comedy of this reversal, which is presented deadpan and somewhat elliptically, could not conceivably have escaped the notice of Aristotle’s contemporary audience, who would surely have understood that they were being presented with an elaboration of Plato’s own theory with its value reversed, in a version where the notion of reversal (peripety) plays as strong a role. The comic effect must have been greatly enhanced by the fact that the passage in question never once mentions Plato’s name. But if it was rhetorically necessary to sweep the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchos into the net of poetry for Aristotle to catch the Socratic dialogues without revealing that it was Plato himself he had set out to trap, Aristotle had to place himself in the avant-garde position of presenting not one but three candidates that must have been considered questionable from the traditional view of the genre. The reason for this was that the mimes and the Platonic dialogues were, according to Aristotle, composed in “bare words” and not in verse, and the traditional conception of poetry was grounded on the historical connection of poetry (the rhythmical verbal art) with music (the art of rhythmically and harmonically ordered tones) and dance (the art of rhythmical body movement) in the family grouping or supergenre of mousiké. This was the old cultural understanding supported through the fifth century BC by a performance tradition that regularly associated poetry with music and dance and went along with a widespread belief in their historical unity.  •

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This understanding may have been associated with the notion of imitation, but could not easily extend to include works that were not apparently aimed toward actual performance, until a truly literary and private literacy that admitted solitary and probably silent reading had become reasonably widespread. According to Eric Havelock such a situation did not come into being until the end of the fifth century BC, but by Aristotle’s time, private literacy was sufficiently widespread to allow for a theory of poetry that was not grounded in performance. This situation is probably reflected in Aristotle’s notorious indifference to the actors’ performance of tragedy, the importance of which he contemptuously minimizes and compares unfavorably to the art of the costumer. In these circumstances a new understanding could be framed that might admit Aristotle’s nonmetrical candidates. Of the three, Plato’s dialogues possess not only the feature of imitation, which was perhaps not so universally accepted as a characteristic attribute of poetry as the Platonic literature would suggest, but they also possess extreme flights of fancy—fantastical figures, metaphors, allegories—that were the surface manifestations of a principle of radical invention, which was widely held to be the property of poetry and probably contributed more to the acceptance of Aristotle’s candidates than anything else. For surely it is an interesting question to ask how ready Aristotle’s audience would have been to admit as poetry Xenophon’s desperately pedestrian Socratic memories, regardless of how thoroughly they exhibit the principle of imitation. In fact Aristotle’s use of the principle of imitation as a defining feature of poetry created more problems for him than it solved, because according to his reading of the principle as a representation of human action he was obliged to exclude from the genre the metrical philosophizing of Empedocles, that had strong traditional claims to membership, and forced to consider admitting history, his resistance to which provides one of the funniest and most problematic passages in the Poetics. In the courage of the absurdity with which Aristotle excludes Herodotus, “the father of lies,” from the genre of poetry, because he presents an imitation of facts (“what has happened”) and therefore a contingent representation instead of the essential representations, fictions or truths, of poetry, Aristotle abruptly shrinks the principle of imitation from a defining feature to a necessary condition and foreshadows one of the symptomatic tactics of a theoretical and programmatic avant-garde. It is in sharp distinction from this kind of exclusive and theoretical radicalism that the most interesting post–Second World War avant-garde undertook its game with genre. Genre was seen as family membership and The Stranger at the Door

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the basis of inclusion was affiliation with any subgroup with which a new candidate shared a fundamental feature. This often had the fruitful effect of articulating and characterizing possibly for the first time an important branch of the family, which would open up a line of connection between past practice and future possibilities. So for some/thing, consideration of George Brecht’s poems appeared to connect and open up a tradition of poetry that acts primarily as an instigation of mind to the solicitation of experience. This articulation is not a definition and would not have served as one if we had stated it in the magazine at the time. It was an opportunity for extension of a practice, that did not even include all of the works that we published and clearly reached out to many works that we had not published or thought to publish, which might well have dissatisfied many of our contributors or even ourselves. Structurally, the result of introducing works like the Brecht text was very much like a situation described by Wittgenstein in which someone gives the rules of a game and someone else in accordance with the rules makes a move that is legal but was not explicitly foreseen and changes our image of the game. As Wittgenstein points out with droll understatement, “it must have been possible not to have foreseen that some quadratic equation would have no real roots.” It seems apparent that there is a large body of otherwise interesting poetry that is not primarily an instigation of mind or is so only secondarily, and there are I am sure many contemporary poets for whom this would hardly seem a sufficient or appropriate function. And even using the texts of Jackson Mac Low, who fits well enough within this branch of the family of poetry, and whom we published in all five issues of some/ thing, we might have come to a different fundamental feature. Something like—radical invention. Following this rather Shklovskian sounding feature would lead us through a somewhat different family grouping that, depending on how we interpreted it, might include only “gloss” from the George Brecht texts, while connecting to the works that we printed of Rochelle Owens, Allan Kaprow, Armand Schwerner, Carolee Schneemann, as it looked backward to poets like Gertrude Stein, Blaise Cendrars, Vicente Huidobro, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Velimir Khlebnikov, or even more interestingly to Aristophanes, Sterne, Diderot, Kierkegaard, and G. Spencer Brown. But this feature too, though it throws light on an illustrious branch of the family and valuably extends a practice, would hardly suffice as a genre defining property. As many, and perhaps even more, of my contemporaries would be dissatisfied with it. Apparently definition is no more useful for the notion of a genre than it is for the notion of a family. Seen from  •

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this viewpoint the viability of a genre is based on survival, and the indispensable property of a surviving family is a continuing ability to take in new members who bring fresh genetic material into the old reservoir. So the viability of a genre may depend fairly heavily on an avant-garde activity that has often been seen as threatening its very existence, but is more accurately seen as opening its present to its past and to its future.

notes  The attitude reflected in this statement is grounded in long-held anarchist/pacifist principles embedded in some combination of Taoist and Buddhist beliefs that Mac Low discusses eloquently in the essay “Reflections on the Occasion of the Dance Scope Issue” (The Pronouns, 74–75). Further references to this source will be cited by page number in the text.  The selections were made from the eleventh book of the General History of New Spain (Florentine Codex), translated from the Aztec by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, originally published by the University of Utah (reprinted in some/ thing, vol. 1, no. 1: 1–7).  Cavell’s essay “Music Discomposed” ostensibly positions itself to discuss the condition of crisis he finds in contemporary music, in which the “professionals themselves do not quite know who is and who is not rightly included among their peers, whose work counts and whose does not,” but moves to a general consideration of the anxieties produced by the need for the sense of authenticity that he considers “essential to the experience of art,” taking “contemporary music as only the clearest case of something common to Modernism as a whole” and Modernism as only an explicit manifestation of “what has always been true of art.” As a consequence his requirement for pervasive compositional choice becomes a necessary feature not only for modern music but all serious music. That this judgment necessarily excludes large bodies of work—aleatoric composition of the Cage variety or procedural composition as in the case of Steve Reich—on the basis of a single indispensable feature makes it a typical if unusually sophisticated example (Must We Mean What We Say, 180–212). Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood” is an example of a structurally similar argument in relation to Modernist art (Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art, 116–47).  Since I am primarily concerned with the English speaker’s essential reading experience of the haiku and not with any particular translation, I have taken the liberty of presenting my own versions of the famous poems. Other translations, both literal and literary can be found in Harold Henderson’s An Introduction to Haiku, 104, 150.  For a selection of the Densmore translations surrounded by numerous other translations dating from the early part of the century and published at the moment of the imagist movement, see The Path on the Rainbow, edited by George Cronyn.

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For radically different kinds of English translations that emphasize the phonological structures of the Native American originals and do not belong to the conceptual tradition here being sketched out, see the various issues of Alcheringa.  The asymmetry of this piece as well as its startling brevity make it very atypical. The pieces immediately preceding and following it in “Tender Buttons” are both characterized by marked musical repetitions (Stein, Selected Writings, 475).  Schwerner, who was a regular contributor to some/thing, published Tablets 2 and 3 of his work in the double issue no. 4–5 in 1968. The explosive humor as well as the lyrical tone of Schwerner’s work separates it very markedly from the precisionist language of the Brecht gloss, but they have in common an underlying conception of the fragmentary understanding of the remains of a very ancient culture capriciously transmitted through the screen of what must be a very different language and nostalgia for a lost civilization.  The older Greek performance tradition is sketched out very neatly by Eric Havelock in chapter IX of his A Preface to Plato, and the transformation to a truly literate culture in his 1977 essay in New Literary History.  The particular passage in Wittgenstein’s Zettel has considerable application to problems associated with new moves within a recognized genre. 293. I give the rules of a game. Someone else, in perfect accord with the rules, makes a move the possibility of which I had not foreseen, and which spoils the game, that is, the way I had intended it. I now have to say “I have given bad rules; I must change my rules or elaborate them.” So then did I have an image of the game in advance? In a certain sense: Yes. It was surely possible, for example, for me not to have foreseen that some quadratic equation might not have real roots. The rule leads me to something of which I say, “I had not expected this image, I always imagined a solution like this.” (Zettel, 54) It appears that a familiar genre exists in the form of the image that we have of it, and that there is a particular mode of criticism that consists of prescribing rules for the accomplishment of works conforming to it. But the application of even the same rules by people not sharing the same image can lead to surprisingly different outcomes.

bibliography Antin, David. Meditations. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971. Antin, David, and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. some/thing. Vols. 1–2, no. 1–5. New York: Hawk’s Well Press, 1965–68. Aristotle. The Poetics. Translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe. London: William Heinemann Ltd. and Harvard University Press, 1965. Battcock, Gregory, ed. Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962.  •

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Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Cronyn, George, ed. The Path on the Rainbow: An Anthology of Songs and Chants from the Indians of North America. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918. Havelock, Eric. A Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. ———. “The Preliteracy of the Greeks,” New Literary History 8, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 369–91. Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Kelly, Robert. Lunes. New York: Hawk’s Well Press, 1964. Luckhardt, C. G. Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Mac Low, Jackson. The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dances for the Dancers, 3 February–22 March 1964. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1979. Pound, Ezra. Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1971. Rothenberg, Jerome. Sightings. New York: Hawk’s Well, 1964. Schwerner, Armand. Sounds of the River Naranjara & The Tablets I–XXIV. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1983. Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings. New York: Vintage, 1972. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell and Macmillan, 1958. ———. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. ———. Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Young, La Monte, and Jackson Mac Low. An Anthology. New York: Heiner Friedrich, 1963.

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The Beggar and the King

From Jean Pierre’s introduction I guess you can tell that I come from the experimental wing of American poetry and criticism. So it won’t be any surprise to you that I started out in the 1950s like many young experimental artists with a strong commitment to most of the received ideas of early-twentieth-century Modernism, the most important of which for a functioning artist was the idea of the exhaustion, experiential and aesthetic, of representation in all its forms. For a language artist this mostly meant the uselessness of narrative. I held this view for a long time, inconsistently I suppose, because I made use of some kinds of narrative anyway, but I continued to hold this view till some time in the early 1970s, when it became apparent to me and a number of other writers and artists that abstraction and collage, the Modernist alternatives to representation, had also become exhausted, perhaps through their success in advertising in magazines and on television. But for whatever reason, by the beginning of the 1970s both abstraction and collage appeared even more hopeless as signifiers of human experience and seemed reduced to conventionalized signifiers of style. With something like this in mind—the exhaustion of nearly all the modes of experiential communication—I began to wonder if it wasn’t time to reexamine narrative to see if what we had all supposed of it was really true or, as I was beginning to suspect, the consequence of a very narrow and conventional idea of narrative; and when I started looking around I discovered that a lot of other people had been studying it too, and some for a very long time, though very few in a way that I found useful. The oldest studies were by the folklorists and ethnographers who had collected folktales—like the Grimm brothers or Afanasiev—mostly for cultural reasons; and many of them had cleaned up the material and deprived it of most of its narrative force, the way the Grimms did when they gathered together all those different tellings of the same story by different

tellers in different dialects and melted them down into their idea of an Urform, which though attractive enough in a peculiar nineteenth-century way is a kind of literary monster. And the only way you can recover the narrative force of these stories is to go searching through the vast appendices of the German collection to find the dialect originals. But even then you can’t recover the original occasion or circumstances of the telling. Now it was on one of these collections—specifically on a group of fairy tales from Afanasiev’s great collection of Russian folktales—that Propp based his structural study, The Morphology of the Folktale, back in 1928, a work that in spite of its pioneering status seems to have to have gone underground with the suppression of Formalism in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s and didn’t reappear till its translation into English in 1958. The English translation coincided with a whole new industry in structural studies in the United States and France, where it inspired and provoked a train of structural investigations of narrative, so that by the 1970s narrative was mainly being studied by a great number of structuralist critics, and a few philosophers and linguists. The literary structuralists responding to Propp were mainly interested in finding some kind of grammar of narrative, because most of them were devoted to the fantasy science of semiotics, while the philosophers, who were involved in a dispute about the explanatory power of narrative in the philosophy of history, were mainly concerned with the logic of narrative. Since I was also concerned with the discursive force of narrative, I had some interest in the work of the philosophers. But I found practically nothing of value in the work of the structuralists, whose quasi-scientific claims were commonly attended by a cloud of technical terms derived from arbitrary categories of analysis and supported by antiquated linguistics. The most valuable work I was able to find was in the areas of anthropology and sociolinguistics. I’m thinking mainly of William Labov’s remarkable study of Black English Vernacular storytelling and Dennis Tedlock’s brilliant recreations of Zuni storytelling. Somewhat later I discovered the phenomenological writings of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whose positioning of narrative as an engagement with the paradoxes of the experience of time seemed of crucial importance. Still, what I found disappointing in almost all scholarly work on narrative was the near total emphasis on plot, as though the simple ordering of the events of a story were the main reason for its existence. In my experience it was otherwise; and though this may sound strange, I could think of stories that had no narrative and narratives that had no story. Consider the curious responses made by the aristocratic Aztec informants to Bernardino de Sahagun’s request for definitions when he was compiling his The Beggar and the King

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vast account of their culture, his General History of the Things of the New World. We do not know exactly what he asked them, but standing there in the rubble of their culture so recently destroyed by the Spaniards, what could they make of the Franciscan scholar’s request for definitions of the common things of their world? What would an Aztec think of as a definition? What they gave him was this: t h e c av e It becomes long, deep; it widens, extends, narrows. It is a constricted place, a narrowed place, one of the hollowed out places. There are roughened places; there are asperous places. It is frightening, a fearful place, a place of death. It is called a place of death because there is dying. It is a place of darkness; it darkens; it stands ever dark. It stands wide-mouthed; it is wide-mouthed; it is narrow-mouthed. It has mouths which pass through. I place myself in the cave. I enter the cave.

This typical definition is not a story. It has no plot, no clearly articulated sequence of events. It is not even certain whether individual verbal passages—“it darkens” . . . “I place myself in the cave”—represent specific events or typical events, or whether sequences like “it is wide-mouthed; it is narrow-mouthed”—depict sequential experiences in a traversal of the cave or merely list alternate experiences of it. But as far as I’m concerned, this is clearly a narrative. What it presents is narrative experience, and what other way could these Aztecs have conceived of explaining the meaning of a cave than by attempting to put themselves back into mental proximity with it and reenacting for the listener the threat or promise of this remembered or imagined place. On the other hand this recent story from the San Diego Union is not a narrative at all. t wo rob shoe store fem ale customer e l c a j o n —Two men robbed an El Cajon shoe store Saturday night and confronted a customer who entered the store as they were leaving, police say. One of the two brandished a chrome handgun and demanded money from the cash register at the Payless Shoe Source on Avocado Boulevard. On their way out, the robbers took the purse of a customer entering the store, police say. A nearby patrol officer gave chase but lost the men when they fled into an unlighted residential neighborhood.

It’s an account of a sequence of events recorded by the police and described by a noncommittal reporter. While it has a plot and purports to  •

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be a historical description of a temporal whole, it has no continuous subject who could have experienced this coherence, which is apparently an artifact of the desk sergeant—the policeman who said—apparently pieced together from the testimony of several witnesses. Though constructed from fragments of several people’s experiences, the story finally represents nobody’s experience. So perhaps we need a series of definitions of an array of related terms that could help us distinguish narrative from story. To some extent this array of terms may appear to overlap the conceptual network of action that Ricoeur lays out in Time and Narrative; but, since I have no desire to distinguish here between what he calls the world of action from the world of physical change, I will not make use of it. Suppose we start with an event. An event is a temporal whole representing the transformation of some state of affairs into a discriminably different state of affairs. Example: A man and a woman came out of an old brownstone on a quiet street in the East ’30s.

A sequence is a chain of events that succeed each other. Example: A man and a woman came out of an old brownstone on a quiet street in the East ’30s. A black Mercedes turned the corner and pulled up at the curb. A dog started barking across the street.

A story is the representation of a sequence of events and parts of events that articulate a significant transformation. Example: A man and a woman came out of an old brownstone on a quiet street in the East ’30s. A black Mercedes turned the corner and pulled up at the curb. A dog started barking across the street. Two men in black business suits jumped out of the car, grabbed the couple, forced them into the car, and drove away.

This account is sufficiently articulated to serve as the testimony of a witness in a murder trial, but it contains only the barest representation of anyone’s experience. The witness has carefully refrained from indicating his or her feelings watching, has omitted any account of resistance or fear by the couple, and has only minimally indicated the urgency and violence of the kidnappers, who “jumped out . . . grabbed the couple, forced them . . .” In this story three potential subjects have stakes in the outcome of this sequence of events—the couple who have been “grabbed,” The Beggar and the King

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the kidnappers, and even the dog, though we can only guess at what they are. This is a story that could yield several different narratives from several different subject positions—but a narrative requires a sense of something at stake for somebody in some particular subject position, which is what characterizes the stake. It is this sense of stake that should be taken as the center of narrative. To articulate the meaning of this sense of stake, it is useful to redefine narrative away from story. So let’s define narrative as the representation of the confrontation of a desiring subject with the threat or promise—or threat and promise—of transformation. From this definition it’s easy to see why I’m claiming that narrative is a fundamental cognitive modality. Subjects are continually confronted by the promise and threat of change. But no promise comes without the threat of fulfillment. If a beggar wishes to become a king and there is a chance of his becoming one, there is also the possibility that the change will annihilate him together with his desire, leaving behind only a troubled king suspecting his wife, his sons, his brother-in-law, or a revolution in the street. Any transformation, no matter how promising, contains the threat of destroying its desiring subject in the magnitude of fulfillment. But what the beggar wants is to remain the beggar inside the life of the king, or to hold on to that subject position from which the life of a king would be a sufficient satisfaction to at least offset the gravest problems of statecraft, which the beggar has most likely never counted on. And it would be in the interest of the king, who is suffering from all the anxieties of kingship and in whose state of mind the beggar remains only in threads of nostalgia and anxiety, to build a bridge from his present life to his past. As it would be in the interest of the beggar to build a bridge from his present to his possible future, to imagine the speculative consequences of his transformation. This bridge building across change is what I would suggest is the central human function of narrative. The act of reconnecting subject positions across the gulf of change is what constitutes the formation of self. All self is built over the threat of change. There can be no self until there is an awareness of one’s subject position, which can only be created by the threat of change or the memory of change. Every change creates a fracture between successive subject states, that narrative attempts and fails to heal. The self is formed over these cracks. Every self is multiply fractured, and narrative traversal of these fracture planes defines the self. Narrative is the traditional and indispensable instrument of self creation. The king’s genre is autobiography, while the beggar’s is science fiction

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or dream. But both will have to address all three temporal modes—past, present, and future—to function as narrative. The king will have to reexperience his past as the present of a beggar and the beggar’s future—in the form of desire—as it turns into a present with the coming of kingship. To experience this from the standpoint of the king’s present and anxiety ridden future. The beggar and the king will have to and perhaps never quite can be one. And all the efforts of emplotment will never put the pieces together again. If plot is a gathering together of a succession of diverse events to create an intelligible temporal whole, plot in this sense is the least significant aspect of narrative. Calderon’s great play La Vida es Sueno is built precisely on the paradoxical insignificance of plot in narrative, and may be offered as a poet’s refutation of Aristotle. Its plot makes nothing experientially intelligible. In the folk tale on which the Calderon is based, a beggar is turned into a king by an absurd act and turned back into a beggar by a similar and equally absurd act. And the pieces will never come together again, except in some kind of dream. But then, the absurd chain of circumstances that constitute the plot of Oedipus Rex does nothing to make intelligible the relations between Oedipus’s innocence and guilt. And it is the powerful recognition of their absolute incommensurability and unintelligibility that is the strength of the tragedy. Which is why I would like to suggest that we do not derive our narrative competence from storytelling, but from dreams. Because the goal of narrative is to make present, not to make intelligible, and a dream is nothing if it is not a making present of an anticipated future and a remembered past in which we always have a definite stake, because they are always anticipated and remembered in the light of desire. I am supposing here that dreams are the narratives we construct for ourselves at night. There are, of course, many people who do not believe dreams are narrative—some because dreams are often “absurd” or “illogical,” others because they are apparently fragmentary. But there are also many dreams that are not especially illogical if somewhat fantastical or absurd; and there are many powerful, absurd and apparently illogical waking narratives, and the fragmentariness of some dreams may be the consequence of either an extreme ellipticality of the dream—we are “telling” these narratives to ourselves and do not require as much context as narratives constructed for others—or the result of imperfect recall. Dreams are accessible only through recall, our own or reported by others; and the neurological evidence of the fairly regular temporal patterns of rapid eye movement that seem to correlate with dreaming suggest a kind of fullness of the dream cycle that rarely corresponds to the dream reports. So

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it is probably reasonable to assume that dream recall is often only a partial representation of the dream experience. Still, I’ve recorded perfectly coherent narrative dreams. Here is one from a young woman: I’m quickly getting ready for school. My mother is then standing at the front door and I’m outside. I realize that I had in all my rush forgotten to put on my shoes. I was standing there on the cold brick and I knew I couldn’t go back into the house to get my shoes. I had to go to school without them. So then I went to school very nervously. No one notices that I am barefoot at school. But I am almost sick with anxiety. How could they not notice? I really want to go home and just get my shoes but I know it is not a possibility. I had to just accept the fact that I was barefoot and suffer the consequence.

Whatever the significance of the dream to the dreamer, it is a perfectly coherent narrative. It happens also to be a coherent story, because the sequence of events is absolutely clear and forms an intelligible temporal whole, though it may seem to lack an ending, because the anticipated consequences of appearing barefoot in school are not represented. But the emphasis of the dream is upon the dreamer’s anxiety to get to school on time, the haste that produces, which causes her to forget to put on her shoes and will not allow her to go back to correct her mistake. The consequence is the suffering she feels at being shoeless in the classroom. This little dream narrative is somewhat more logical and inevitable than the career of Oedipus, as it has the advantage of not depending upon a great chain of unlikely coincidences. Freud, the great pioneer of dream interpretation, would, of course, be among the foremost to deny the narrative significance of dreams, though most of the dreams he reports in Traumdeutung are apparently narratives. Even though he often uses some of their narrative properties to interpret them, he persistently characterizes dreams in a static vocabulary, referring to them as “rebuses,” “puzzle pictures,” or “hieroglyphs,” or what we might call collages. But he is not interested in interpreting the dream as a form of narrative communication. He sees the dream itself as merely the contingent outcome of a struggle between a communicational impulse and a censoring impulse in a presentational mental medium based heavily on iconicization, and his task is to unscramble a coded transmission for a concealed message. His work is not so much an interpretation as a deconstruction. Nevertheless, The Interpretation of Dreams is a work of great significance for all narrative theory, not least because of Freud’s situation of  •

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desire at its center. It is true that he grossly oversimplifies the relation of desire to dream in his hypothesis of the dream as wish fulfillment and in his remarkable suggestion that the desire underlying any dream is a simple vector that could be expressed discursively in something like a declarative sentence. But he also had the great virtue of reporting a vast array of dream narratives that offer much richer and greater complexities than the theory he offered to explain them. And if his theory of censorship appears to be redundant and probably irrelevant, his hypotheses of condensation and displacement under the constraints of a presentational medium, are still rich with meaning for any student of narrative. Still, the great mechanisms of distortion that Freud hypothesizes in chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams to explain the deformation of the dream message by the dream seem hardly relevant to a dream as simple and lucid as the dream of the barefoot student, at least if we wish to consider it as narrative. They may be more useful in a more literarily complex dream like this dream of my own. I was a guest among many at some pleasure ground that was as large as Prospect Park, and people had been feasting, bathing, drinking wine, etc., wandering off freely from room to room of this large villa, where some were sleeping, others lying about; and I remember at one point taking off my shoes and bathing my feet in a pool and then making my way to some northern point of the estate, where I found Elly (my wife), who pointed out that I had lost my shoes. So I said I would find them and set out looking from room to room, passing people and searching through all kinds of shoes. One man I encountered in my search grasped my arm in a friendly way and asked “What are you doing?” and when I answered “Looking for my shoes.” he said, “Oh, I was thinking of going to the movies.” I continued my search, passing out of one villa into an adjoining one, where a young woman with a notebook was recording responses on a video monitor. She seemed so studious and professional that it was hard to see her relation to the sybarite who owned the villa. “What’s your connection to him?” I asked. “Hogs,” she said. Hog rustling had made the fortune that had acquired the villa and made her research possible. She was analyzing subject/ object relations in a behavioristic manner, watching to see what the subject did and trying always to eliminate the ideas of choice or experience or anything that was not directly observable. “We are not trying to describe the experience of shame, but what people do in straightforward terms.” But I answered that all terms have several meanings in natural languages and we slide from one meaning to another without even noticing it. “Give me an example,” she said. “Subject and object,” I answered. The Beggar and the King

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There is surely an elaborate play of subject/object relations between the dreamer and the other figures of the dream. He begins as an observer of the scene and becomes in turn an object of advice from his wife, the subject of a search for his shoes, the object of a genteel pass from the man he encounters in the room full of shoes, and the object, along with everyone else, of the video observation of the young woman psychologist, who is in turn subjected to his observation and becomes the object of his final response, all the while that the dream observer maintains his subject position and watches it challenged as his surrogate traverses the terrain of the dream. But this network of signifiers, however it may be enriched by an analysis of possible condensations and displacements, is woven into the narrative structure. Whatever the narrative might be said to “mean,” it is the presentational force of each of the successive states that counts. Wandering about pleasantly, being called to account and finding oneself shoeless, searching, misunderstanding an invitation, and realizing one has been spied upon all the while in the name of pseudoscience by a pedant subsidized by a sleazy crime. At the same time, the plot has no obvious logic. In Ricoeur’s sense this is perhaps not a narrative, or not a good one, though I would prefer to say it is not a story, or not a good one. If it is a gathering together of a series of diverse events to form a configurational unity, the ending is by no means an inevitable or even particularly logical outcome of the succession of previous incidents. If its last scene has the feeling of conclusion, it is only because the enigmatic final utterance suggests a self-referential reading that reverberates through all the previous incidents and perhaps challenges the security of the dream observer’s subject position. This turns it into a kind of allegory, which to function has to be a somewhat defective story but not a defective narrative. If a narrative is about making present and a story is about making sense, the two effects may come together or separately, but they invoke different cognitive capabilities and are produced by different means or by the different deployment of the same means. Consider this passage from the Warhol Diaries. Thursday March 23, 1978 Yesterday I watched the Flying Wallenda on the news fall from the highwire and get killed. You saw it all—he was walking, and he got to the middle, and a wind came from Miami, and—he was just—he fell, and then the cameras went close in, they showed him lying there.

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This is a simple story, the report of the aerialist’s death, and it follows the form William Labov suggests for oral stories of personal experience. It begins with an Abstract (“Yesterday I watched . . .”), followed in order by an Orientation (“. . . he was walking, and he got to the middle . . .”), a Complication (“. . . and a wind came from Miami . . .”), a Result (“. . . he fell . . .”), and a Coda (“. . . they showed him lying there.”) What makes it a narrative in my terms is what Labov calls the Evaluation, which in Labov’s sense marks the significance of the event, but which as I see it narrativizes the story by marking the presence of a subject and the subject’s sense of stake. These markers begin with “You saw it all,” proceed by insistence through the staccato rhythm of “he was walking,” “and he got to the middle,” “and a wind came from Miami,” which would have continued to “and he fell,” but this clause is emphatically interrupted by the stammering “he was just,” the most emphatic mark of the observer’s stake in the outcome. While the next clause—“and then the cameras went close in”—reveals that the narrative impact is upon the observer to whom “they showed him lying there.” From this point of view, the final clause turns out not to be a Coda, but the narrative Result. For while the story gives an account of the fall of the Flying Wallenda, tripped up by a wind from Miami, the narrative is the sense of Warhol watching, first with interest and admiration, then in fascination and helpless horror from 1,500 miles away. It represents and reenacts the confrontation of the observer’s subjectivity with the promise of aesthetic delight in a spectacle of grace and skill that turns into catastrophe. Narrativization can be accomplished in a number of different ways. In his letter to Richard Southwell of July 20, 1452, John Paston is essentially offering legal testimony. And the testimony is presented by means of a story or, more precisely, that part of the story not known to Southwell. This be proof that Jane Boyce was ravished against her will and not by her own assent. One is that she, the time of her taking, when she was set upon her horse she reviled Lancastrother and called him knave and wept and cried out upon him piteously to hear, and said as shrewdly to him as could come to her mind and fell down off her horse unto that she was bound and called him false traitor that brought her the rabbits. And when she was bound she called upon her mother, which followed her as far as she might on her feet and when the said Jane said she might go no further she cried to her mother and said that whatsoever came of her she would never be wedded to that knave were she to die for it. And by the way at the Shraggary’s house in Kokely Clay and at Brychehamewell and in all other places where she might see any people she cried out upon him and let people wit

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whose daughter she was and how she was ravished against her will desiring the people to follow and rescue her. And Lancasterother’s priest of the Eagle in Lincolnshire who confessed her said that she told him in confession that she would never be wedded to him were she to die for it and the same priest said he would not wed them together for a thousand pounds.

But to prove that Jane Boyce was taken against her will, Paston has to present evidence not only of her resistance, but of her unflagging unwillingness to be taken. By the time he has finished he has painted so vivid a picture of her frustration, rage, and shame, that the account serves as Jane Boyce’s narrative. Narrativization through marking of the subject’s experience seems to be a human universal and not culture-dependent, though different cultural traditions may make use of different procedures to accomplish the same end. In the ancient Sumero-Akkadian poem Gilgamesh, the depiction of Gilgamesh’s descent into the underworld in search of the dead Enkidu is a striking example of narrativization by insistent repetition. The journey requires him to follow the road of the sun through a netherworld of darkness and cold till he finally comes to the light. The fearfulness of the trip is dramatically staged by insistent literal repetition: one hour he travelled dense was the darkness nowhere was light neither forward nor backward did it allow him to see two hours he travelled dense was the darkness nowhere was light neither forward nor backward did it allow him to see and though there are many missing lines in the cuneiform tablets and verses that expand on this formula, the formula is essentially repeated through the ninth hour nine hours he travelled the north wind licked at his face dense was the darkness nowhere was light neither forward nor backward did it allow him to see till Gilgamesh appears to approach the light by the tenth hour, arrives at the beginning of light in the eleventh hour and comes into the full brilliance of sunlight in the twelfth.  •

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This repetitive formula, which was characteristic of old Sumerian poetry and is deployed to great effect in the late Akkadian version of the poem, serves as a kind of narrative staging of the story. In this tradition formulaic repetition is typical of action sequences that are of major significance for the protagonist and have the effect of theatrical presentation. While the manner and style of performance or recitation of these poems is unknown, even a silent literary reading, which is hardly likely for ancient near Eastern poetry, gives a powerful representation of the hero’s subjectivity. In a modern novella like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s transformation has already taken place before the story begins. Or rather, the famous first sentence begins the narrative at a point after the story has already begun. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself in his bed, transformed into an enormous insect.

And for the next seventeen pages, as the clock slowly advances from 6:30 to nearly 8:00 a.m., Gregor confronts his physical transformation from the point of view of the wretched human being he has always been—the dutiful son, the miserable traveling salesman who has overslept and will be late to work and is afraid he will lose his job if he can’t roll his beetlelike body onto its feet and off the bed. It takes him eight pages to rock himself off his back and out of bed, six more to crawl across the floor and prop himself up against the bureau, two more to let himself fall against a chair and use it to propel himself to the door, and a final page and a half to grasp the key in his mandibles, turn it, push the door open and appear in the open doorway. Gregor Samsa’s journey across his bedroom is longer than Gilgamesh’s descent into the underworld; and it accomplishes nearly the same thing—the staging of the protagonist’s subjectivity—but by a nearly incredible precisionist description instead of repetition. In Labov’s terms we might say that the Evaluation markers in Gilgamesh are produced by the insistency of repetition and in Metamorphosis by the precisionist, micro-detailing of Gregor’s goal-oriented behavior. In both cases there is a story, which has a plot—a configuration of events and parts of events that shape a major transformation, but the configuration doesn’t make any important new sense of the events. Samsa fades away with a rotting apple in his side and dies with the mind of a human in the body of an insect, and Gilgamesh, who knew that he was going to die after seeing his friend die and went off to search for him and The Beggar and the King

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for immortality in the underworld, is still going to die and finds no new knowledge he can bring back from there. The tragedy of Oedipus makes no more sense than Gilgamesh or Metamorphosis. The young man who solved the riddle of the sphinx, who killed a rude old man at a crossroad and married the queen of Thebes, never killed his father or slept with his mother. He merely killed a man who turned out to be his father and slept with a woman who turned out to be his mother. The absurd chain of circumstances that connected these events, never connects Oedipus’s two states of being. And because Oedipus despairs of connecting his two states of mind, he blinds himself. The narrative of Oedipus consists of the gradual confrontation of two states of mind that will not connect, and the plot is merely the device that brings the confrontation about. Kings never become beggars and beggars never become kings. Narrative explains nothing. bibliography Afanasiev A. N. Russkie narodnye skazki [Russian folktales]. Moscow: 1855–1864. Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to a Structural Analysis of Narrative,” in A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Bremond, Claude. Logique de Recit. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Danto, Arthur. Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated by John Gardner and John Maier. New York: Vintage, 1985. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard ed. Vols. 4 and 5, ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1973. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428–44. Propp, V. The Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd edition. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1968. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Sahagun, Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex). Translated from the Aztec by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J.O. Anderson. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 1963. Todorov, Tzvetan. Poetique de la prose. Paris: Seuil, 1971.

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“the death of the hired man”

when i was invited to come here i realized that siah armajani had gotten here first because i received a phone call from somebody up here barbara and she said siah armajani has constructed a poetry lounge for us up here at cal tech and we’d like to know if you would come up and read “read” well i said i dont really read i talk but i guess i could come up and do a talk poem and barbara didnt blanch at that i guess i couldnt see but it didnt seem to set her back at all and she said all right and it was agreed then i received in the mail a little green booklet that was i suppose to prepare me for the poetry lounge because while i might have imagined what a poetry lounge was if it had been built in the cal tech library this poetry lounge was in the baxter art gallery and i also knew because i happen to be an art critic as well as a poet that siah armajani was an artist and not a contractor and comes from a part of the art world we both share so i had no idea what sort of thing this poetry lounge in an art gallery was going to be and the booklet didnt prepare me for it either it prepared me for several other things that siah armajani had constructed at several other places on several other occasions than this one reading houses and reading gardens and meeting gardens and newsstands with reading benches and tables and fences in art galleries in places like omaha and cincinnati and purchase and roanoke and i could see from the booklet that siah had a considerable involvement with sitting and reading but since for me poetry has a lot more to do with standing and talking than sitting and reading i still couldnt quite imagine what this poetry lounge was likely to be so i let my mind play over the possibilities and i imagined partly because of siah armajanis wonderful name some poet like basil bunting reclining on a great oriental settee behind which a beautiful maiden was kneeling and pouring from a costly beaker some sweet and appalling

wine which the reclining poet awaited from her hand and would take and between occasional sips sigh and lament his lost love for some handsome youth now long since dead in a music as sweet and appalling as the wine but then i thought that wasnt too likely and i reminded myself that clayton eshleman teaches poetry at cal tech and siah would surely have taken account of this so that he would have painted little paleolithic figures upon his fences and benches in recognition of claytons well known passion for the old stone age but looking at the little green booklet once more i recalled that siah and i had very nearly served together in a symposium held in washington on the present state of the crafts a symposium at which he somehow didnt appear and was replaced by an amazingly handsome vietnamese poet with a brilliant smile a monogrammed leather attaché case and an elegant gold wristwatch and i thought then that siah might be doing something craft conscious for poetry and as the booklet revealed in spite of his sonorous name which i took to be either armenian or persian siah armajani had turned around in minneapolis and made american furniture and i thought wow in the baxter art gallery of the california institute of technology we will have handcrafted american furniture for american poetry and i remembered that there is a school or was a school of american poetry that was so american i used to think of it as armorican more armorican than american and i suspected that siahs relation to this armorican americanism with its neat downright simpleness its blunt straightforwardness its woodenness might provide us with more of those wooden things he had built for the art galleries of purchase and roanoke and omaha and cincinnati more of those boxy tables and trestle benches those tongue and groove slatted fences and here we are in the poetry lounge in this gallery arranged like a church or a meeting hall or a schoolroom with its three little rows of desks and benches on each side facing my cratelike lectern or pulpit with the crisscrossed shelving at the walls lodging a few books that signify poetry and all this was more or less expectable but one thing i didnt expect that went beyond all my expectations was robert frost that robert frost should be here and i should be here with him in the same place at the same time i knew of course that robert frost was going to be here someone had told me something of it but that the entire poem “mending wall” would be stenciled line for line across all the desk tops separating the people on the benches from me up here at my pulpit that went beyond all my expectations because it creates a conjunction of two poets i simply could not imagine in fact i considered this conjunction so  •

“the death of the hired man”

impossible to imagine that when i was publishing my last book and composing a preface to stand as a kind of signpost to any entering reader to indicate what he or she might soon expect to be confronted with i quoted something i had said on a previous occasion “if robert lowell is a poet i dont want to be a poet if robert frost was a poet i dont want to be a poet if socrates was a poet i’ll consider it” now i didn’t say this because i despise the writings of robert lowell or robert frost but to try to explain in what sort of way i would like my works to be heard and seen and to prevent confusion because in some ways i’m afraid i’m a rather implausible poet not to myself of course to myself i’m a simple straight forward talking poet more plausible than most whod be easy to understand for most of those people who sat around in the courtyards and coffee shops and taverns and listened to homer or socrates but my book was a long way from those courtyards and coffee shops and a lot closer to a library or school where robert frost would surely be a much more plausible poet than i who would seem to be a still more implausible poet because i had come in his place and i wanted to assure everyone that i had not come in his place at all and now here we are confronting each other across the desk tops of the same place and anticipating something of this i wanted to think about what it was that made me feel so deeply and firmly that we were two poets who could not possibly occupy the same space because i had felt that way for a long time and felt it i think more deeply and firmly than i was sure i had a reason for feeling it so i thought to myself before coming here i will get myself some robert frost books and i’ll look into them so i got out the three volumes of robert frosts biography and i looked at them because i thought it would be difficult to read his words without having some sense of the world within which they might apply and i got out a book of robert frosts poetry one of those books that are refugees from our childhood that were collected by someone like louis untermeyer in which the poems are taken from most of the poets books no matter where or when they were written or under what circumstances and pressed up against each other between little folksy engravings and chatty paragraphs commending their various excellences or frosts as if these were in no way dependent on any human context of time or place or situation but since this is the standard situation for robert frost the place in which he is the perfect model of a plausible poet and a place possibly very much like a poetry lounge i thought i would read in that book but because i cant imagine poetry anybodys poetry in such a place i cheated and read in the biography as well and i asked myself this question “the death of the hired man”

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what is it about this poet or what is it ive felt about this poet who ive never considered hateful from another time from whom i feel so completely alien that i couldnt imagine sharing the term poet with him there are i said things about him i should like but i dont like them anyway for example i came on a letter of frosts that i liked and would probably agree with at least in part or at least a large part of that letter makes sense to me within my world it was a letter he had written to somebody named sidney cox whom i dont know and dont especially care to know as i dont care about the details of robert frosts personal life but i do care that in this letter frost said that “the living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a sentence its only there for those who have heard it in conversation its not for us in any greek or latin poem because our ears have not been filled with the tones of greek and roman talk it is the most volatile and at the same time important part of poetry it goes and the language becomes a dead language and the poetry becomes a dead poetry” now i dont entirely agree with that but it belongs to a discourse i would take seriously i mean i would agree that for us greek and latin poetry have a certain amount of deadness because we have no idea how they really sounded though i was once in a seminar with a woman who had a great theory of how they sounded and she sang a whole book of the iliad at us and it was one of the loveliest performances ive ever heard but i still dont know how they talked the only way i ever got any sense of how they talked was in reading plato where the sense of the sentences when you think youve got it gives you some sense of the way they sounded and it seems to me also that this image of a spoken language and its ways of making sense lying at the bottom of any poetry that makes sense was something i could agree with and surely take seriously but there is something about robert frost here that doesnt make sense to me because most of his poetry doesnt make sense that way or makes sense that way only once in a while and i guess you can see that from the lines that are stenciled in front of you on your desktop or your neighbors desktops from a poem that most people who would think about it would consider one of frosts best poems in precisely this way that the lines sound of the sense that sentences make in peoples conversations but i think there is something disastrous about the language of most of this poem something mechanical and wooden about the way the lines are nearly all end stopped and tacked on one to the other like siding and most of them are stretched out to reach the end of a line or swollen to fit the poetical style

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“the death of the hired man”

something there is that doesnt love a wall that sends the frozen ground swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun or the work of hunters is another thing i have come after them and made repair where they have left not one stone on a stone there is what i would call a disastrous poetical language in robert frost and i dont understand it or why it had to be so disastrous because it wasnt a personal disaster perhaps it was a national disaster or a disaster of his time but somewhere in the poetical debris of such a poem there will be one line that will make sense in the way frosts letter talked of making sense and you wont want to dismiss it the sound of a voice saying over and over again as if its speaker had just discovered its meaning something like “good fences make good neighbors” which is not equaled but supposed to be by “something there is that doesnt love a wall” though not only have you never heard anyone speak it you cant even imagine anyone speaking it in precisely that way because you suspect quite rightly that something called meter has turned an english sentence back on itself to make it sound more poetical more important and quaint something there is for sure that goes around turning over english sentences like “i let my neighbor behind the hill know” into “i let my neighbor know beyond the hill” which is too bad because if there was something wild and whimsical in this poem that didnt respect walls you might suppose it wouldnt respect meter either so you dont take it too seriously and thats too bad because frost as the poet appears to identify himself in speaking for the force against walls “that wants them down” or represents himself at least as knowing more than his neighbor about walls and their limitations so he keeps bugging him “why do they make good neighbors isnt it where there are cows but there are no cows here my apple trees will never get across and eat his pines before i built a wall i would ask to know what i was walling in or out” to which his neighbor doesnt respond just answers with that line that might have come out of a book of marianne moores or a collection of gnomic verse or simply out of the long experience of the neighborhood “good fences make good neighbors” the logic of which is unassailable if you happen to look into the life of robert frost who was it seems a particularly acquisitive

“the death of the hired man”

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man and might have followed his apple seedlings up to his neighbors doorstep if the occasion presented itself but frost doesnt want to give his neighbor a logic only a tenacious hold on a conventional saying that the poet wants to toy with if not challenge and so in what i regard as the most disastrous language of the poem he proposes to give a kind of shape to this something that doesnt love a wall and wants it down “i could say ‘elves’ to him” now thats a blatant lie there is no way that robert frost could have said elves to him he could not and would not have said elves to him because if he had ever said elves to him he would never have been able to face his neighbor again across any wall at all and of course thats exactly what robert frost wanted to continue to do to face his neighbors across his wall and be taken for a new england farmer sort of but of course he was not a new england farmer he was hardly a farmer at all he farmed when he felt like it raised a few chickens that others had to take care of and come over and kill and apple trees that didnt take much tending which in any case he could always hire others to do but he wasnt much of a farmer or he would have known that being a farmer is as precisely dependent on walls as being a poet is not and we wouldnt have that curious characterization of his neighbor as an old stone age savage when it wasnt the old stone age gathering and hunting people but the new stone age cultivators who made so much of surveying and boundaries and walls robert frost was not so much of a farmer as a poet dressed up as a farmer in a disguise he would have liked all of us readers to see through and it seems to me thats part of the awkwardness we’re confronted with when we try to read the poetry of robert frost the awkwardness of metaphor poetical metaphor which is something that gets handed to you in such a way as to assure you that its not that thing thats being handed you but something else which you will have to take it for if youre going to take part or pleasure in the transaction at all now whenever robert frost has an interesting insight into anything hes looking at some kind of human action and if you take a poem like “the code” and its an interesting poem what youve got is an anecdote or a short story in this case told by an old farm hand about a farmer he’d been working for a hard driving man who managed by driving himself to drive his workers before him in jobs like mowing and loading hay and the old hand had put up with this driving all day long and bided his time because nothing explicit had been done or said to violate the code of farmer farm hand relations till they got back to the barn to unload the hay and the farmer who was standing in the barn stall down below called to the hand who was standing on top of the wagon load that he’d just been stacking  •

“the death of the hired man”

“let her come” in just that tone of voice that could be interpreted as criticism and command and the farm hand tried to kill him by dumping the whole load down on his head now whats valuable in this poem is the sense of the way the mans resentment of this farmers style of rushing was there before his words but it was the words that gave the hand his justification for killing because they constituted the open act of violation and the farmer whom the farm hand didnt really succeed in killing appears to have recognized this too and it gives a nice image of how many small acts of nearly imperceptible violence can be precipitated into a single utterance struck off like the head of a match whats good about this story is its compactness and simplicity the sense of watching a mind slowly registering its experience but the trouble is the poem is nowhere as compact as the anecdote lying at its center which could have been tossed off in a couple of dozen lines and is padded out to more than a hundred with a lot of rural furniture and the thing about this furniture is that its less functional than metaphorical if you dont see what i mean consider armajani whose furniture most of you are sitting in its not serious furniture or its too serious joinery look at those bookshelves against the wall if bookshelves is what they are because the fact that you can place a few poetry books in them doesnt make them bookshelves and they are much more seriously minimal wooden wall sculptures to which something excessive has been added along with the blue paint all those hinges for example now those hinges are borrowed from a great class of familiar objects with moving joints that allow you the convenience of a certain indecision to accommodate which you can open and close the joined things or at least move them back and forth as the impulse strikes you but there is no reason why you would want to move these hinges back and forth and if you wanted to you couldnt because the joined things prevent the joint from moving since each separate piece of wood here is hinged at one end to the top of a crosspiece from which it would hang down loosely and if you wanted you could pick it up and let it swing back down but armajani has intervened at just this point and hinged the two loose ends together to form a hanging “v” from which you couldnt budge them if you tried because the length of each wooden flap prevents the other one from moving and this is pretty funny because of the way it transforms all these moving joints to fixed ones and makes you wonder why hes used them until you realize that these hinges are not hinges at all but images of hinges or synecdoches that as individual hinges expend all their energy calling up the class of hinges of which they are merely representatives or consider his gable shaped wall structure that terminates absurdly in what resembles a little bench surely you could find “the death of the hired man”

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no reason for sitting here and no one is ever likely to sit here armajani must know this so we are not really looking at a bench but an image of a bench that is there to represent like all those hinges structures of a type we encounter now mainly in museums where we can hardly divine what needs or whims were satisfied by these plainly ingenious designs so this is not a simple functional furniture but a metaphoric mannerist sculpture that reminds you of a kind of american craftsman furniture that this is not and it goes further it invites you to test its function and then springs its trap which tells you something by the way it looks and doesnt let you use it look at where youre sitting on those benches theyre quite a bit too low for most of you to read comfortably the six lines of “mending wall” stenciled on the desk in front of you if you wanted to read them you might have to stand up as at a lectern which these desks much more resemble besides what good are six lines of a forty five line poem that youd have to stand to read the rest of from the seven other lectern desks and youre not going to do that either because this room is set up as an auditorium and all your benches and desks are angled toward my cratelike lectern pulpit that turns me into some kind of preacher teacher and you have to crane your necks a little to look toward me over the fragments of robert frost this room is beginning to tell us something about the contemporary state of poetry or armajanis beliefs about it which may not be so far off the mark an image of a slightly foolish teacher preacher followed by an uncomfortable audience from which he is divided by fragments of robert frost and this is pretty funny but the clincher is yet to come suppose you the audience for poetry take it upon yourselves to become poets and write your own poem you reach for the hinged lectern on which the robert frost is inscribed to lower it into the desk at which you can write and it comes down and crushes you against the desk behind you apparently these fragments of robert frost that prevented you from hearing poetry will also prevent you from writing it this is a very funny situation for a poetry lounge in which poetry becomes at best uncomfortable and at worst impossible there is a certain amount of mockery here in which metaphor poetical metaphor is turned back on itself as the enemy of poetry or at least of meaning now this feels like a kind of attack on poetry or a certain image or aspect of poetry and certainly of robert frosts poetry at least that part of robert frosts poetry that has been selected for popular acclaim according to which he is americas poet the way andrew wyeth and norman rockwell are americas painters and there is that way in which he sometimes resembles one or the other of them though there is something fiercer and harder in some of his poetry but  •

“the death of the hired man”

there is often and almost always something that blurs or hides this a kind of metaphorical screen that he drops over it that softens and discolors it and i wondered whether my problems with frost were the problems of metaphor the kind of metaphor that does not reveal but conceals and colors and i wondered what the role of metaphor was for frost and i think i’m first beginning to understand it now its the idea that metaphor is what a poet does its his job to turn speech into figures of speech and dimly i seem to remember hearing back in school somewhere that that was the center of poetry metaphor poetry was metaphorical speech i never understood it then why does it have to be metaphor so i forgot about it as if it was some kind of literary aberration to which schools are prone but i see it goes deeper than that this commitment to metaphor yet what is it if i try to review it in the light of a classical education i can ask what aristotle had to say of it in the poetics aristotle had some funny things to say about metaphor toward the end of the poetics the part that nobody tends to read very much because by then youre so interested in tragedy its hard to remember its as a species of poetry that hes discussing it and when he finally comes to the language of poetry hes going to take up the nature of words and the greeks have a peculiarly idiosyncratic idea of them according to which all words are some kind of names because for the greeks all representation appears to consist of naming at least according to aristotle and for aristotle because he is a greek and because the greeks have such a powerful idea of a rep things have reps everythings got a rep and the rep is carried by its name and there are names for actions as there are for things and for people and among these names aristotle says there are the right names and the wrong names the wrong names are metaphors now as he says this he also says other things about names that there are foreign names and common names and specially strange and deformed ones but metaphor is the wrong name you get something that is not the right name for something and you call it by that name for example you call this woman “george” she wont answer to that name but it doesnt matter what does matter is that you refer to her as george in such a way that she or others hear her referred to as george well she isnt really a george and you probably dont have a strong enough idea of what a george is for me to discuss it with you but charlemagne her name isnt charlemagne but if i call her charlemagne youll have a strong image of the character i want to attribute to her you can immediately see what power will accrue to her youll see her holding a scepter riding at the head of her troops half roman half german and followed by a train of irish scholars and all emperor uniting civilization and force if you accept it you “the death of the hired man”

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may not believe me because she doesnt look at all like shes going to play the role of charlemagne today now if thats the case and shes not going to play charlemagne what will this wrong name metaphor do it will depend i suppose on how much you care about how wrong it is because you could consider it like a hat you put on a hat you cover your face somewhat you put it in the shade if i put on a hat i would look different i dont like to wear hats but i remember once when i was hitching across the country in about 1952 i remember that because it was the year that eisenhower was to be elected president and i was traveling west on the northernmost route route 10 and in 1952 they had not yet completely obliterated the country when it got dark the roads got dark and there were stars or there was a moon unless it got cloudy when there was nothing and the road was empty and you could wait a long time for a hitch if you traveled at night and i traveled back and forth across the country that year from idaho where i had been working and i was passing close to bismarck north dakota i don’t know what it is now but in those days it was a lone landmark on the road in the empty state of north dakota and i happened to be wearing a hat i was wearing a hat because it was a hot and sunny summer and i was trying to keep the sun out of my eyes the hat was a beaten up old fedora that i had worn to work to keep branches out of my eyes and i was traveling with a friend who was similarly wearing a hat over his dark wavy hair and a man pulled up in a pickup truck and offered us a hitch and we were driving along my friend walter making small talk with this friendly man whod picked us up when he gave us the pitch first he started on all of the reasons why living in north dakota was living in gods country the best place in the world to live how attentive and sharp it made you to live close to the wild makes a man observant and sharp “i bet he said i can tell you all kinds of things about yourselves you wouldnt think i’d noticed” we bit go ahead “i can tell he said where youre from what kind of people you come from” okay we said “i can tell” he said looking at my thin pale handsome friend “youre from new york” admiration from us “how could you tell” from your jewish accent he said and walter who was of german extraction smiled “how about me” “youre a scandinavian” “how could you tell” “easily discernible” he said “well?” “youre the blonde germanic type too bony to be german” apparently the hat sitting on my bald head had confused him slightly changed my genre made my absent eyebrows blonde if i had taken the hat off i might have been a zen monk or if i took on a monocle i could have been german again this time a junker once when my wife was going to our h.i.p. clinic when she was pregnant to see the doctor there it was back in the sixties at the height of the early protests against the  •

“the death of the hired man”

vietnam war and the doctors were keeping check on her progress and i came along sometimes to keep her company one day we got there and the nurse receptionist stared at me for a moment and said youve done something i said “what?” “shaved off your beard” now i never had a beard but i knew what she meant i wore chinos or levis and black motorcycle boots and elly wore no makeup and all of us were protesters against the war bearded beatniks this has become a somewhat historical term and many of you wont remember it but thats what you were then as later elly might have become a hippie a condition for which i didnt qualify because in my levis and boots and very short hair i looked too military and this nurse who had glanced casually at me taking in only my boots and jeans one day looked at me and seeing no beard realized that i had shaved it off she dropped a hat on me or she’d always had a hat on me and seeing me walk out from under it she dropped it on me again now what is this trick of getting and keeping things under your hat the way armajani goes about getting american carpentry under a hat and we recognize this hat trick because we recognize the hat armajanis as a high amish hat and frosts as a big broad brimmed high crowned straw that doesnt fit any wearer so we know whats under that hat isnt simply wearing it but hiding under it now what does it mean to perform this hat trick to me it suggests that most of the people who perform it know very well or think they do what it is theyre covering up they seem to have a very clear idea of what the truth is or the fact is and its inadequacies and what they want to give you or put in front of you or themselves is something thats not exactly the truth it may be better than the truth or more interesting or simply more pleasing now the people who go in for this must have a strong sense that they know the truth because you have to feel you know it to want to cover it up with a metaphor how else would you know you had a metaphor and not the simple truth how do you know this isnt a real poetry lounge because it doesnt work as a poetry lounge because as a poetry lounge its ridiculous and works only with absurd difficulties that we all imagine a poetry lounge would never present though we may never have seen one or imagined it before this lounge is something like its hinges which as hinges are some sort of lies so i suppose you need if not an image of truth at least an image of some kind of untruth that can serve as a kind of poorly fitting hat and i guess at bottom both frost and armajani have a clearer idea of truth than i do because i’m not at all sure when i’m using metaphors or giving the wrong name i suppose i’m pretty sure her name is not charlemagne its a low probability but who would believe my sons name is blaise cendrars “the death of the hired man”

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when he was a little boy we lived in the town of solana beach and every morning i used to have a conversation about this with a neighbor of mine a mr canton a retired actuary who came from montreal every morning mr canton used to come strolling up the street on his way to the bluffs overlooking the ocean and he proceeded in his portly old mans way hands behind his back pausing to take in the street and pausing occasionally to converse with his neighbors his conversation with me was conducted in french and concerned blaise who he regularly observed was a wonderful child a handsome child well behaved what was his name? and when i answered blaise he would smile and say ah thats a wonderful name and observe that he was named after the saint who protects against ills of the throat at which i would smile and point out that he was actually named after blaise cendrars the great one armed poet of france then mr canton would nod politely make some observation on the weather and continue his stroll this would happen every day that we chanced to meet mr canton on his morning stroll he would ask my sons name i would say blaise he would tell me of saint blaise who protects against ills of the throat and i would tell him of blaise cendrars the french poet who protects against depression and this was our regular morning conversation it gave mr canton pleasure and it gave me pleasure until mr canton one day went off to his montreal brothers home where he would be taken care of by relatives and end his life in peace probably still convinced that blaise cendrars was not my sons right name and in this blaise may have agreed with him because he has resolutely refused to let friends know his middle name for no other reason i suppose than his suspicion that they would hear “cendrars” a foreign name meaning nothing to them and turn it into “sandra” which is not a foreign name but not a boys name either he has also let us know that in front of his friends and their parents we must call him “blaze” instead of “blaise” though hes not quite so consistent in this but it seemed right to elly and me and weve called him blaze in public whenever we remember for this is california where the english translation seems to articulate his name so at baseball games when the loudspeaker announces to the gathered spectators “now batting for glendale federal the shortstop blaze antin” the name flares up in the spirit of the poet he was named after in a form they can pronounce and recognize in san diego as his right name and you may ask why if its so important to give the right name did you name that golden california child after a scraggly raunchy french adventurer poet and the answer is he wasnt born a california child he was born in new york as dark as an arab a wizened little baby with what looked like a heavy growth of beard who refused to sleep for a full twenty four hours after he was born and  •

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he looked like no one else except maybe w.c. fields and elly said he looks like a trouble maker the little bastard wont go to sleep he wants to look around maybe get up and go he looks like the kind of kid wholl run off at sixteen to cover the russo japanese war lets name him blaise cendrars besides this was the name of the twentieth centurys most cheerful poet one of frances greatest but however that may be and i believe it he was surely the most cheerful and a good person to take after and thats why we named him blaise cendrars hopefully and it didnt seem like a metaphor because an infant has no right name yet and has to grow into one we hoped it would be this one and now it doesnt seem to be the wrong name after all he gets to be more like the name each year to be sure a younger somewhat cooler california version a blaze with all the light and somewhat less heat who has not grown into the name fully yet but look how long and how far blaise cendrars had to travel before he grew into the name he gave himself in the hôtel des étrangers after running away from his quiet swiss home he had to travel through manchuria with a rug merchant and to the united states where nobody knows what he did except hang around the new york public library and write a poem about easter and even if he didnt do anything else but hang around the library and bryant park he knew more about the united states than most people who toured the country because he knew its modernism he knew a great deal about the united states its strange commercial fever and he wrote about the discovery of gold though he’d never been in california then later he improved on this way of working he went to remote and exciting places and then wrote about them making them more like what they were than they ever could have been but blaise cendrars was not a metaphorical writer in the way that robert frost is a metaphorical writer blaise cendrars could once in a while be accused of lying honestly telling a story the way it should be told to make it luminously clear blaise cendrars was a writer of luminous and questionable truth in this sense he was far superior to robert frost who apparently had the problem of trying to make the truth poetical not in a wild but in a professional way as if he considered it a poets job and when you hear a poem of robert frosts you know hes not simply telling you how it is or how he might desperately want it to be hes simply raising it to put it on the shelf with literature at the same time hes not the sort of poet who fails to respond to the things in life that just come up that simply happen and you can see this in a poem like “the death of the hired man” if you can get through frosts incredible ineptitude his awkward blank verse his clumsiness at setting up a situation at finding names for people mary warren “mary sat musing” “waiting for warren” mary “the death of the hired man”

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and warren are the modern people and when warren comes to the door what does mary do she rushes on tiptoe down the darkened passage to tell him “silas is back” the refugee from english literature has returned to the farm of the educated urbanized couple mary and warren the style of naming is as broad as a comic strip and the names ring nothing “fred where is north?” “north is there my love the brook runs west” which is even worse because “the death of the hired man” still has the nucleus of a story in it something brief and disturbing that happened an old man whod worked for them comes looking for a place to stay and finding no one home falls asleep against the barn door where the woman finds him and gets him into the kitchen where he offers to clear the orchard and ditch the meadow and falls asleep and the husband returns to hear whats happened which is where the poem begins but then theres all this talk of the old man coming back sensitive talk from mary tough farmer talk from warren the old man walked out on them for better wages during haying time and warren wont have him back warren is clearly frosts idea of his farmer self what hes like or should be like which is not too pleasant frost gives mary the best of it for sensitivity a strategy that reads “honesty” in the realist tradition tell a story on yourself and everyone believes it tell a story on someone your readers will identify with you and theyll believe it and dislike you a little less and while frost is busy manipulating and playing with his readers expectations of sensitive women and harder men and pathetical old and poor ones hes doing it in a wooden literary language he offers as spoken american that runs a register from fake folk “he thinks young wilson a likely lad though daft on education” to 1907 short story talk “harolds young college boys assurance piqued him” through palgrave poetical “part of a moon was falling down the west” or “as if she played unheard some tenderness that wrought on him beside her in the night” to arrive at the parlor gnomic about home “i should have called it something you somehow havent to deserve” that clinches it and just about the time that mary convinces warren to take him in they find the old man dead now whats dead? its the language of this poem thats dead the poem is covered with hats everywhere i look the poem is covered with hats but i cant help imagining theres something under one of those hats now why is it that everything in the poem seems to be a hat trick and i cant stand the language of it which most critics would probably say is all that there is in a poem anyway yet i still have a strong sense of something hidden in it something obscure and hard as the angular silhouette of a man in a doorway glimpsed from the window of a moving train in another of frosts poems where the brief image of the tall man sharply lit against the  •

“the death of the hired man”

darkened doorway is the gist of it and the poem is obscured by frosts usual habit of poetical play how tall the man was how gaunt how poor or comfortable or alone all of which is irrelevant as even frost knows to the center of this poem the observation for a second of this figure in a doorway which if its obscure is still more significant than the whole hat covered operation that he finally presents and i wonder what is this disability that frost suffers from and i think it is a kind of american gentility he was an american poet at a time when being an american poet was almost equivalent to being a parlor poet that is you could write poems about anything from a rainbow to a steel mill strike as long as you did it in language suitable for listening to in parlors which was not the way they talked in parlors that would have been a lot more interesting but in a language designed for reading and listening to in parlors that would hardly be listened to anywhere else and as an american poet he was suffering from what everybody in american literature was suffering from in those days whenever anyone came calling then they wore hats hats were very important at the time when these poems were being written they were published around 1914 and most of them were written one way or another about seven years earlier and even though he continued to write into the 1920s and 30s and even 40s frost is really a poet whose mind was formed before the first world war and we have to work hard to remember the world of poetry he grew up and matured in its hard because weve killed off a lot of the people frost grew up among and shared the world of poetry with back then names like richard hovey and bliss carman louise imogen guiney and lizette woodworth reese does anyone remember william vaughan moody or joaquin miller i remember them because i grew up in the 40s and i went to an old fashioned high school where they were very retrograde about literature which they taught out of old anthologies put together in the early part of the century in which all the poems were filled with transcendent feelings heroic feelings like millers columbus “past the pillars of hercules past the blue azores sail on sail on” or romantic ones like alfred noyes highwayman who came riding over a road that was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor ribald comic ones like arthur daleys giuseppe da barber who was always “biggah foh mash and hadda da granda da blacka moostache” or lyrical adolescent ones like nathalia cranes “i’m in love with the janitors boy and the janitors boy loves me” poems by people who went ecstatic at the sight of a cloud passing by or made delirious by the smell of crushed grass or the sight of the sun through a tenement window poems of whatever type that almost invariably reflected the extraordinary intensity or sensitivity of feeling that was almost the definition of a poet now frost “the death of the hired man”

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was surely caught up in this peculiar definition of the poet and there are plenty of poems in his first volumes a boys will and north of boston that represent nothing more than an attempt to justify his claim to poetry by bearing continual false witness to his sensitivity to nature poems in praise of butterflies and flowers and the miracle of rain were the professional poets stock in trade and frost tried to carry the whole line of romances rhapsodies and emblems but at the same time he was a tough and stubborn man with a nasty streak and a cold curiosity about people and things that let him register a few cool hard images in which he recognized his own experience and because he was a stubborn man he seems to have wanted to get these into his poems but he was also a professional poet so he had to make sure that these were poems he was getting them into and his way of going about this was to put hats on them to make sure you knew they were important i lived for a while with an uncle who used to wear a hat to work every day and in the morning when i went to school and he went to work we used to ride the train together every day he was a businessman and manufacturer and every morning he wore this beautiful dark green homburg and heavy coat over his dark worsted suit from witty brothers to the factory where he promptly took off his hat and coat and jacket before he began to work now i never saw him go out in the morning without his hat and coat in the summertime he wore a seersucker suit and a straw hat and though i worked for him for many years i never saw him wear the jacket or hat at work in those days the 1940s i never saw any serious person without a hat now these hats werent meant to keep you warm if you wore them in the winter your ears were freezing does anyone remember what those hats were like they had a crown and a brim and they sat fairly shallowly on your head a crisp wind would blow them right off if you didnt hold onto them with your hand but it was a respectable thing a hat it made you a serious person and thats all it did it wasnt a workmans woollen hat that you could pull down over your ears workmens hats were not for serious people they were a form of shelter like gloves or a ski mask everybody knows what ski masks are because burglars are always using them in the movies you see on television so you know about them even if you dont ski but you can get the wrong idea about them from the movies because in principle theyre like workmans hats a form of shelter not a disguise but you dont know about hats though i had a friend who used to wear a hat only when he went out drinking it was a bowler hat and represented his college days it reminded him of his princeton childhood so he wore this bowler hat with a raccoon coat whenever he set out for greenwich village to visit saloons like the san remo and the white horse  •

“the death of the hired man”

because it signified a jovial bon vivant writer who would make the tour of the dives in the village in the 1950s writers were still making that tour in the 50s and i’m sure that hat meant about as much as any experience in the tour because the hat gave the right color to any experience my friend could have as long as he was wearing it and i think of that hat as long as i keep trying to think of “the death of the hired man” as a poem which i cant say that i like still if i think of the experience i imagine to be hidden in the poem behind the words that i dislike i’m reminded that my mother in law once owned a hotel in the mountains of upstate new york the hotel had been built many years before probably at the end of the first world war by two brothers one of whom was a kind of woodworker artist a folkish artist such as siah armajani might have imagined armajani is not a folk artist hes a gallery artist who imagines folk art or craft and various workmanlike properties and this man was a kind of sophisticated folkish woodcarver painter caricaturist who made caricaturelike wooden sculptures and caricaturelike paintings of gnomelike people and demons and the other brother was more of builder a big bear of a man and the two brothers built this hotel like a great chateau in the mountains and the two of them didnt build it alone because the artist brother was more of an artist and decorator than a builder so he did the decorating the painting and the finish carpentry while the bearlike brother did the building with help most of this help were local people who in winter time would wander by looking for odd jobs here and there in the country and they were probably the sort of people frost knew from new hampshire and vermont you could hire them for mowing and haying on the local farms and for odd jobs building and repairing whatever you needed and when they didnt wander by there were places in the local towns callicoon and jeffersonville liberty and monticello where they would hang around and you could go and find them and there was one of them that this builder brother used to work with fairly regularly a heavy drinking ugly old foul mouthed guy named joe brizo he was a pretty good rough finish carpenter who could frame a building lay concrete and plaster and paint and handle the plumbing and some of the electrical work whenever he was sober and because he was a good workman and his foul talk that got fouler and fouler the longer he was sober amused philip which was the older brothers name in the winter philip would go down to a saloon in callicoon or liberty to hunt him up and hire him for board and pocket money to rebuild the main kitchen or repair the water system and the two of them philip and joe brizo would work together for a month or so until joe saved enough money to go off and drink for a while by spring “the death of the hired man”

• 

philip would find him in a bar in callicoon center or monticello and drive back with him to reshingle the roof and repaint the main building or frame a new guest house and repaint the pool bottom and this would last from march to june when joe would drift off again and in july out of money he would drift back and hang around the open hotel as a general handyman for a month or so until he got restless and disappeared till fall when philip would have to go off to find him in a bar in hortonville or hancock so that they could close up the place together and this would happen year after year they would work together and joke and quarrel together and in the evenings sometimes drink together and the two of them got older but not together because philip the owner brother as he got older got richer and drank less and less as he got older while joe brizo as he got older drank more and more and he got poorer and as he got older and more deteriorated from drinking he would get distracted sooner from working and wander off more quickly to liberty and monticello where the trotting track came and he found a new way to lose his money along with drinking and he got more difficult while working more quarrelsome and less reliable as a worker because he would drift off quicker and leave a job sometimes right in the middle to go off drinking so he was becoming too difficult for most employers but philip who had a sort of fellow feeling for joe because the two of them had worked so long together that a part of both their lives was in some way nailed into the structures they had built together so whenever joe brizo came around in whatever shape philip let him have a place to sleep and found some light work for him at the meager wages he always paid knowing he would disappear in a day or two it was about this time that my mother in law started managing the hotel for the two brothers who were getting old and losing interest in the day to day operation of the place jeanette was an imperious little woman who got exasperated with the eccentric ways of her help chambermaids who stole towels and linen dishwashers who showed up drunk for work salad chefs who quit on sunday before the afternoon meal and the temperamental chief chefs the french one who produced red white and blue sour cream for everyones blintzes on bastille day the passionate ukranian with the giant wife who suspected that all the male guests were running after her and chased some inoffensive person around the lawn with a knife for exchanging a few amiable words with her and the quarrelsome handymen who drifted in and out and were never there when you needed them they all exasperated her and she put up with it as an experienced hotel manager who knew the quality of the help she was likely to get

 •

“the death of the hired man”

but as soon as they overstepped her line she would rise in fury to her full five foot height and pronounce a banishment from which they were never to return driving them off the property immediately and sending their wages after them to the employment agency from which they had come racing off in the car to monticello to hire replacements or taking on the work herself and she never had any qualms about this act of firing happening as often as it did she would flare up abruptly and calm down almost as quickly as a matter of course though she was aware that many of the local people so dismissed held grudges against her but she chalked that up to her role as hotel manager and then owner she merely added them to the list of her normal commercial enemies butchers who had cheated her milkmen laundrymen and linen suppliers local farmers who wanted her property for their chickens competing hotel owners and developers several banks and their lawyers and regarded them with a kind of grim pride as witnesses to her success and importance in the area but with joe brizo it was different maybe because he was polish and she was polish or it was because of his foul mouthed style that she hated and the one time he had gotten splendidly drunk in the middle of a saturday afternoon and marched up to the porch of the main building where he sat down among the guests and regaled the general area with a series of incoherent filthy stories punctuated by intermittent outbursts of abuse at anyone and everyone present in a string of expletives in english polish and ukranian and she had never forgiven him for this and the image of his violence had lingered in her mind where over the years it had been magnified to such a point that it was equaled in her mind only by her image of the german bund about whose activities in the local area just before the war she’d heard awful stories and the two images had more or less fused in her mind so that in the lonely late fall days when she was shutting down the hotel and the woodwork creaked or the pipes knocked menacingly and the moody overcast weather began she would look out at the fiery foliage of the autumn trees and suspect arsonists coming with cans of gasoline or vandals with crowbars and rocks to smash the windows and tear up the porch and generally terrorize her and her family so she used to keep a .22 carbine in the bedroom and whenever she heard an unlikely sound and there were lots of them creaks and bumps and knocks she would send out her husband with the carbine to look for prowlers and when i came up with eleanor she’d sent me out because i was bigger and more imposing and i used to feel foolish taking the rifle and looking for what i was sure were raccoons or squirrels or rats in the

“the death of the hired man”

• 

attic so i would ask her what do i need the rifle for and she would tell me about the time the bund came by to drive philip and his brother out of the area and how philip who had been a greco roman wrestler fought half the night with a truck full of local toughs that he finally beat off with lots of broken arms and legs and they had threatened to come back and burn the place down at which philip had only smiled grimly and challenged them to try but had to take to his bed for a week afterward that was 1939 i said and this is 1960 and the nazi movement has not been doing so well lately and not here where almost all of them have gotten old or moved away “dont forget joe brizo” she said “ive seen him skulking around the grounds sometimes at night just waiting for a chance you take the gun” and i had seen joe brizo once in a while the summer that i was working as lifeguard for the hotel a beaten up grizzled old man trying to keep out of everybodys way and i would take the gun and feel completely foolish standing there holding it and i would walk up and down and look in all the places the scratching noises came from with the .22 always getting in my way and i would come back and tell jeanette it was probably some rats that got in through the roof but i remember one grim march that jeanette and peter were staying up there in one of the smaller cottages that they could keep warm with electric heaters and peter still had room to paint the weather was raw as always in that part of new york where the delaware freezes over in december and doesnt thaw till early april when the ice begins to crack in a week long cannonade that sends huge floes down the river to port jervis and below and jeanette and peter were huddled in their little cottage when we came up to have dinner with them and cheer them up we’d brought some bottles of wine and we had a great time eating and drinking and looking at peters new paintings and listening to joan baez peters favorite record on the scratchy little phonograph theyd kept in the country and we all went off to bed but in the middle of the night jeanette came by in a panic she’d heard something crashing around in the next building and now it was suspiciously quiet and she was afraid to look she had the .22 and i could see i was elected so i forced myself awake and went out to look the snow was already gone from around the building and there were no tracks but the screen door was loose and moving gently back and forth in the wind someone could have gotten in i pushed it open and went from room to room trying all the doors and they were as i suspected empty dank and depressing like any summer hotel in winter i searched the first floor room by room and the second and i was really angry and heading back down the corridor when i heard something in the linen closet and i stopped to look for what i figured was a rat and he was there a dirty  •

“the death of the hired man”

little grizzled man curled up and sleeping on the floor and he stank a sour rancid smell of whiskey and dirty clothes and vomit and he was lying on the floor of the closet sound asleep and snoring and very small i closed the door and went back to tell jeanette theres no one there the door was banging in the wind and the next morning he was gone now i could have killed him off in the story slowly or quickly it wouldnt have been too hard i could have given him a heart attack or pneumonia something terrible could have happened but i was thinking of him in terms of what had happened to the hired man and that level of escalation i dislike so intensely in robert frost and thats where joe brizo comes in

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fine furs

Let me begin with a simple memory. I was sitting in my dining room having a cup of coffee in the early afternoon before going off to meet somebody at the university; and I remembered, probably because my dining room faces west and looks toward the water, and because the sun was coming in through the window, a summer a long time ago—I was probably five—and sitting on the beach in New York at Rockaway, when a small biplane appeared over the water and began a series of climbs and turns and rolls, emitting a white trail that gradually turned into a sequence of furry letters that slowly spelled out the message. i. j. fox fine furs

I had just learned how to read and I read it slowly. And while I thought it was wonderful for the fox to write with such fine furry letters, I was a little irritated with the fox, who I thought was very stuck-up to brag like that, no matter how fine his furs, because in my reading it was this J. Fox who was bragging about his fur, which I imagined was as white as the letters that spelled out his name, and it took me a little while before I realized that it was not the fox who had authorized the message, but someone who made a business of skinning foxes and providing their furs to wealthy ladies at a price. But my image of those beautiful white letters, formed so elegantly by the plane and over such a long time, that I had to wait to find out what the words were, and had to remember them as they began to disappear— by the time it said furs, fox had begun to blur and the “I” had begun to vanish—my sense of sitting on the beach in the bright light of a clear blue sky, and the new pleasure of reading, gave me such a physical experience of the act of reading that I thought it would be nice to do a poem that way,

a skypoem. So being reasonably practical I went to the yellow pages and I started looking to see all the people who do skywriting. But times had changed. There weren’t all those people who did skywriting. In fact there was nobody in the San Diego or Los Angeles yellow pages who did skywriting. There were people listed who did aerial advertising by dragging signs and banners across the sky, but nobody who did any writing. So I started to call the local airports. It took a lot of time and a lot of calls, but I found out from somebody at the Santa Monica airport that there was a group located in the Cypress area who used to do it around Los Angeles, but he thought they were lying low because they were in a bit of trouble with the FAA. He gave me a name and a phone number, and it turned out that this group, called Skytypers, could do skywriting or, more accurately, skytyping, because they used five planes and a dot matrix method with a computerized program in which the five planes flew straight across the sky in formation at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, each plane putting up part of each letter. When I finally reached them, or they reached me, because I got only an Answerphone and they had to call back, I told this guy, “I’m interested in putting some words up in the sky.” He said, “That’s all right. I do advertisements all the time.” I said, “No, that’s not it. I want to put up a poem. In the sky.” And he said, “As long as it’s not too long or obscene you can do it.” I said, “That’s not going to be the problem. It won’t be too long and it won’t be obscene. I’m not specially interested at the moment in writing erotic poetry in the sky.” So he asked me, “What made you think of it?” and I started to tell him about i. j. fox, and he said, “fine furs. That was my father.” I said, “Oh? It was your father?” He said, “Yeah, in fact I was doing it a few years later when my father got tired of it. I was sixteen years old and I couldn’t get a driver’s license in New York, and my mother used to drive me out to the airport so I could fly this plane over the beach to write coca cola.” So Gregg Stinis and I had a kind of sentimental connection, and he gave me a very cheap price. He said, “If you want me to print your message on a day that I know I’m going to be in the air, you can have it for $650 a line. If I have to commit to a date without knowing that, it’ll be a bit more.” “Well,” I asked, “can I specify the time?” He said, “You can specify the time. But I can’t be responsible for any time when the sky is overcast, because everything is written in water vapor and that’s what the clouds are made of. Water vapor doesn’t show against water vapor.” “So what happens then?” “We can do it for you the next day at the same price.” As it turned out, there were other limitations. There are always limitations. He told me I could have eighteen to twenty-three letters to a line, no fine furs

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more. Twenty-three letters if you don’t use M or W. M’s and W’s count as two. This is one of the great formal properties of skypoems; and a threeline poem consisting of eighteen letters to a line, or twenty-three if you don’t use M or W, becomes a little bit harder than a haiku if you’re trying to write idiomatic English. Because letters are much less natural to English than syllables are to Japanese. So then I had this dream of an epic poem stretching across the United States over twenty or thirty years, three or four lines a year—at two thousand bucks a shot—gradually being written for people who would never see all of it. Which didn’t bother me in the least. Partly because I’m not such a public-spirited citizen, or maybe because I have no very clear idea of what a public is. Though I suspect from the way it’s usually treated by the people who appear to perform in its interest that the public must be a disadvantaged and somewhat retarded part of our population. But more specifically, I have a somewhat looser idea of the relations between writing and reading. I was counting on a certain randomness of interest among the onlookers. Some would know about the skypoem in advance and come to a central viewing place where they’d be waiting for it, because they’d read about it or been invited. Some might drift in when they saw the others gathering. Some might happen to be looking up while they were walking on the beach or driving on the highway. Some might pick it up in the middle or at the end, and some might leave before the end because they had to or because they didn’t care to stay. And I liked it that way. I have a certain attraction to more or less democratic artworks that don’t coerce your attention because they respect your independence—or maybe they’re aristocratic because they’re indifferent to your existence. But I wanted to do a poem that was outside of a book, and outside the range of the poetry magazine or small press distribution. I have an extraordinarily prestigious publisher who believes that the publication of books is a hermetic activity, and he manages to hide our books with great care, valuing them and protecting them. He’s a lovely man, a poet himself, Jay Laughlin of New Directions. But a skypoem is put up at an altitude of ten thousand feet. Each letter is twelve hundred feet high, each line is five and a half miles long and can be seen over an area of three hundred square miles from the ground. So I thought it would be nice to do a skypoem, because I had my image of that sitting-on-the-beach pleasure, and I thought I would offer it to people with a text that would keep changing while it was disappearing. I had a text in mind—a beginning text for my micromonumental epic poem. It took me a long time to develop it. It didn’t come right away. I needed a line that would keep changing its sense from phrase to phrase. I  •

fine furs

knew that it would take two to two and a half minutes to put up each line, and I wanted to stretch out that time—the time between lines, but also the time between changes. So I inserted a blank space one word long at the end of each phrase. if we

get it

together

which took a couple of minutes to put up. And then because I wanted the line to disappear, I arranged to be in radio contact with the planes from the ground so I could tell them, “Don’t come back yet!” and they would make a long pass to the north, from which they couldn’t see the line anymore, till I saw the line disappear and called them back to start the next phrase right below where the first one had been can they

take it

apart

after which they’d go away and I’d wait for that line to disappear so I could call them back to finish up with or

only if we let them

The poem was essentially aimed to offer the pleasures of reading to whoever cared. I remember they asked me on a television program after the second one of these skypoems, which I did for the La Jolla Museum on Labor Day a year later—they had me on one of these daytime television programs where a sprightly blonde lady and a sprightly blonde man ask you sprightly questions in a television manner—and they said to me, “You put a poem up in the air. What’s a poem?” So I thought for a moment and I said, “A poem’s a commercial that isn’t selling anything.” “Okay,” they said, “how much did it cost?” Now because it was four lines long and because of the complications involved in booking my Skytypers for Labor Day, and the cost to the museum for publicity and a mailing, the expenses finally came to somewhat less than $10,000 for the whole art event. Which I told them. And they said, “That’s very expensive.” I said, “Well it’s expensive as poems go, but it’s cheap as public artworks go—if you think of something like Serra’s Tilted Arc. But think of it this way—if an artwork is discursive—if an artwork is some kind of talk—the nice thing about this one is it goes away fast, if you don’t like it. And if you do like it, you remember it. But it takes an awful lot of energy to get rid of Tilted Arc.” One of the interesting difficulties of discursive artworks is that if they fine furs

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are protected as free speech, they will become the first forms of free speech that could violate zoning ordinances. And that’s a rather odd issue—because the durative property of speech is not related to its discursive significance, or more bluntly, discourse is biodegradable in mind. And most things that people call public art objects won’t go away. Which is unfortunate. Because often you want to take a look at them and send them on their way after they’ve used up their meaningfulness. But this is difficult, because often their meaningfulness is exhausted very quickly. In ten minutes? I have often thought that the typical art look since the 1960s was the ten-second glance. It seems to have been developed by most of the Pop artists and minimalists, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody standing in front of a seventies or eighties work for forty-five minutes the way we probably all remember standing in front of a painting or sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art in our childhood. But maybe there are such anachronisms and there are a few people who might look at a contemporary artwork for forty-five minutes. Though I believe it would be somewhat more likely for them to think of it for fortyfive minutes, however unlikely that might be. But looking at it for fortyfive minutes seems somewhat dubious—unless what they’re looking at is a performance piece that happens to last just forty-five minutes. Now I didn’t know how to get this funded. And I didn’t want to lay out $2,000, and I was doing another public artwork on a radio station in Los Angeles. All radio is in a sense public. Airwaves are public. They have been temporarily surrendered to private companies in the interest of the public by our government, which always acts in our interest. And because these private companies do things that are in the public interest from time to time, they are given control of pathways of definite size through this partitioned public airspace, that they are allowed to treat as toll roads, which are commonly known as stations or channels. These companies then control all transmission over these roads, which are in that sense not public, but this transmission over them can be received by anyone with an appropriate receiver, so that the reception is in fact public. And the nature of this one-way traffic from the private and privileged company to the passive and underprivileged consumer may have gone a long way toward defining the public as an underdeveloped and incapable entity consisting of a collection of more or less isolated needy individuals. Now this was a station that acted somewhat more in the interest of the public in Los Angeles than many. It was a listener-funded one, KPFK, and was therefore funded fairly directly by its own public. And I was offered the opportunity undemocratically to do an artwork over its airwaves. There was no board of supervisors, no selection committee. Jackie Apple  •

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said, “David, would you like to do an artwork for radio?” I said, “Sure, when is it?” She gave me a date, and I prepared a piece to go out over the airwaves. And it was a talk piece of sorts. Part of it was prerecorded in a complicated way, and part of it was an improvisation that I undertook to interact with the recorded part, and it all went out live over the radio. And the whole piece was rather complicated to arrange. So we spent a lot of time up there in Los Angeles working it out. During a lunch break Jackie asked me about my plans for new work and I happened to mention my idea for a skypoem. She said, “Why don’t you call up Henry Korn?” who was then director of the Santa Monica Arts Commission. I called up Henry Korn, and Henry Korn said, “What a great idea! You think you can do it on Decoration Day?” He happened to have $2,000 and an open slot for an artwork on Decoration Day, and so it got done. This is the only way I have ever gotten a public artwork done. Some benevolent despot happens to be in power, and has $2,000 or $3,000 or $10,0000 to spend, or the amount of money you need. He likes your plan. He isn’t afraid you’re going to rape the public, and he tells you to go ahead. That’s the way I got to do the radio piece for KPFK. Jackie Apple was producing a series of performance pieces with Astro Artz, the publishers of High Performance magazine, together with KPFK in Los Angeles. She asked me for a work, I said okay and did it. In this kind of situation the only thing that can stop you is some kind of technical problem like a power failure or forest fire. We had a forest fire over the Cleveland National Forest when we were putting up the skypoem over San Diego. The planes were based in Palm Springs and had difficulty coming in. They were flying through great clouds of smoke, and had difficulty believing they were going to put the piece up. But we were on the ground in the parking lot of the La Jolla Museum, and we kept assuring them by radio that the sky was clear over La Jolla and they would be able to put the poem up. But when they got there, about half an hour late, the computer in one of the planes went down, and the pilot had to release his water vapor with a hand-switch on timings called out over the radio from the lead plane by Gregg, who was acting as flight commander. And the poem still went up, though I realized there were a few fragile aspects to this kind of work. The next time I had the resources to do a poem like this, Gregg and his fliers were negotiating with the Olympics, and the Olympic Committee had a lot more money than we did. So I lost my Skytypers to Korea. But though there were serious problems, this was the nearly ideal public artwork for me. If people didn’t like it, it went away. If the money was available and the weather was all right, nobody worried about what I was going fine furs

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to do. Except Gregg. He said, “Send me the words.” I sent him the words. He said, “Okay. I don’t know what it means. It’s fine.” But I’ve also been involved in several public artworks of another kind. In the spring of 1985 an art person—Pat Fuller—called me on the telephone. At that time she was living in North Carolina and working as a consultant to the Art in Public Places program of Miami, and she said to me, “David, how would you like to write a proposal for a public artwork in an airport?” They were inviting some good people—Nam June Paik, Max Neuhaus, Robert Irwin, and a few others, all of whom I knew. So I said I would think about it, and if I could think of anything that made sense to me, I would submit a proposal. Now as I reflected on my experience of airports, the one thing I remembered most intensely was all the time you spend waiting around with nothing to do. Or maybe you have a lot to do, but it’s hard to do it, because you’re waiting for something or someone, for how long you don’t really know, and you have to continually look up or listen to catch some sudden appearance or muffled instruction that won’t let you settle down in this airless, poorly lit space filled with other people intermittently wandering or rushing about or distractedly waiting around just like you. So I thought I would try to design something for all of those people waiting around. What I imagined was a large monitor or lightboard in a part of the terminal where people had lots of time to kill, on which I would run an uncut newswire—the kind the newspapers get to cull their stories from by radical shortening and revision—which I would randomly interrupt with segments of my kind of poetry, a more or less colloquial mix of stories, one-liners, and aphorisms, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish, because this was Miami International Airport. And my idea was that the news was something like an airport. Predictable in general and surprising in detail. There is an earthquake in Turkey. Japanese workers want more leisure time. Black people are killed in South Africa. Drought keeps people from watering lawns in Southern California. Traffic accidents ruin holidays in France. Reported in a language that’s always the same, spoken by nobody and seemingly generated by a kind of reporting machine. So I proposed to break into this linguistic nonspace with intermittent samples of a more personal language, to try to establish a temporary human space in this dislocated transition zone. I wrote up the proposal and sent it off to Miami. In mid-July I got a letter from Cesar Trasobares, the executive director of Art in Public Places of Dade County, inviting me to participate “in an open-ended, forward-looking process to place art in an airport setting,” and informing me I was one of a group of four artists who had been chosen by a selection panel of three curators, who had rec •

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ommended us to nine advisors, two Art in Public Places trust liaisons, and three staff members in a meeting that took place under the eyes of three observers. The selection panel’s recommendations had been accepted and I was invited to come to Miami and tour the site. In September I flew to Miami and was taken around by Cesar and Antolin, a couple of courtly Cuban professionals, to meet some of the program’s administrators and to a marvelous Cuban restaurant for lunch. I got myself installed in the airport motel, where it seems I spent most of my days prowling around the endless terminals and lobbies or hanging around the motel coffee shop, eavesdropping on the conversations of sleek-looking Latin businessmen, gun runners, counterrevolutionaries, and dope dealers and their splendidly painted girlfriends or wives, when I wasn’t going to meetings with administrators or wandering around downtown Miami, while I waited to meet with the airport director. According to my gentle Cubans, Richard Judy was an impatient corporate dragon who made the final decisions on everything. They said he was very busy and they warned me to be brief. He turned out to be your standard Anglo corporate executive. He shook my hand and came right to the point. “So what do you want to do in our airport?” “I want to put up a newswire on a few of your signboards and interrupt it from time to time with some stories and jokes that I’ll write in English and Spanish.” “Sounds okay to me,” he said, and our meeting was over. But Cesar told me that they were going to need a more elaborate statement of my plans. So I flew back home and wrote up as detailed an account as I could, considering that I didn’t have the slightest idea of what kind of text I was going to write or how I was going to manage the interaction of my material with the newswire, where I wanted to put the electronic signboards, what kind of signboards I needed or where I could get them. At the end of January, Cesar told me they had approved my plans and they were preparing a contract. When it arrived, it was a contract for a proposal that required a three-dimensional model, drawings, and a budget, which I was supposed to have completed by July, although this was the middle of May. The contract had been sitting in the Dade County lawyers’ offices since January. So my work started in July 1986. First I had to find a wire service that would rent us their lines and let me interrupt their text with mine. Then I could deal with the control system and the display. Working through the barriers of the AP’s initial suspicions about my text—it would be obscene, outrageous, slanderous—I finally convinced Susan Burgstiner, their marfine furs

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keting manager, that it would be okay. This took me to February of 1987. She turned me on to Tim Fitzpatrick, who ran a software company named EPI in Minnesota, and by May 1987 we had a prototype system pretty well thought out. The prototype was going to require two computers, a small LED signboard, and three controlling devices: a filter module designed to “listen” to the AP stories, take off their headers, maybe reject long strings of stock market quotations and do some buffering—store up news stories to supply from its memory if the AP wire were to crash; a scheduler module to read a schedule control file that I would design to set and vary the pace and scale of the feed of my material into the AP news text; and a remote control module that would let somebody seated at a remote PC at a remote site update the poem text and the schedule control file, and from time to time call for a phone signal from the controller PC to make sure that the system was working. Not counting the cost of the AP newswire—about $900 a month—or the phone lines, or my own expenses, the hardware and software for the complete development of this model came to something around $20,000. I sent a detailed account of the plan and a budget to the Art in Public Places offices at the end of May 1987, and some time in the fall I got a letter from them asking me also to give them a precise proposal for the final installation in the airport. Working with Fitzpatrick by telephone, I was able to get this done by January 1988, and Cesar seemed pretty happy with it. Happy enough to send me the rest of my artist’s fee for the proposal, and in March they sent me a draft of a new contract for development of the prototype and told me to check it out with my lawyer. The contract seemed all right but was slightly weird. First it misstated the amount of money I had already been paid—“Whereas, the Art in Public Places Trust has paid the Artist $12,000.” They’d paid me $10,000. Second, it suggested that the people down there had no idea what the artwork was, because the contract read, “Whereas, the computer technology comprising the artwork requires the Artist to further develop his design.” This was nonsense. The computer technology didn’t “comprise the artwork”; it was merely a support for the work’s existence. Then a new element appeared in the contract. During the course of my negotiations with Miami, Robert Irwin had apparently escalated himself out of the ranks of us project artists to “Master Planner” for the disposition of all the artworks in the airport. In the words of the contract, “ ‘Master Planner’ means Robert Irwin.” The contract went on to specify that “Whereas the Artist has been apprised of Robert Irwin’s Master Plan for the Miami International Airport.” I hadn’t seen anything I would have  •

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called a master plan, only an elaborate commentary Robert had made on the South Florida environment and Miami, and on some of the artistic possibilities of the airport, which he’d asked me to look over. This didn’t look like a problem, although the contract required that I select a site for my work in consultation with airport officials, Robert Irwin, and the Art in Public Places staff, because the only logical sites were fairly obvious— the places where people had to hang around with lots of time to kill. And finally the contract stated reassuringly that “the Artist’s initial proposal submission has been reviewed and recommended for design development by a panel of the Trust’s Advisory Committee.” In late March I gave the contract to a lawyer to clean up a few minor absurdities and by April I heard from Miami that the project had been killed. Now I don’t really know why it was killed. I made a lot of phone calls and sent a lot of letters, but I never got to talk to my amiable Cuban friend again, although he was still the director of the program. An entirely new young woman named Mary suddenly appeared to handle all communications with me, and from her I learned about a variety of new problems. The costs seemed to be unanticipatedly high for the prototype. The advisory committee wasn’t sure something similar hadn’t been done before. Some of its members were worried that interference with the news of the day might prove disturbing to some constituencies among the airport travelers. I wrote letters reclarifying the work and its intentions. I offered to come out and meet personally with everyone concerned, to explain what I was doing and why it was distinctive. Why it cost this much. But it was all to no point. It was against procedural rules for artists to talk to the committee. My letters went unanswered. At length I was told that a new advisory committee had come into being, reviewed my plan and decided it was an excellent work for an art gallery but not for an airport. Later I heard that all the other airport projects, including Robert Irwin’s master plan, had also been junked. Finally and somewhat indirectly, I heard from friends in Miami that the whole Miami Art in Public Places program was swamped in financial problems and had gone on hold. Now I have no complaints—at least not personal ones. I was well paid, though not exorbitantly, if you consider the amount of time I spent on the project. But I really would have liked to see the work go up in the airport. I would have liked to make annual updates of my poetic texts. I could have been the first poet in the world to have a maintenance contract with an airport. But mostly I felt sorry for the people who had helped me— for Tim Fitzpatrick out in Minnesota, who had already put in so much time working out the software design with me, for Susan Burgstiner at fine furs

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AP, who probably went out on a limb for me with their bureaucracy to let a poet mess with their newswire, and for all the weary travelers waiting for planes out of Miami who could have had something more amusing to do than eat junk food or work out their expense accounts or get ink all over their hands and eyestrain from reading over and over again their already outdated newspapers. But instead it evaporated like a dry ice sculpture. Now it’s possible that this whole thing was about money, but I don’t think so. Twenty, thirty thousand dollars, though a considerable amount of money to a human being, is small change to an airport. And no one asked if there was a possibility of reducing the costs in any event. But there was one aspect of the project that was probably related to its failure. It wasn’t the scale. The skypoems were much larger. It was the duration. My newspoem was as near to a permanent installation as anything imaginable. It could have gone on for years, for as long as the Miami International Airport lasted, as long as the AP wire continued to transmit and phone company lines persisted in working. Skypoems are gone in twenty minutes. And this is the major point of most of the issues surrounding so-called public art. Permanence. Nobody knows who the public is or what it wants or needs. Or whether it should be considered singular or plural. Though there are many people claiming to act on its behalf or speak in its name. And no one is quite sure what space belongs to it or to them, though that usually seems to be what’s left over when all of the other spaces have been appropriated, walled, shut, fenced, or screened off by whatever groups or individuals can enforce private claims to them. So what we are left with are discards and transition spaces, spaces for a kind of temporary and idle occupation like lounging, strolling, and hanging around—streets, squares, parks, beaches, bus stops, subway stations, railroad and airport terminals. And since all of these have been increasingly encroached upon and restricted by various authorities in the urban renewal and spread of the suburban mall culture of the last twenty years, the idea of permanent appropriation of yet more of this common space by an artwork seems to be of great moment, and seriously debatable by all the constituencies who might desire access to that space or lay claim to it, or by all the people who can claim to speak for them. So the issue is permanent appropriation of space. Once something is going to be permanent everybody cares about it. This issue becomes even more pressing for a contemporary art world embedded in a society that smothers discourse under an avalanche of indestructible and trashy objects, to which it responds by laying more weight on the discursive properties of artworks than on their object-like status, or at least on the discourses implied by the nature and structure  •

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of these art objects. So it becomes reasonable to consider artworks a kind of speech, and to protect them with all the freedom of speech. But then they become the first examples of speech that can collect dust, block traffic, and violate zoning ordinances, as well as the sensibilities of some constituency that will surely appear, or will appear to appear, as soon as the work takes its place in one of these contested spaces. So to mute this contest before it occurs, to prevent the placement in public space of any artwork that could conceivably give offense to anyone, an army of bureaucrats is usually placed securely around it, whose nominal job is to protect the space, but whose eventual concern is to protect themselves. Because the basic form of American bureaucracy is to cover your ass. And you cover your ass with paper, and you paper people to death. And everybody papers everybody else to death, because everybody is afraid of being held responsible for doing something that might disturb somebody. We would probably have much better public art if everybody wasn’t afraid of disturbing people, because they knew you could eventually wheel the art away. I would like to suggest that you could make the most disturbing public art in the world and nobody would give a damn, because you would know that after some limited time it would go away. The way all good discourse goes away. I don’t think public art installations should be permanent. I think they should be wreckable. I think we should have a ceremony of destruction and remove them regularly. I think works like Serra’s should after some specifically limited time have been publicly destroyed in an honorable fashion. Honoring its creator in a ritual fashion. This ritual would not have meant that the work was bad, but that it had said what it had to say. In this sense I believe that the court was right. There was no reason to iterate his single utterance forever. Perhaps the right to repeat yourself endlessly in a given space is not freedom of speech. It may become a form of tyranny. On the other hand some of the most effective public artworks I’ve ever seen—like Suzanne Lacy’s Whisper Project—went away. And one of the great things about artworks that go away is they remain in your mind. And you can use them. They can become part of other artworks. While if they clutter up the space, you eventually have insufficient space to put up anything else. So from my point of view removal is a greater problem than preservation. This is one of the greatest problems of architecture. How to get rid of buildings economically and efficiently that no longer serve their own or any useful purpose and are choking up our streets. And in view of the buildings that have been going up for the last ten to twenty years in the fine furs

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United States the problem is becoming calamitous. A number of years ago I gave a talk on this subject at an architecture school; and it wasn’t very popular then, but perhaps its time has come. I suggested that the problem of architecture is not how to make it, but how to get rid of it. The biggest problem in our cities is how to destroy no longer useful buildings—discarded shopping malls, useless high rises. My solution was soluble architecture—buildings provided with a plumbing system into which you could drop catalytic pills that would cause them to dissolve and run out through their own pipes into the sewer where they belong.

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Wittgenstein among the Poets

In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein, reflecting on the idea of personal identity, casually asks us to imagine a man whose memory on the odd days of his life consists only of his experiences of the odd days, while his memory on the even days consists only of his experiences of the even days, and asks if we have here one person or two. This is an interesting question, but to make sense of it we have to play out its narrative implications. Suppose this man dies on a Thursday in Paris. Both die, the odd person and the even, but which one owns the dying? Which one is run down by a taxi while crossing the Place de la Bastille in the rain? To answer we have to ask: was it an odd Thursday or an even Thursday? Which we can determine only by counting back to the day of his birth, by which we mean the day of his first birth, the odd day, or the birth of the odd person, or else from the day after his birth, or his second birth, by which we mean the birth of the even person. Both will certainly die on the same day but only one of them will have the dying as part of his life story, as only one of them can have the literal birthing. And if it is the same one—let’s say the odd one—the even one is deprived of two fundamental experiences that could shape his life—birth trauma and dying agony or entry into the light and release from the world, depending how you look at it. Wittgenstein goes on to propose that this dual or twinned personality might have alternating appearances. But the suggestion is hardly necessary, because it is a virtual certainty that they will look somewhat different. The even person, the younger sibling, will start with secondary experiences that the older could not encounter. He will always be a day late and perhaps blamed or pitied for it, and his stance in reaction to this blame or pity will surely mark his appearance. Of course, this might change. Nursery school might start on an even Monday, when the children learn to tie their shoelaces. Then on Tuesday the odd person would seem to have forgotten how to tie the bow that the even person learned

the day before. Or perhaps more significantly, on a cold day in January the odd person could wake up in some girl’s bed in SoHo and wonder what her name is when she whispers to him in Farsi. Still, the belatedness of the younger brother should somehow determine his appearance as the second into the light. So it goes with nearly all of Wittgenstein’s questions and analyses from The Blue Book on. They set in motion a process of narrativization. This process, that is either carried out by Wittgenstein himself or by his audience, makes concrete sense of his figure of teaching as creating an electrical connection between a switch and a light bulb, though maybe a different sense than he imagined. It is the kind of connection or the kinds of connections his work has created as it has been mirrored, disassembled, and reassembled in the light of experimental Modern and Postmodern poetry that forms the subject of Marjorie Perloff ’s new book. Wittgenstein’s Ladder tracks these connections through an idiosyncratic subset of the avant-garde poetic family over whose work Wittgenstein casts a brilliant and fitful light. The track has a number of surprises. It starts somewhere not far from Gertrude Stein, travels a short distance to Samuel Beckett, crosses the German language border to Thomas Bernhardt and Ingeborg Bachman, and then circles back to a sequence of Americans—Robert Creeley and the Language poets—and comes to a playfully inconclusive conclusion with the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. Perloff points out that this tracking is not about “influence”; it is essentially an attempt to place Wittgenstein within a distinctive poetic tradition on the strength of shared Modernist affinities. With some qualifications this works. Stein is an early Modernist, Wittgenstein a central Modernist, Beckett a late Modernist. Wittgenstein’s Modernism is a child of the First World War, Beckett’s of the postwar, and Stein’s of fin de siècle and the prewar, and in the broadest sense all three were involved in a struggle with the representational capacities of natural language. By her own account Stein started The Making of Americans as an attempt to present a structural, psychological representation of America. It ended by 1908, engulfed in the grammar of the language whose celebration finally swallows the novel. Beckett by 1937 expresses an extreme exasperation with the representational capacities of his language, an exasperation that drives his work from that time on. “More and more,” he wrote to his friend Alex Kaun, “my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at things (or the Nothingness) behind it.” The underlying issue that Wittgenstein was wrestling with in the seven years from 1912 through 1918 that finally culminated in the Tractatus was to create a completely perspicuous way of “picturing” thought,  •

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because the problem of language, as he expressed it in the Tractatus, was that “Language disguises thought—in such a way that it is impossible to infer from the external form of the clothing the form of the thought it clothes, because the external form of the clothing is shaped with different goals than to reveal the form of the body beneath it.” But Stein and Beckett were literary artists who addressed their work to the contemporary literary and art worlds. Wittgenstein was a philosopher whose work was primarily addressed to the analytic philosophical community and who expressed little interest in contemporary literature, art, or music and intermittent hostility towards it. Yet he designed a remarkable modernist building as a home for his sister and wrote in one of his notebooks, “One should really only do philosophy as poetry” (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten). This line, translated slightly differently by Marjorie Perloff as “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” serves as an epigraph for her book. Taken together with the verdict of so many poets coming after him, this seems sufficient reason to consider his philosophy poetry. But if it is poetry, what kind of poetry is it? In the preface to Wittgenstein’s Ladder Perloff sketches an outline of a “distinctively Wittgensteinian poetics” from a close reading of the metaphor of the ladder that Wittgenstein offers as the next to the last pronouncement of his Tractatus. “My propositions elucidate in such a way that whoever understands me will recognize them as senseless when he has climbed out through them—on them—over them.” (He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) In her reading there are three critical aspects to this poetics: first, a commitment to a kind of linguistic “dailyness” that she derives from the vernacular image of the ladder; second, to “practice” over “theory”—or to process over system—which she infers from the equivocality of the origin and destination of the ladder and from the potential for endless climbing up and down; and third, to an insistent repetition that yields instead of sameness surprising differences that accumulate to reveal “the strangeness of the language that we actually use.” With a little stretching these three aspects can probably be read out of the Wittgenstein’s figure of the ladder, and they throw light on Wittgenstein’s philosophical, poetic practice. But to understand the kind of poet Wittgenstein is, you have to look at his texts directly and closely, which is something the structure of Perloff ’s book does not permit her to do. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is Wittgenstein’s first significant published work and the only complete work whose final form is directly attributable to him. It is a queer work all the way through. It consists of Wittgenstein among the Poets

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a curiously numbered set of paragraphs that seem to form a meditation on the nature and limitations of human understanding, deriving from the nature and limitations of logic and language. It begins like a kind of logicist’s metaphysical litany. 1* 1.1 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.2 1.21

The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. For the totality of facts determines both what is the case and also whatever is not the case. The facts in logical space are the world. The world divides into facts. Any one of them can either be the case or not be the case while everything else remains the same.

The tone of these pronouncements—put forward, according to Bertrand Russell, like “a Czar’s ukase”—and their numbering suggests an initial set of axioms for a systematic logic. But we gradually realize it is not. At first the decimal numbering system appears to show with the utmost clarity the relations among the paragraphs. A footnote at the beginning of the Tractatus explains: “The decimal figures that number the separate paragraphs indicate the logical weight of the paragraphs, the emphasis they bear in my exposition. The paragraphs n.1, n.2, n.3, etc., are comments on paragraphs No. N; the paragraphs n.m1, n.m2, etc., comments on paragraphs No. n.m; and so on.” This sounds very orderly and may be an accurate description of 1.1, since “what is the case” is a “fact” and 1.1 can count as a clarification of 1, though it is also an elaboration that tells us that this is a phenomenological world that is made up of “facts, not things.” But 1.11 introduces a radically new notion—that the totality of facts determines the world both by what it includes and by what it excludes. It is hard to think of this as simply a comment on 1.1. And 1.12 creates a new puzzle by introducing the notion of “what is not the case” in its assertion that “The totality of facts determines what is the case and also whatever is not the case.” Since a fact is by definition what is the case, and the totality of facts is the totality of what is the case, and all of these facts add up to the world; what is it that is not the case? And if we can say what it is, isn’t it also part of the world—its negative or shadow, so to speak? These questions are addressed in the Tractatus in a reprise that begins 37 numbered paragraphs later at 2.05. But at the beginning they are simply left hanging for us to  •

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address or not. And we do this by imagining any proposition that is not the case converted into a proposition that is the case by negation. So while it is not the case that all odd numbers are prime, it is the case that not all odd numbers are prime. But if we go this way, the apparently clear, welldefined and severely limited world of paragraph 1 now bristles with a potentially infinite array of squared circles and purple cows and dying gods that obtain access to our world simply through negation. This is a pathway leading into Alice’s Looking Glass. In any case 1.12 appears to function as a clarification and elaboration of 1.11 by suggesting how the facts and the totality of facts determine the world. It is seems as much of a comment on 1.11 as 1.11 is on 1.1. If the system works, it should accordingly be numbered 1.111. But the system doesn’t work, and the next two paragraphs reveal the absurdity of the whole numbering system. 2 2.01

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of states of affairs. A state of affairs is a combination of objects. (entities, things.)

Why 2.01 and not 2.1? There is no paragraph 2.0 upon which 2.01 comments. It is a direct explanation of 2. It cannot be regarded as possessing two orders of magnitude less weight than paragraph 2, and it is not obviously separated from it by any significant gap. This numerical eccentricity becomes even more startling when we arrive at the 3s. 3 A logical picture of the facts is a thought. 3.001 “A state of affairs is thinkable” means we can picture it And this situation is repeated precisely at 4. 4 A thought is a meaningful sentence. 4.001 The totality of sentences is the language. The elaborate decimal system presents a picture of order, but it is a different kind of order than the text of the Tractatus possesses. The Tractatus circles and repeats itself over and over, correcting itself and elaborating on its original pronouncements and sometimes apparently cancelling them out. At 2 we learn “what is the case, the fact, is the existence of states of affairs,” and from 2.01 that these states of affairs are elementary combinations of otherwise unidentified but distinct elementary objects, which are elaborated upon for thirty-four paragraphs before we learn at 2.04 that “the totality of existing states of affairs is the Wittgenstein among the Poets

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world.” What follows then is a restatement and reformulation of 1.1, 1.11, and 1.12: 2.05 2.06

The totality of existing states of affairs also determines which states of affairs do not exist. The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality. (The existence of states of affairs we call a positive fact and the non-existence a negative fact.)

Pronouncement 2.06 not only proposes the apparently new notion of “reality,” but goes on to introduce in a parenthetical addition the notion of negative facts, the totality of which combines with all the positive facts to add up to this reality. Wittgenstein introduces the notion of reality in a casual but puzzling way twenty paragraphs earlier at 2.022. “It is apparent that any imagined world no matter how different must have something—a form—in common with the real world.” This remark is puzzling because it opens up the possibility of an infinite number of “unreal worlds” whose contents become facts on negation. This then comes into apparent conflict with 2.06, according to which “the total reality is the world,” unless we are willing to suppose that the real world contains an infinite number of unreal worlds and that “the total reality” contains the total unreality, a conclusion somewhat likelier for a poet than a logician. And this appears to cancel the whole opening gambit, because it turns out that reality and the world are identical and that the world is not “everything that is the case.” It is everything that is the case and everything that is not the case as well. This is the method of a meditation, not of a mathematical or logical system. The aim of meditation is usually to concentrate the mind and attain access to the inexpressible, and a common technique for achieving this is insistent repetition. Recognizing his own tendency to repetition, Wittgenstein wrote in explanation and perhaps self defense in a 1930 notebook: “Every sentence I write always intends the whole thing as though there were only sightings of the same object from different angles” (CV 7). And if we take his notebook entries seriously this “whole thing” turns out to be the “inexpressible.” “The inexpressible (what I find mysterious and cannot express) may provide the background against whatever I could express gets its meaning” (CV 16). Accordingly the Tractatus repeats and repeats, insisting and concentrating, producing cognitive litanies on the elementary “states of affairs” and the mysterious “things” that constitute them and form “the sub-

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stance” of this world, on the “facts” that picture them and on the nature of picturing. Here is the celebrated section on thinking as picturing: 2.1 2.11 2.11 2.13

We make ourselves pictures of the facts. A picture represents a situation in logical space. A picture is a model of reality. Within the picture the elements of the picture correspond to the objects. 2.131 In the picture the elements of the picture stand for the objects. 2.14 The picture consists in the relation of its elements to each other in a definite manner and way. 2.141 The picture is a fact. And because 2.18 asserts that every picture must have logical form in common with reality and 2.182 that every picture is also a logical picture, all this leads eventually to 3

A thought is a logical picture of the facts.

and arrives immediately thereafter at 3.001 “A state of affairs is thinkable” means we can picture it. From which we come to the absurd but consequent conclusion 3.03

We cannot think anything illogical, because then we would have to think illogically.

For, as the Tractatus continues, “We would not be able to say of an illogical world what it would look like.” This is the point at which we should begin to see that this intense concentration of mind has opened a bright pathway that is not at all like a ladder, but like a strange spiral staircase that swings in tighter and tighter arcs till it becomes too narrow for the climber or descender to enter, leaving him no place to go and looking into a luminous void. It is one of the great virtues of Wittgenstein’s Ladder that it makes clear how much of a meditation the Tractatus is. Calling attention to the apparent discontinuities that mark the transitions from a technical, logical discourse to a human discourse, Perloff finds what is “uniquely Wittgensteinian is the

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sudden break, the lack of connection between two kinds of operation,” between “dry passages of logical analysis” and Schopenhauerian “meditations on desire and will” (44). She sees the jump from the insistence that logical necessity is the only necessity and logical impossibility the only impossibility at 6.375 and 6.3751 to 6.4 6.41

All propositions are of equal value. The meaning of the world lies outside of the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it happens. There is no value in it—and if there were it would be of no value.

as marking an irresolution about the significance of measuring and assessing what lies within the world when everything that gives value lies outside it. And she suggests as an explanation Wittgenstein’s “recognition of a mystery that cannot be solved” (44). In her view this separates the Tractatus from the logical and mathematical writings of Russell and from the philosophical writings of Mauthner or Mach and places it with “the gnomic manifestos of Malevich or the meditative poems of Wallace Stevens” (44–45). But it seems that there is something more particular to Wittgenstein than simple irresolution or the relatively commonplace recognition of the “mystery of existence.” On the Austrian front line at the height of the Russian counteroffensive, he looks into his notebook and sees the apparent gap between his ethical and religious speculations and his logical concerns and writes: “7/6/16. Terrible exertions this last month. Have considered every possible thing, but remarkably I cannot find the connection with my mathematical trains of thought.” And the next day, “7/7/16. But the connection will be made. What cannot be said, can be not said.” By August 2, 1916, Wittgenstein decided that his work had “expanded from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.” It is not a sense of the discontinuities between ethics, metaphysics, and logic that separates Wittgenstein from Russell or Frege, or in fact from any of the many logical positivists his early work inspired. It is his sense of the connection and his desperate desire for it that is a part of the fundamental difference in the way his mind worked. He was well aware of the nature of his mind and comments on it in his notebooks with a certain amount of anguish. A passage from a 1937 notebook is typical. “When I think for myself without wanting to write a book, I jump all around the subject; that’s the only natural way of thinking for me. To be compelled to think my way forward in a linear order is a torture for me. Should I even  •

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try? I squander unspeakable effort on an arrangement of thoughts that may be completely worthless” (CV, 28). But in 1918 placing his thoughts in a linear order is exactly what the numbering system of the Tractatus was intended to do, and Wittgenstein was completely committed to it. He was so committed to it that in December 1919 when he was desperately trying to find a German publisher for the completed Tractatus, he wrote to Ludwig von Ficker, who was an unlikely, if possible, candidate for publisher of such a technically difficult work: “(By the way, the decimal numbers must absolutely be printed alongside my sentences, because they alone give the book perspicuity and clarity, while without them it would be an incomprehensible mess.)” Wittgenstein’s working method throws some light on why he felt this way. His practice was to write down discrete comments or remarks in his many notebooks as his thinking crystallized in words. These remarks essentially represented the surfacing of an otherwise unmarked and nearly continuous play of mind over what might have been some single theme or a changing theme or some sequence of changing themes. The numbering was a desperate attempt to try to bring these thoughts into the kind of linear order that Wittgenstein’s education seemed to demand but which was apparently foreign to his nature. Ray Monk gives an excellent description of Wittgenstein’s way of working: Wittgenstein had a particularly laborious method of editing his work. He began by writing remarks into small notebooks. He then selected what he considered to be the best of these remarks and wrote them out, perhaps in a different order, into large manuscript volumes. From these he made a further selection, which he dictated to a typist. The resultant typescript was then used as the basis for a further selection, sometimes by cutting it up and rearranging it—and then the whole process was started again. (LW, 319)

This method has been the despair of the editors having to deal with the considerable body of writing Wittgenstein left unpublished at his death, but it was not really a “method of editing.” It was an attempt to cope with his manner of thinking, which was perhaps not so much a jumping all around the material as the only partially conscious, continuous and wide-ranging play of his mind over some group of idiosyncratically related themes, which only intermittently crystallized in words. For there are strong indications that his thinking did not always take the form of language. By his own account his thinking moved freely and involuntarily from words to images and back again. A 1937 notebook entry indicates that he continued to be somewhat disturbed by this. Wittgenstein among the Poets

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Just took some apples out of a paper bag, where they had been lying around for a long while. I had to cut and throw away nearly half of many of them. Later when I was copying out one of my sentences whose last half was bad, I immediately saw it as a half rotten apple. That’s the way it always is with me. Whatever comes my way turns into a picture in my mind of whatever I am thinking about. (Is there something feminine in this tendency?) (CV, 31)

The individual written remarks are like intermittent solid precipitates from a fluid process. The laborious method was a nearly hopeless attempt to duplicate by some arrangement of discrete pieces the whole fluid course of his thought. The role of the numbering system and the way it was probably created was made somewhat clearer by the discovery and facsimile publication of an earlier manuscript version of the Tractatus. The manuscript, written in pencil in a hardcover notebook, now known as the Prototractatus, contains an essentially complete earlier version that is quite similar to the final Tractatus, but the layout is particularly interesting. It begins with a note explaining the arrangement of the manuscript and the numbering system. This is followed by a title page, a dedication page, and a page containing an epigraph. The manuscript proper begins with a page containing fifteen decimal-numbered paragraphs beginning with the famous first paragraph and concluding with number 6, which in this draft gives an early version of the general form of the truth function. If this is a skeletal layout of the book’s argument, it is missing the aphoristic paragraph 7, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must keep silent,” as it is also missing all of the ethical and metaphysical pronouncements that make the Tractatus the remarkable work that it is. These appear with their decimal numbers among the next 115 pages of the notebook, arranged not in the order of their numbering but in serially related sections that move generally, though not consistently or completely sequentially from the lower to the higher numbers. Paragraph 1.11 appears on the first of these pages (page 4 of the notebook) and is followed by 1.13 and then 2.01, while 1.12 appears on page 5; paragraph 3.02 appears after 4.41 on page 7, where it is followed by a sequence of 3.1s that is succeeded by a group of 4.0s. Paragraph 7 appears on page 71 between paragraphs 6.4 and 6.12112. The initial note on the first page of the notebook offers a plausible explanation of this situation. “Between these sentences all the good sentences from my other manuscripts are fitted. The numbers indicate the order (Reihenfolge) and weight of the sentences. So 5.04101 follows 5.041, which is followed by 5.0411, that is more important than 5.04101.  •

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If by “these sentences” Wittgenstein meant the first page of fifteen remarks, the remarks on the succeeding pages are most likely “the good sentences,” gathered, perhaps already bearing provisional numbers, from the “other manuscripts,” which have by now disappeared. If this is true, the absence of the ethical reflections from the first page of the manuscript is not very important, because the whole notebook is nothing more nor less than the workshop in which the numbering system was being worked out in exasperating detail. Here the first fifteen remarks were simply laid out as an armature of six basic segments on which to hang the remaining paragraphs, whose weights are delicately but improvisationally poised at different distances from the central skeleton as in a Calder mobile, waiting for the seventh and last piece to complete the balance. It is this sculpture that Wittgenstein is finally prepared to throw away. Perhaps Perloff ’s most telling observation about the Tractatus is that it is a “war book.” Not in the sense that A Farewell to Arms or Three Soldiers are war books; but perhaps in the sense that Beckett’s Watt is a war book—a meditation on the absurd logic of his experience as a member of the French Resistance, composed during the German occupation. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a war book in at least two senses. It is a meditation composed in a time of war, the First World War, a war that Wittgenstein experienced as a soldier from 1914, in front-line combat from 1916 to 1918, and as a prisoner of war in 1919, and it is itself the outcome of a war with language. Wittgenstein’s relation to the First World War was quite different from Beckett’s relation to the second. Beckett simply found himself in it when the Germans overran France and began arresting his friends. But for Wittgenstein, as for so many of his age and class, the Great War was not so much a political event as a chance to test himself under fire. In an unreflecting sense he was a patriotic Austrian, but as a nominally Catholic Austrian of Jewish descent he had absorbed all the doubts about Jewish character and courage that were the staples of the anti-Semitic, AustroGerman propaganda epitomized in the quasi-philosophical writings of Otto Weininger and had even more reason to want to subject himself to the purifying test of a patriotic war. So even though he had been living in England most of the time since 1909 and nearly all his closest friends were English, he rushed to enlist in the Austrian army almost as soon as war was declared. Meanwhile he was working at logic. That sounds funny but it’s not, or not in the ordinary way. Some time in 1909 while involved in engineering research at Manchester University, Wittgenstein discovered that the problems he was dealing with were mathematical rather than technological, and in his studies of matheWittgenstein among the Poets

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matics he became fascinated with the logic underlying mathematics and turned to Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. By 1911 he had gone to Cambridge to study with Russell and thrown himself into the study of logic with a passion usually reserved for art careers. By 1913 he had not only recognized the inadequacies of Russell’s and Frege’s logical systems, but with Russell’s encouragement had set himself the task of solving the problems of logical representation once and for all. Toward the end of 1913 he decided to rush off to Norway to struggle with his logic in isolation. In the summer of 1914 while visiting his family in Vienna he was trapped in Austria by the war, and after some desultory attempts to get back to Norway, he enlisted in the Austrian army in August, carrying his notebooks with him. From these notebooks that he worked on throughout his military service, at first behind the lines and then in combat, it is possible to follow fragmentarily the expansion of his work in progress “from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.” Perloff ’s chapter on Watt in Wittgenstein’s Ladder, besides throwing a great deal of light on the composition of Watt, exhibits interesting similarities between Wittgenstein and Beckett, both sharing a sense of the linguistic gulf between logic and human concerns. But once Beckett discovered this discomforting space he moved into it and continued to occupy it for the rest of his life, while Wittgenstein moved on. The next work to issue from his hand, the much reproduced and widely circulated typescript of lecture notes he made for his Cambridge students in 1933–1934, now known as The Blue Book, revealed a very different Wittgenstein, or at least what looked like that. In the years between the final publication of the Tractatus (in German in 1921 and in English in 1922) and Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929, he had come to believe that the entire project of the Tractatus was futile and mistaken. He still believed that the problems of mathematics and philosophy were problems of language, but he had abandoned his belief in the value or usefulness of logic or of theory of any sort for mathematics or philosophy in general. He had come to the conclusion that all the problems of philosophy were not problems of logic but problems of grammar, and Wittgenstein’s solution was narrative. From the still pictures of the Tractatus to the moving pictures of The Blue Book, The Brown Book, the Philosophical Investigations, and Zettel, Wittgenstein has gone from still photographer to filmmaker. If Wittgenstein’s use of the word “grammar” seems odd, The Blue Book clarifies this immediately. It opens with the question “What is the meaning of a word?” which Wittgenstein doesn’t try to answer but immedi •

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ately follows with the question “what is an explanation of the meaning of a word?” For, it continues: Asking first “What’s an explanation of meaning?” has two advantages. You in a sense bring the question “what is meaning” down to earth . . . Studying the grammar of the explanation of meaning will teach you something about the grammar of the word “meaning” and will cure you of the temptation to look about you for some object which you might call “the meaning.”

What follows looks at the start like a simple assault on the idea that words can have essential definitions, but rapidly turns into a series of explorations of human situations within which an individual word like “meaning” might be imagined to acquire distinct and perhaps even unrelated meanings. It is the application of a meaning that is justifiable in one situation to another where it is not applicable that the later Wittgenstein sees as the basis of all the problems of philosophy. The appropriate relationship between a specific human practice and the use of a word within it is what Wittgenstein calls “grammar.” It is this method for clarifying language problems by analyzing hypothetical usage that Wittgenstein has in mind when he announces his new approach as a method of “examples.” The famous language games of the Philosophical Investigations are nothing more than examples—small stories exhibiting hypothetical practices that seem to lead to distinct and exotic ways of learning the meaning of familiar words. But examples are notorious for their power of escaping the arguments they are intended to illustrate. In The Blue Book Wittgenstein attempts to show that there is no single mental state corresponding to the idea of “expectation.” To illustrate this he tells the following story. If, for instance I expect B to come to tea, what happens may be this: At four o’clock I look at my diary and see the name “B” against today’s date; I prepare tea for two; I think for a moment “does B smoke?” and put out cigarettes; toward 4:30 I begin to feel impatient; I imagine B as he will look when he comes into my room. All this is called “expecting B from 4 to 4:30.” (B, 20)

This brief story of the first date between W and B—if it was not a first date W would know whether B smoked—reads like a Walter Abish transformation of Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Expectation), in which the longing and anxiety of Schoenberg’s fin de siècle heroine for her anticipated tryst has Wittgenstein among the Poets

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been retained by W in a minimalized vernacular form. The intensity level may be reduced but the genre remains the same, with the result that the example tends to push against the argument it was intended to support. There is apparently something structurally similar in the expectational situations and corresponding psychological states of W as the gay lover and the heroine of Schoenberg’s monodrama. The equivocality of Wittgenstein’s new method was not something he was completely unaware of. At times he believed his method of examples would clarify philosophical problems and eliminate them, and there are numerous passages in the Philosophical Investigations that reflect this belief. The method would be therapeutic. 255

A philosopher treats a question—like a disease.

There is a diagnosis— 593

A main cause of philosophical problems is a one-sided diet— nourishing one’s thinking with one kind of example. (PI, 154)

—and a prescription: different kinds of examples If a doctor’s prescription is successful, if he provides the right kind of examples, he makes the disease go away. 309

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the bottle. (PI, 103)

But Wittgenstein was also convinced there would always be more problems and that his remedy of examples was a job without end. There was also the possibility, of which he was perhaps not so clearly aware, that his little stories could become productive obstacles, roadblocks on the way to a solution of a problem. But of course it is always possible that disabling a solution will be more valuable than enabling one. Suppose we consider this example from The Blue Book in which Wittgenstein asks us to imagine the task of arranging the books of a library whose volumes have been strewn randomly about the floor. Now there would be many ways of sorting them and putting them in their places. One would be to take the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right place. On the other hand we might take up several books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in order to indicate that these books ought to go together in this order. In the course of arrang •

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ing the library this whole row of books will have to change its place . . . In this case, in fact, it is pretty obvious that having put together books which belong together was a definite achievement, even though the whole row of them had to be shifted. Some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they are no longer side by side.

This image of the history of philosophy or of thinking about anything at all is a powerful one—a kind of Renaissance myth—the replacement of the classic order in a library ransacked by vandals. But the image suggests alternate tellings. What of the intellectual achievement produced by knocking the books off the shelf and leaving them on the floor? The act of Marx or Nietzsche, or even Freud? Or told another way, the Phrygians show the young conqueror the sacred knot, solving it brings mastery of Asia. Alexander draws his sword and cuts the knot in two. The pieces lie on the floor. Is this a solution or a new problem? In a sense the later Wittgenstein is continually confronting the same knots, picking them up turning them around, cutting them differently, picking up the severed pieces, putting them back together, trying to untie them or cutting them all over again. 203.

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You come from one side and you know your way around. You come to the same place from a different side and you no longer know your way around.

Here is Wittgenstein taking us to a strange place from which to regard a landscape we thought we knew. 204.

As things stand I can invent a game that is never played. But would this also be possible:—Mankind has never played any games; but somebody once invented a game—which was of course never played.

But can we imagine this tiny sci-fi world he has just invented or does it as we peer into it simply explode like a gag in a low farce? The strangeness and comedy of this almost possible world is a direct consequence of the familiarity and “strangeness of the language we actually use” (xv), which Perloff offers as the subject of Wittgenstein’s Ladder. But the strangeness of Wittgenstein’s language or the strangeness of the worlds created or discovered in it appears to be of a different kind than the strangeness Wittgenstein among the Poets

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of the language “of the poets and artists” Perloff suggests “have climbed through, on and over the rungs of his ladder. Mainly, because it is arrived at in a different way. If Wittgenstein is a language poet, he is working at language in somewhat different way than a poet like Robert Creeley, with whom he appears to have real affinities. They are both in a certain sense improvisational experimentalists with a mix of distrust of conventional language use and a commitment to a knowledge that can be mined from the vernacular. But their explorations are carried out in a different way. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein tries to examine the relations between thinking and talking or writing. He starts in a classical, almost Kantian, manner, by laying out an antinomy in vernacular usage: 318.

If we talk or write, thinking—I mean in the ordinary way—we will in general not say that we think faster than we speak; on the contrary our thought will appear to be inseparable from its expression. On the other hand, one speaks of the speed of thought, how a thought goes through one’s head like lightning, how problems become clear to us in a flash, etc. (PI, 104)

Which he immediately proposes to concretize as two approaches to a detonation system: “So an obvious question is: Is lightning-like thinking only an extremely accelerated version of thinking-while-talking? So that in the first case the timer unwinds in a single snap, while in the second, it uncoils bit by bit, braked by the words” (PI, 104–5). He follows this with a series of alternate images of these two different modes of thinking. Paragraph 319 compares lightning-like thinking to a shorthand notation, 320 images the relation between lightning-like thinking and thinking-while-talking to the relation between an algebraic formula and the numbers that can be derived from it by sequential computations. All of these images are offered provisionally, introduced with phrases like “I can imagine A in the same sense as X” or “A can be connected with X as B can be connected with Y,” and these provisional images are themselves questioned as soon as they are suggested, e.g., “What makes this notation a summary of that thought?” What we get here are no conclusions, but a series of improvisational reflections on those philosophical problems that are reflections of Wittgenstein’s own psychological experience. All of Philosophical Investigations can be said to consist of a thinkingwhile- writing that was in all likelihood based on Wittgenstein’s own thinking-while-talking. For whatever else Wittgenstein may have been, he was an improvising, talking philosopher, whether he was talking to  •

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colleagues and friends in colloquia, or to students in lectures, or to himself when he was writing. His lectures were legendary and have been described in great detail by any number of his students. According to Norman Malcolm, who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1939, they “were given without preparation and without notes.” His commitment to improvisation was absolute and quite self-conscious. He told Malcolm that “once he had tried to lecture from notes but was disgusted with the result; the thoughts that came out were ‘stale’ or, as he put it to another friend, the words looked like ‘corpses’ when he began to read them” (M, 23). In the method that he came to use at Cambridge in the 1930s, according to Malcolm, “his only preparation was to spend a few minutes before the class met, recollecting the course that the inquiry had taken at the previous meetings. At the beginning of the lecture he would give a brief summary of this and then he would start from there, trying to advance the investigation with fresh thoughts” (M, 23). In Malcolm’s view, it was “hardly correct to speak of these meetings as ‘lectures’ ” (M, 25). This view is confirmed by others. According to Wolfe Mays, who attended his 1940 seminars, Wittgenstein “never gave what ordinarily could be called lectures”: He used to sit in his deck chair and discuss particular topics in an informal way. Since he did not use notes he frequently had mental blocks, when he ran dry of both words and ideas, and there were then embarrassing silences. During these pauses he remained seated, jaw in hand, eyes closed, shaking his head slowly, an attitude copied by some of his disciples. On such occasions I was never quite sure whether he had run out of material, was off color, or was using these pauses for effect . . . It did seem that he had difficulty in producing a connected lecture.

Also according to Mays, in spite of the fact that Wittgenstein forbade students to take notes during his lectures, he allowed Smythies to take notes. As Mays later understood this, Smythies notes “were destined to become parts of the Philosophical Investigations, along with the notes that Wittgenstein dictated in German to a shorthand typist” (“RW,” 81). It seems likely then that practically all of Wittgenstein’s “thinking-whilewriting” was “thinking-while-talking”—either to himself or to others. It is especially interesting that Mays saw these sessions as performances and considered Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophical problems as “essentially esthetic” and was most impressed by “the strong, almost abnormal imagery” of “the bizarre examples he used to produce to illustrate his arguments” (“RW,” 80). Wittgenstein among the Poets

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From all accounts, Wittgenstein’s philosophy students, who were used to sustained arguments intended to support or attack some position, had difficulty seeing where all the talk was going. Example was piled on example; and although the examples were often fantastic, they were sometimes merely concretizations—most often narratively situated concretizations—of some ordinary fact. And these situations were always described in concrete detail in everyday language. But the students were accustomed to a particular philosophical genre in which there is a single line to an argument, no matter how ramified—a chain of consecutive connections they could hang onto. They were apparently hoping to find a pathway they could follow all through a performance, so that at the end they could describe where they had come from and where they ended up. Their fascination and bewilderment is well described in an essay by two of these students: At first one didn’t see where all the talk was leading to. One didn’t see, or saw only very vaguely, the point of the numerous examples. And then, sometimes one did, suddenly. All at once, sometimes, the solution to one’s problem became clear and everything fell into place. In these exciting moments one realized something of what mathematicians mean when they speak of the beauty of an elegant proof. The solution, once seen, seemed so simple and obvious, such an inevitable and simple key to unlock so many doors so long battered against in vain. One wondered how one could fail to see it. But if one tried to explain it to someone else who had not seen it one couldn’t get it across without going through the whole long story.

And while Wittgenstein tried to let them know that they were attending a different kind of performance, he doesn’t seem to have been completely clear about it himself, not if we consider the explanation he apparently gave to these same students. I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed though any given street a number of times—each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a born Londoner. Of course a good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets, a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy. I’m a rather bad guide.  •

Wittgenstein among the Poets

It may be illuminating to think of his speculations as a series of rambles in and around a terrain. But it is a question how well anybody can know a city, which as Baudelaire pointed out “changes much faster than the human heart.” And it seems that the domain Wittgenstein was exploring was less likely to be neatly mapped or completely known than London or Paris or even Naples. But it is not so surprising for Wittgenstein to partially misapprehend and misstate the full indeterminacy of his practice. It was not a contemporary philosophical practice to be doing “philosophy as poetry,” and he didn’t think he was very good at it. His full notebook comment indicates the degree of his self doubt. I believe I summed up my attitude to philosophy in saying: One should really only do philosophy as poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) From this it seems to me it must be clear to what extent my thought belongs to the present, to the future or to the past. For with this I have also revealed myself to be someone who can’t quite do what he wishes he could do. (CV, 24)

But he was doing it as well as he could. Still, it was understandable for an engineer to feel uncomfortable in the company of Socrates, Plato, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche; and Wittgenstein had fairly conventional ideas of poetry, although his poetical practice was much more radical than that of Rilke or Trakl. The account he gives of poetic word play in Zettel is strikingly similar to Pound’s definition of logopoeia. “A poet’s words can go right through us. And that is causally connected to their use in our life. And it is also connected with the way in conformity with this use we let our thoughts wander around the familiar environment of the words.” But the musico-linguistic parallel he invokes to illuminate the poetry “language game” is a standard nineteenth-century cliché—“The way music speaks. Don’t forget that a poem, even if it is composed in the language of information transmission is not employed in the information transmission language game,” which seems to deny his own practice, that is clearly involved in some kind of information transmission (Mitteilung). Taking a hint from Wittgenstein, we should really ask whether or not there is only one language game that is poetry, or whether poetry, which is an ancient supergenre, may not consist of an indefinitely large family of language games that like human families can always admit new members by intermarriage and adoption and admit a language game that overlaps the language game of information transmission. If Socrates was a poet, Wittgenstein is a poet. Wittgenstein among the Poets

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If we simply consider Wittgenstein’s native language, we see that the German verb for the composition of poetry, dichten, has a much wider range of meaning than “to write verse” or even “to write poems.” Derived from a verb of speaking or saying, in the broadest sense it has come to encompass all generally linguistic, imaginative creation or re-creation, and in a narrower sense the invention or construction of “fictions” and hovers between these two meanings as in the title of Goethe’s autobiographical work, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is conveniently rendered as either Poetry and Truth or Fiction and Truth, depending on which mistranslation you prefer. But even this range of meaning is not broad enough to encompass the range of the ancient supergenre poetry. In the broadest sense poetry is the language art and by even the simplest of linguistic breakdowns language encompasses a phonology, a morphology, a semantics and a pragmatics—a sound system, a system of word formation, a grammatical organization, a lexicon, and a system of human language-related practices. Wittgenstein’s is a poetic practice based on the interrogation of the meaning of words in the context of life practices. That was what he meant by grammar, and it is a practice very close to that of the Socrates represented in Plato’s quasi-dialogues—the improvising sophist in performance, exploring meaning by thinking while talking. But there is a special character to Wittgenstein’s poetic performances that is illuminated by another meaning of the German verb dichten, or more precisely by the meaning of a homophonic verb dichten, that has come to be associated with the poetic verb by a folk etymology, which means “to concentrate,” “make dense,” or “to pack.” The notion of poetry as a mental concentrate has considerable significance for Wittgenstein’s practice. He was apparently operating within an aesthetic of “concentration” from the beginning. This aesthetic commitment was the main point of the quote from Kürnberger that serves as the motto of the Tractatus: “And everything we know that we haven’t just heard buzzing and blowing around can be stated in three words.” It is this combination of an aesthetic of improvisation and concentration and compression, within an exploration of the vernacular, that suggests a connection with a poet like Robert Creeley. Creeley’s psychically intense, minimalist practice and his repeated invocation of the great jazz improvisers like Parker and of the Abstract-Expressionist painter Franz Kline ought to make this connection convincing. But improvisation is a confused issue in most critical circles, and the application of the term to two such different practices as Creeley’s and Wittgenstein’s may seem questionable because they appear to violate our  •

Wittgenstein among the Poets

common understanding of the term. This understanding requires a start from ground zero, complete spontaneity of proceeding and an absence of anything anyone could call revision. A close look reveals that all of these notions are either nonsensical or false. There is no such thing as ground zero for any human being who hasn’t suffered severe brain damage. For any performer there is always some complex of past, future and present relevancy conditions that makes the notion of complete spontaneity an absurdity. And in any temporal genre each successive take is experienced as a revision of the one before it. An examination of improvisation within the jazz tradition goes a long way to clarifying this—the kind of examination Charles Hartman conducts in his book Jazz Text, the only work I know written by someone critically capable in both poetry and jazz—Hartman is both a writer and a jazz guitarist. In relation to the “ground zero” assumption, he points out that Charlie Parker was probably the most prolific and inventive improviser in jazz. Yet Parker’s improvisations are built out of a little store of about a hundred “motives” that have been exhaustively cataloged by Thomas Owens. Hartman notes the similarity of Parker’s method to the Homeric poet’s use of verbal formulas described by Parry and Lord. In relation to the assumption of “complete spontaneity” he reminds us of the relevancy conditions—that the Homeric phrases and Parker motives are responses to local contingencies of meter and harmonic progression within the broader sweep of narrative and musical statement. And he concludes that “the fact that Charlie Parker in any particular solo played fragments of phrases he had played before, like the fact that he might be playing a known tune, will not prevent us from calling the solo ‘improvised’ if the word is to have any use at all.” On the apparently more problematic notion of revision he notes that in jazz “our listening is borne along and away by the moments; so that another turn in the solo can retrospectively revise what we feel we have heard. Konitz’s last chorus on ‘All the Things You Are’ revises his first as much as his first revises the original tune.” This notion of revision by successive takes seems a particularly productive way of looking at the work of both Wittgenstein and Creeley. Chapter 6 of Wittgenstein’s Ladder goes beyond this and extends the line of a “Wittgenstein poetics” further to poets like Rosemarie Waldrop, Lynn Hejinian, Alan Davies, and Ron Silliman, who do not share a commitment to improvisation and compression, though all seem to have had significant engagements with Wittgenstein’s work. This extension of the connection to the Language Poets is interesting but may be somewhat misleading, and the meaning of the connection is questioned by Ron SilliWittgenstein among the Poets

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man himself in “The Chinese Notebook”—a work Perloff describes as “a sequence of 223 aphorisms, most of them on questions of language and poetics, that sometimes echo, sometimes gently spoof, the method of the Philosophical Investigations” (201). But Silliman, somewhat more cautious, asks “14. Is Wittgenstein’s contribution strictly formal?” To which the answer is probably, “Mainly, but not strictly.” A substantially stronger contribution to Silliman’s way of proceeding here seems to come from John Cage. Compare Silliman’s “6. I wrote this sentence with a ballpoint pen. If I had used another would it have been a different sentence?” (“CN,” 43) with part 3 of Cage’s “Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?” Other nonformal contributions might come from Derrida or Foucault: “5. Language is, first of all, a political question” (“CN,” 43). This is too hit-and-run for Wittgenstein, too absolute and too unclear. Silliman could mean “A language is, first of all, political,” referring to particular languages like English or French or Arabic, which have an obvious political dimension. Or he could be referring to language, the universally human capacity to signify and communicate, which has certainly developed within a social setting but for which the political may represent too crude a category to be primary. Or he may simply have confused the two. He later asks the question, “16. If this were theory, not practice, would I know it?” (“CN,” 44). To which the obvious answer is, “Maybe, if you were not confused.” Because it is clear from the subjunctive in “If this were theory” that for Silliman “The Chinese Notebook” is not the practice of theory, but the practice of poetry, and that he doesn’t expect the same kind of discursive or cognitive clarity from poetry that he expects from what he calls “theory.” “The Chinese Notebook” is attractive as poetry because it is playful, argumentative, crude, refined, silly, enigmatic, and very rarely interesting as criticism, theory, or discourse. Because it simply reframes and re-presents fragments of critical and theoretical discourses as tunes or images. How else to read “117. Paris is in France. Also, Paris has five letters. So does France” (“CN,” 55) than as another version of the folkish Concrete poem “thimk”? That the Language Poets generally hold this traditional, nondiscursive view of poetry is confirmed by Alan Davies response to “The Chinese Notebook.” “One morning . . . I received from Ron a lovely Chinese notebook . . . I read the text enthusiastically. I was impressed by the number of interrogatives in the work. My own tendency has often been to suppress questions and, where they did occur, to end them with a period. I knew that I would make my most considered response to the text by answering each of the questions in it.” To Silliman’s “29. Mallard, drake—if the words change, does the bird remain?” (“CN,” 46), Davies answers, “29. Ask  •

Wittgenstein among the Poets

the bird.” To Silliman’s “35. What now? What new? All these words turning in on themselves like the concentric layers of an onion” (“CN,” 46), Davies responds, “35. Unpeel the onion a layer at a time; at center, the still point.” The result is an amiable response poem, rather like Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply” to Christopher Marlowe’s “Come be with me and be my love,” and it is no more discursively or cognitively significant than Silliman’s original, or for that matter than the Marlowe or the Raleigh, from which taken together they are not too different. There is simply nothing in either of these two poems that Alan Davies thinks or that Silliman thinks that can matter as thinking to anyone at all. On the other hand, Wittgenstein is a poet of nearly pure cognition. He is not a poet of the German language or the English language, he is a poet of thinking through language. And the Language Poets Perloff cites are poets of English. They are not so much exploring as exploiting, often elegantly, the distinctive properties of the English language. If we can imagine Wittgenstein and the Language Poets engaged in a similar seeming act—like sharpening pencils—the products might look the same, but the Language Poets are fashioning slender cylindrical objects that come to a finely shaped point, while Wittgenstein is preparing a writing instrument. Still, this may not be so seriously misleading an extension of the Wittgenstein connection, since Perloff ’s aim is not to articulate a genre but to reveal the extent to which Wittgenstein’s work resonates within the field of serious Modern and Postmodern experimental poetry and art and the powerful place he occupies within it. In this she has been completely successful. 1998 notes Though I have consulted whatever translations exist, I have in all cases used my own translations of Wittgenstein’s German texts.  See Gertrude Stein, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” in Selected

Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1972), 248.  Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, quoted

in Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 120–21.  The Ramsey-Ogden translation of the Tractatus is an awkward rendition of Wittgenstein’s precise German, which reads: “die Sprache verkleidet den Gedanken. Und zwar so, dass man nach der aüsseren Form des Kleides, nicht auf Form des bekleideten Gedanken schliessen kann, weil die aüsseren Form des Kleides, nicht auf die Form des bekleideten Gedanken schliessen kann; weil die aüsseren Form Wittgenstein among the Poets

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des Kleides nach ganz anderen Zwecken gebildet ist, als danach die Form des Körpers erkennen zu lassen” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922], 62; quotations from the Tractatus are hereafter identified by their paragraph numbers).  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24; hereafter abbreviated CV. I am responsible for all the translations from Culture and Value used in this essay.  The original reads: “6.54. Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie—auf ihnen—über sie hinausgestiegen ist.”  Wittgenstein refers to the numbered passages of the Tractatus as Sätze, which can mean “sentences,” propositions,” “phrases,” “passages,” or even “aphorisms.” Writing in his native idiomatic Austrian German, his emphasis shifts freely across the range of its meanings. His translators have attempted various solutions. Since many of the numbered passages are not obviously propositions and contain more than one sentence, I have chosen to call them “paragraphs.” In other instances I have translated Sätze as “sentences” or “propositions,” depending upon my sense of his emphasis within the context at hand.  Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development, quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), 156; this volume is hereafter abbreviated LW.  In Wittgenstein’s usage, the word Satz here means both “sentence” and “proposition.” A sinnvoller Satz is a “meaningful sentence,” which is one that can be shown to be true or false, which is the same as a “proposition with a (positive or negative) sense.”  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Geheime Tagebücher, ed. Wilhelm Baum (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 1991), 72, 73. These quotes are from the sections of the notebooks that were written in code and left out of the German-English edition of the 1914–16 notebooks by the editors, who apparently felt they contributed little to understanding Wittgenstein’s thought. A number of German scholars felt otherwise and published these coded sections as the Geheime Tagebücher (Secret Diaries). Perhaps in a more reasonable future these secret diaries can be reintegrated into a more accurate version of the notebooks, because they throw a great deal of light on Wittgenstein’s thought processes at the time.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 79. After a long series of meditative reflections in his wartime notebooks beginning June 11, 1916, with the entry, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world is” (p. 72), he notes on August 2, 1916, at the end of a series of speculations on the relation of the subjective will to the world, “Yes, my work has expanded from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.” Throughout the remaining recovered notebooks he moves freely between logical issues and ethical and metaphysical ones. The last existing entry on January 1, 1917, raises the question of the ethics of suicide.  •

Wittgenstein among the Poets

 Ludwig Wittgenstein to Ludwig von Ficker, quoted in German in G. H. von

Wright, introduction to Prototractatus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg, and G. H. von Wright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 18. Von Ficker was the publisher of Der Brenner (The Burner), an Austrian literary magazine that since 1910 had published a very distinguished selection of the German avant-garde. In 1914 Wittgenstein had consulted Ficker to help him give away one hundred thousand crowns of his inheritance to Austrian writers and artists without means. In 1919 with the war over, Ficker wrote Wittgenstein to announce that he was continuing to publish the journal. Wittgenstein, having failed to get the book accepted by a number of other German publishers and knowing its difficulties, cautiously offered it to Ficker as a literary work, but could not resist his emphatic insistence on the meaning of the decimal-numbering system. The correspondence appears in Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright and Walter Methlagl (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1969).  Wittgenstein, Prototractatus, 40.  For a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s movements and intellectual life before and during World War I, see part 1 of LW, 1–137.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, in The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 1; hereafter abbreviated B.  “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to—the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.—Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem . . . ‘But then we will never come to the end of our job!’ Of course not, because it has no end” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The Big Typescript,” quoted in LW, 325).  The original reads: “Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe [New York: MacMillan, 1953], 91; hereafter abbreviated PI).  Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 23; hereafter abbreviated M.  Wolfe Mays, “Recollections of Wittgenstein,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy, ed. K. T. Fann (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1967), 81; hereafter abbreviated “RW.”  D. A. T. Gasking and A. C. Jackson, “Wittgenstein as a Teacher,” in Fann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 50.  Ibid., 51.  Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” in Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Editions de Cluny, 1941), 95.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 28.  Ibid.  Charles O. Hartman, Jazz Text: Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Wittgenstein among the Poets

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 For an exhaustive catalog of these “motives,” see Thomas Owens, “Char-

lie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1974).  More recently the folk notion of improvisation as completely spontaneous invention, apparently shared by the editors of OED, seems to have caused Albert Lord to reject the term “improviser” for the Homeric poets and the Balkan oral poets. Seemingly unfamiliar with the jazz tradition, he now chooses to refer to the oral poetic method as “composition by formula and theme” or “composition in performance” or “recomposition in performance.” But his description of the method and intentions of the Balkan bards reveals such close parallels to jazz improvisation and musical improvisation in general—as it would also to the compositional strategies of painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Kline—that it appears better to revise the folk conception of improvisation than to abandon the term. See Albert Bates Lord, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). My own contribution to the discourse on oral poetics can be seen in “The Sociology of Art,” in David Antin, Talking at the Boundaries (New York: New Directions, 1976).  Hartman, Jazz Text, 78.  Ibid.  Ron Silliman, “The Chinese Notebook,” in The Age of Huts (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 44; hereafter abbreviated “CN.”  John Cage, “Composition as Process, Part 3, Communication,” in Silence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 41. The question form of this section suggests a much stronger connection to Cage than to Wittgenstein. The section begins: Nichi Nichi Kobe Ko Niche: Every day is a beautiful day What if I ask thirty-two questions? What if I stop asking now and then? Will that make things clear? Is communication something made-clear What is communication? Music, what does it communicate . . . (Cage, “Composition as Process,” 41)  The full paragraph reads, “117. Paris is in France. Also, Paris has five letters. So does France. But so do Ghana, China, Spain. How should I answer ‘Why is Paris Paris’?” (“CN,” 55); the miscount of “France” has the effect of a pebble in your shoe or a speck of dust in your eye, not letting you attend single-mindedly to anything else.  Alan Davies, “?s to .s: for Ron Silliman and for The Chinese Notebook,” in Signage; quoted in Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 202.

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Wittgenstein among the Poets

john cage uncaged is still cagey

when i received this invitation to come talk about johns work i felt it was time for me to come and do it many times i was invited to similar occasions but you know how these things work out youre on your way to paris and somebody is having a gathering in bloomington and its not possible or youre on your way to bloomington and somebodys having a gathering in paris so it seems i never found the right occasion or it never found me yet if theres one writer or poet to whose work i have responded more profoundly than to johns i dont know who that is and this may seem very strange to people who know my work though perhaps not so strange to people who have known my work for a long time but it would have sounded strange if i had said this to david tudor and as a matter of fact I remember doing a performance because basically thats what ive been doing lately ive been doing performances since nineteen seventy two or three so lately means something like the last fifteen years but i was going to buffalo to the media study center where i was supposed to talk about video art or about narrative but whatever i did was going to be a performance engaging with whatever i was concerned with and i did this performance and i think stan brakhage and david tudor and robert creeley all showed up for the performance and i did this piece now my pieces are talking pieces i work out of a relationship of talking to people trying to address them while i’m exploring something in front of them actually maybe talking more for myself than for anyone else and in this performance what happened is what often happens in my pieces narratives develop and my thinking moves in various ways sometimes somewhat surprising to me though to everyone else it sounds very coherent and seems as though i had planned it ahead of time instead of following my mind wherever it wanted to go at least thats what many people have

told me now my way of proceeding seems so very strange to some people that they find it hard to believe and this leads to surprising responses some years ago i did a performance in san diego at the end of which a woman rushed up to me and insisted that she had really enjoyed my performance even though it made her terribly nervous and i was really surprised because i couldnt imagine anything about this performance that should have made anyone terribly nervous so i asked her what made her nervous and she said i was afraid that youd forget your lines and this left me baffled because i never had any lines to forget now in buffalo i was talking in my usual way and getting more and more amused as i would occasionally catch a glimpse of david tudors face in the audience because he was looking more and more baffled as to what all this perfectly intelligible ordinary talking had to do with poetry or art at least within the well defined modernist ideas of poetry or art because it seemed to operate under no formulaic constraints it displayed no conspicuous formal devices it worked against no arbitrary mechanisms and in short dispensed with nearly all the features of the kind of work that david tudor has devoted his brilliant career to interpreting the kind of work that required the character that ive always admired him for i admire david tudors ability to take spices and herbs that have spilled out of their containers and been mingled together with dried beans and palm sugar and excelsior and a variety of other pieces of detritus of almost equal size and to spend days and days separating them out and this is a feat that john has celebrated so brilliantly but its an accomplishment thats not in my character i dont have the character for hunting mushrooms i’m sure i would kill myself on the very first day if not on the first day then on the second day i would eat with enthusiasm what i had obviously identified as a perfect edible example of pluteus cervinus it would turn out to be an enteloma and i’d be dead by morning and i know this about myself my lack of concern with precise discriminations among beautiful things that have no necessity for me and my unwillingness to subjugate myself to an arbitrary discipline so why then would i be the right person to come and talk about john cage when even in the preface to this book silence which i found so meaningful silence a book i discovered in the early sixties and that was so very meaningful to me there was something extremely unpromising about some of the attitudes expressed in the preface but then in the same preface john is also terribly perverse and i share  •

john cage uncaged is still cagey

his perversity and admire it so i suppose that may have made him attractive to me and then theres the response he makes to a question put to him by m.c. richards why didnt he one day just give an orthodox lecture because it would shock people more than anything else he could do “i dont do these lectures to surprise people” john said “but out of a need for poetry” that sounded right i understood it or i thought i understood it it was a promising attitude it turned me on and i approved of it but what followed didnt turn me on at all because john goes on to say “as i see it poetry is not prose simply because poetry is one way or another formalized it is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements time and sound to be introduced into the world of words thus traditional information no matter how stuffy the sutras and shastras of india for instance was transmitted in poetry it was easier to grasp that way” god what a reason theres the need for poetry a defective memory this is the reason that eric havelock seems to have proposed for homers putting those elaborate stories into verse too people had defective minds and were unable to remember stories so poets said things like “we know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return” and that made these stories much easier to remember its a funny idea and probably the only silly idea in eric havelocks great book the preface to plato and john goes on to point out that karl shapiro a poet of whom i have a very low opinion karl shapiro may have been thinking along these lines when he wrote his essay about rhyme now this certainly raises the question of how john cage could be a poet i am terribly attracted to but there are other comments about poetry in john cages work there are comments about poetry throughout this book and there are comments john makes about music that really seem to be about poetry and i’m not sure that theyre about music at all but in music i’m an educated tourist thats very important to remember i dont make music i have no desire to make music i’m interested in music the way i’m interested in paris i know my way about paris reasonably well thats about my relationship to music so if you are an educated tourist you dont have too many profound opinions about paris and i don’t have too many profound opinions about music i just let it happen and take my pleasures as i can and i can in fact listen not with equal pleasure but with equanimity to milton babbitt and john cage just a little while ago somebody mentioned them in the same sentence so i will also mention them in the same sentence but while i’m a musical tourist i’m a sufficiently educated musical john cage uncaged is still cagey

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tourist to understand that there is something about milton babbitt that has caused people to call him a formalist and at the same time there is something about john cage for example that comment about poetry i just referred to which would also cause people to call him a formalist but i would assert the following two propositions if milton babbitt is a formalist john cage is not a formalist and if john cage is a formalist milton babbitt is not a formalist this is not a syllogism but there is something axiomatic about it and the reason for it is this john cage belongs to a class that excludes milton babbitt from its membership and milton babbitt is a member of a class that excludes john cage from its membership this is as simple as a venn diagram and it seems to me that its almost self evident and given this class analysis i figure that its only because i’m a musical tourist that i can listen to both with equanimity though not with equal pleasure but going back to the other kind of commentary on poetry that i found in johns writing theres a comment that comes up in one of the daniel charles interviews the third interview i think and daniel is obviously getting exasperated with john and john is getting a little exasperated with daniel probably because they were living a long talking life together and this was getting harder to do as time went on and in the course of this interview daniel asks john an odd question “does silence as you understand it represent the style of life you desire” to which john replies “its the poetic life” and here daniel responds with some exasperation “why do you insist on the word poetry” to which john calmly responds “theres poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing” now i liked that answer even though i wasnt sure what it meant because its not about musical elements or meters or rhymes but daniel pushes him further because theyre talking about silence cages idea of silence so daniel asks why after having done silence didnt you leave it without a sequel or always do more of it and john answers “i didnt say that i had attained to silence” now this attitude towards poetry is somewhat different from the one expressed in the notion that poetry is something you do to prose to make it memorable by introducing musical elements after all what could it mean for john cage to introduce musical elements whats a musical element whats not a musical element for the john cage who asked the question is the sound of a truck passing outside of a music school musical is the sound of a truck passing without the music school nearby musical is the image of the truck passing without the sound of its passing  •

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musical it seems to me i dont know what john meant in emphasizing the musical elements of language i’m not sure what the musical elements of language are it occurs to me there are many elements of language that we might consider musical musical pitch curves or images or absences that we might propose to the mind that might quiet it if i may borrow one of johns formulas for what music brings to the soul i say formulas because theyre catch phrases that john has either invented or quoted that seem to sum up succinctly certain ideas and attitudes that he is attached to and seems to carry around like baggage wherever he goes but if these are catch phrases hes made them or made them into them hes a man whos invented commonplaces and given them different meanings each time he uses them so that his repetition is a form of translation and maybe hes always translating his past circumstances into his present circumstances which is why he seems not to be repeating himself and of course hes not repeating himself any more than homer is repeating himself with his topoi in the odyssey or the iliad though johns topoi are not contemporary cultural commonplaces but the commonplaces of a spiritual tradition that he is continually adapting to contemporary living but to get back to what i learned from the book i collided with what i learned from silence seems to be different from what most people learned from it the first piece that really astonished me was one of the most brilliant pieces of poetry i had read in many years it was the second movement of a work called “composition as process” well now there is a question of whether its one work in three parts or a suite of three works whether its one poem or a sequence of three poems with an epilogue the work consists of three lectures given in darmstadt and probably several other places modified by the way theyre set up in somewhat different typographical forms lectures that make more or less didactic statements about the organization and structure of music as an activity undertaken as doing something concrete and particular that seems to be whats at stake and the first one which is a historical account of johns ways of working is interesting and reasonable enough but it was not the one that most attracted me part one the first movement if we can call it that was not what attracted me while the third part consists of a serious of provocational questions that are attractive enough that is theyre provocational enough to be attractive to me but it was the second part that most moved me it was this intractably ugly looking second part printed in blunt paragraph blocks in very small type that john himself describes as pontifical in character what got me first about this piece was its ugliness it showed how far you could go john cage uncaged is still cagey

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into unpromising material and still come out with a poem and then there was the physical difficulty of reading it though i had good enough eyes then to read it but it took an effort and then what i liked about it was its aggressiveness the piece is a calculated act of aggression even its typography and layout are acts of aggression the piece if one reads it carefully enough is an assault on stockhausen with some fairly severe strictures on earle brown that is its a polemic attack on stockhausen and on the claims made for stockhausen but what struck me about this contentious critical piece was that without agreeing or disagreeing with its polemical position what i received from it was a feeling of such deep aesthetic satisfaction and approval that i would call the work beautiful now on the face of it is hard to say how you could call a work beautiful that sounds from its beginning like this This is a lecture on composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance. The Klavierstueck XI by Karlheinz Stockhausen is an example. The Art of the Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach is an example.

now is this musical or not it seems like a strange way to open a poem but the whole piece is divided into six sections stanzas or cantos and each section opens with the same opening line This is a lecture on a composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance.

is this repetition simply a musical device the refrain of a rather odd long limbed song is this a zen master in an aggressive mood driving home an argument he wont let us forget or is there something parodic about it something about this statement that we must regard with skepticism its a statement that is made six times and each time it seems to hold out to the performers a promise of unimagined bliss and the most curious thing about this lecture aside from the fact that it is divided into six sections or five sections and an epilogue each beginning with the same opening line and containing irregularly recurring passages is that it proceeds by way of comparisons and a comparison is a binary relationship of the kind that john specifically rejects as a way of looking at things the first section compares the art of the fugue by johann sebastian bach to klavierstueck xi by karlheinz stockhausen the second compares morton feldmans intersection 3 with cages own music of changes while sections 3 and 4 which deal respectively with indices and

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4 systems by earle brown are implicitly compared to section 5 which deals with christian wolffs duo 2 for pianists as well as to feldmans intersection 3 and bachs the art of the fugue in sections1 and 2 now i also take a dim view of comparisons and i’m always surprised by the excellent art historians in my school because theyre always comparing things apparently all art historians are born with two slide projectors and you might be surprised at what can be compared by means of them a wooden shoe and a gothic cathedral for example though they dont do that but ive often wondered why not because its possible to compare anything to anything else once theyre in the same place in fact theres no possibility of denying a relationship between two things put into the same place of course you can say its not a significant relationship but there they are these two things occupying adjacent rectangles which is a relationship in itself so you cant help comparing them in this piece you cant help comparing johann sebastian bach and karlheinz stockhausen john cage and morton feldman and earle brown and christian wolff because they are all in a relationship and relation is something that john emphatically denies liking especially in this piece and this piece lives on a comparison of the relations of various composers and their compositions to their performers and on their ability to provide them with sufficient indeterminacy to allow them to attend to no matter what eventuality thats the key term apparently the most elevated possibility in this poem which i love and find it funny that i love it is evoked by this phrase “attending to no matter what eventuality” which achieves a lyrical intensity that is hard to believe and by the end of this poem you realize that what you most desire in life is the capacity to attend to no matter what eventuality and you come to feel deliriously attracted to engaging with no matter what eventuality whatever that might be a flat tire a sudden inheritance a trip to tanganyika and each composition discussed in this piece is examined in terms of its capacity to permit its performers to respond to no matter what eventuality as a result of the determinate or indeterminate acts of its composer so these determinate or indeterminate acts undertaken by these composers are examined for their control or lack of control of the various elements of music which john specifies in great detail and goes over several times “structure” which he defines as “the division of the whole into parts” “method” which is the “note to note procedure” “form” which is the “expressive content the morphology of the continuity” and the “characteristics of the material” “the frequency duration timbre and amplitude of the sounds or silences of which it

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consists” and each of these composers is rated for his success or failure to liberate his performers to attend to no matter what eventuality stockhausens klavierstueck xi is compared unfavorably to bachs the art of the fugue because in the art of the fugue the structure method and form are all determined and the frequency and duration characteristics of the material are also determined but since bach didnt specify instrumentation or provide much in the way of dynamic markings the timbre and amplitude characteristics are indeterminate and left to the performers and this indeterminacy brings about the possibility of a unique overtone structure and decibel range for each performance so that the function of the performer according to john is like that of someone coloring in a coloring book while in stockhausens klavierstueck xi all the characteristics of the material are determined as is the note to note procedure the structure the division of the whole into parts is also determinate but the sequence of the parts the form is indeterminate which suggests the possibility of a unique expressive content for each performance but according to john the great promise of klavierstueck xi is not fulfilled and all hope is frustrated because of stockhausens choice of the two most conventional aspects of european music the twelve tones of the octave for the frequency characteristic of the material and the regularity of the beat that is a component of the method and these according to john render the indeterminacy of form giving pointless and incapable of bringing about any unforeseen situation now the whole poem proceeds in this precise way feldmans intersection 3 is seen as liberating its performer while johns own music of changes is seen as enslaving the performer christian wolffs duo for 2 pianists is seen as liberating its performers while earle browns indices and 4 systems are seen as enslaving their performers and in each case the conclusion seems to be based on a precise analysis of the way in which the composer sets up a situation that either allows or prevents the performer from encountering a situation sufficiently unforeseen to allow him to engage with no matter what eventuality now you may or may not agree with this analysis or its conclusion and i personally have grave doubts that the invocation of a table of random numbers or chance operations will invariably or even often produce the kind of unforeseen outcomes that allow a performer to identify with no matter what eventuality but this is a poem that provokes you to think very precise thoughts just to find out whether you agree or disagree with any part of it and this is as much a part of the pleasure of this poem as its repeated invocations of the deep sleep of indian mental practice or meister eckhardts ground

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from the very beginning the initial definitions provoke questioning for as soon as john didactically and somewhat pedantically lays out the elements of music as soon as he defines structure as the division of the whole into parts i am moved to doubt and as he repeats it over and over again in each section of the poem i begin to doubt it even more strongly it seems to me about as plausible as wittgensteins proposal that “the world is everything that is the case” so reading this poem i’m moved to ask what do you mean structure is the division of the whole into parts so i’m reading a poem and i have to think thats already unusual and the first thing i’m moved to think is is this really the case if i was to speak of the structure of a gothic cathedral lets say the first thing i would think about the structure of a gothic cathedral is that it consists of a series of translations the downward vertical thrust the great weight of the vast roof its downward pressure is translated by the contrivance of the arch into a lateral pressure or in large part into a lateral pressure contained by the walls or partially contained by the walls because in the gothic aesthetic the walls are thin and perforated by windows to admit the light beloved of the gothic designers so that the great lateral pressure transmitted from the arch is only partially contained by the walls while the rest is passed on to the buttresses the heavy vertical piers placed at intervals along the nave and anchored in the ground right alongside the body of the nave but since the greatest lateral thrust transmitted from the arch is positioned high on the buttress and acts like the force at the end of a lever whose fulcrum is a great distance down in the ground much of this force is passed on by another translation to the flying buttress which transmits it as yet another arch or an angled vector to a place farther away in the ground now looking at this series of translations as the structure of a gothic cathedral is somewhat different from thinking of it simply as the division of the whole into parts its a division of its constructional whole into functional parts but maybe this isnt a good enough model to raise the question of structure so lets consider the structure of an airplane what are its parts i would say theres a motion generating system they call it the engine then theres the direction giving system which seems to divide into several separate direction giving systems a forward directional system which used to be the propeller and now is the jet system which governs both forward and backward directions then theres the wing which governs vertical motion and the tail assembly that governs lateral motion and there is the landing gear which enables rolling motion on the ground and all of these interact with a subsidiary element the wingflaps which

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determine several kinds of motion modification and when you put this all together you may have the structure of an airplane but is this what john had in mind by defining structure as the division of the whole into parts and is this an adequate account of the structure of johns music or of this poem i know that john is a counting animal and i also like to count and i know that there are musical pieces of his that are arranged on the basis of a module of fours and that four is easily multiplied to give you 16 or 32 or 64 and that all of these numbers are powers of 2 and all of these numbers have pleasant geometric expressions in squares or cubes so i looked very carefully at this poem and it didnt look like that it might be delightful for it to be arranged that way it would be playful but i’m still not sure that would count as its structure still i tried to consider it johns poem is divided into six sections and each one is constructed of a number of paragraphs but it is an unequal number of paragraphs section 1 has 5 paragraphs section 2 has 4 paragraphs section 3 has 3 paragraphs this suggests a declining series but section 4 has 6 paragraphs section 5 has 2 paragraphs while section 6 has 3 paragraphs so if there is an oscillating paragraph series it runs       which so far doesnt really add up to a series so i tried to count the lines the sections have different numbers of lines so i counted the lines and i found that the first section contained 59 lines the second 52 the third 32 the fourth 63 the fifth 44 and the sixth 66 and this doesnt tell us much of anything numbers like this do not suggest anything we could call a structure so what is the structure of this piece there are six sections and each makes use of several different language genres there is the language of analysis a language of description that includes the language of definition structure is . . . method is . . . form is . . . which lay out the elements deployed in the compositions to be analyzed and then theres the language of metaphor that is invoked by the analysis but works differently bachs performers function like children coloring in a coloring book feldmans performer is likened to someone given a camera who can take any pictures or kind of pictures he likes the conductor in earle browns indices is compared to a contractor following an architects plan and the performer to a workman who does what hes told while the performer in christian wolffs duo II for pianists is compared to a traveler who has to keep catching trains whose unpredictable arrivals and departures are just in the process of being announced so we have the childlike colorist the improvising photographer the construction worker and the harried railway traveler and in the music of changes we have the slave but there is also the

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language of narrative in the account of the branching paths by which a performer may or may not arrive at the ground of meister eckhardt He may do this in an organized way which may be subjected successfully to analysis or he may perform his function . . . in a way which is not consciously organized and therefore not subject to analysis either arbitrarily feeling his way following the dictates of his ego or more or less unknowingly by going inward with reference to the structure of his mind to a point in dreams following as in automatic writing the dictates of his subconscious mind or to a point in the collective unconscious of Jungian psychoanalysis following the inclinations of the species and doing something of more or less interest to human beings or to the “deep sleep” of indian mental practice—the Ground of Meister Eckhardt— identifying there with no matter what eventuality or he may perform his function . . . arbitrarily by going outwards with reference to the structure of his mind to the point of sense perception following his taste or more or less unknowingly by employing some operation exterior to his mind tables of random numbers following the scientific interest in probability or chance operations . . .

identifying there with no matter what eventuality and it is the interaction of these three or perhaps four language genres that determines how this poem is constructed now these language genres may count in cages sense as the material of the piece their repeated but free deployment their expansion and contraction within the different sections could count as the method and their precise positioning might count as the form the morphology of the continuity but i would question whether that alone could determine the expressive content of this work and where does that leave the notion of structure is it simply the notion of six sections five dealing with individual compositions and a sixth offering some kind of conclusion and a prophecy this seems hardly adequate because the most important thing about this piece appears to be left out the nature and effect of the ritualized and yet free repetitions of the materials this is particularly marked in the account of the pathways leading through the deep sleep of indian mental practice and the ground of meister eckhardt to the ultimate confrontation with no matter what eventuality for these repetitions change this narrative account into something like an incantation as the narrative expands and transforms finally in the fifth section on christian wolff to invoke meister eckhardts adjurations to the prospective performer who turns away from himself and his ego

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sense of separation from other beings and things and faces the ground of meister eckhardt from which all impermanencies flow and to which they return and is four times adjured that “thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were void thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were rotten wood thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were pieces of stone thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were the cold ashes of a fire long dead” thinking about this piece i believe its more useful to consider its structure as the organization of its function and ask how does this piece function to which i think we can answer it functions as an art machine so what is an art machine an art machine is a system whose parts when put in motion act upon each other in such a way as to cause you to see things differently i believe thats a reasonable definition of an art machine and i remember a long time ago teaching a class with a very large number of students and asking them as an assignment to make an art machine and because none of the students appeared to have had any experience of an art machine and feeling that no description would be equal to seeing one i sent them to look at one now this was in the late sixties or early seventies and the town of la jolla which was the closest shopping center to where we lived was at that time still inhabiting the nineteen fifties respectable women wore white gloves while their men wore blue blazers with brass buttons and pale slacks and most of the clothing stores sold clothing to accommodate their taste but my wife elly is an artist not a respectable woman and is also very small so the only place in la jolla she could shop was in the junior section of the local saks fifth avenue where they sold things like miniskirts and silver courrege boots now this junior section had a jukebox and if you were bored or otherwise so inclined you could put a quarter in and hear the rock tunes of the day and one day i put a quarter in carefully selecting b3 as i watched a mechanical hand that had been resting at the end of a long gantry rose up and traveled the length of the track along the row of vertically stacked discs and came to a stop at b3 reached into the rack grasped the disc lifted it out traveled to where the tone arm and needle were situated then turned around and traveled back to b3 where it replaced the disk retraversed the entire rack to its starting place and then lay down so i said to my class which had never seen an art machine and was apparently having a great deal of trouble finding one i said there is this device on the second floor of saks fifth avenue in la jolla that is an  •

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art machine if you go there you will see a very brilliantly lit machine of many colors if you put a quarter into it its lights will flash and it will start to work its right near the place where they sell the silver boots and if you put your quarter in youll be expected to make a selection of very great importance involving a number and a letter think carefully before making your choice then push a number and a letter and what you see next will be an art machine in operation in the days afterward between meetings i would run into class members it was a class with a hundred and fifty kids and i would run into them in revelle plaza or in the bookstore and they would see me and wave and laugh happily and i was happy because of the way they looked and if they came up to me i would laugh and ask them are you working on your art machine and theyd say i’m hard at work on my art machine but one kid i ran into looked very glum and i asked him are you working on your art machine he said no i dont know how to make one so i asked him didnt you go to the second floor of saks fifth avenue and do what i told you he said i went to the second floor and i did what you told me but i never saw any art machine what did you do i asked i went up there i put a quarter in this machine he said i pushed b3 and it played the shirelles it must have been broke i said 1989–2005

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Credits

In the Art Essays section, chapters 1 through 6 and chapter 10 first appeared in ARTnews, © 1966, 1968, 1970, 1971, 1971, 1972 ARTnews, LLC (http://www.artnews.com). Chapter 7 was originally published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, on the occasion of the exhibition entitled Video Art (January 17–February 28, 1975). Chapter 8 was originally published in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, © 1994 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York (used by permission). Chapter 9 first appeared in Seeing Rothko, ed. Glenn Phillips and Thomas Crow (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2005), © J. Paul Getty Trust. Chapter 11 first appeared as the foreword to Jeff Kelley’s book Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). In the Literary Essays section, chapter 12 first appeared in boundary 2, vol. 1, no. 1 (1972) (reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press). Chapter 13 first appeared in the now defunct magazine Occident, vol. 8 (Spring 1974), published at the University of California, Berkeley. Chapter 14 first appeared in Coherence: Experiments in Writing, O.ARS 1 (Cranberry Isles and Cambridge: O.ARS, 1981). Chapter 15 first appeared in Genre, vol. xx, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1987), and is reprinted by permission of the University of Oklahoma. Chapter 16 first appeared in Pacific Coast Philology, vol. xxx, no. 2 (1995). Chapter 17 first appeared in the Baxter Art Gallery’s catalog Siah Armajani (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 1982). Chapter 18 first appeared in Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1992), © The University of Chicago (all rights reserved). Chapter 19 first appeared in Modernism 5:1 (1998): 149–166, © The Johns Hopkins University Press (reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press). And chapter 20 first appeared in John Cage Uncaged is Still Cagey (San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press, 2005).

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers who first published these essays so many years ago, with thanks now for allowing them to be reprinted here. *

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Fifty lines from “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” by Charles Olson, from Selected Writings of Charles Olson. © 1960 by Charles Olson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. My thanks to New Directions for allowing me to reproduce these lines thirty-nine years after the essay in which I first discussed them appeared.

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Credits

Index

Abish, Walter, 317 Abstract art: history of, 6, 22–24, 45–54, 58; and Lewitt, 46–47; and Lichtenstein, 161; and Morris, 104; and Reinhardt, 51; and Stella, 46–47 Abstract-Expressionism, 25, 112, 150; and Hess, 2; and Kline, 324; and Rothko, 123, 127–28; and videos, 85 abstraction, 22–24 (see also Abstract art); Abstract-Expressionism; and art for corporations, 42, 46; death of, 213; exhaustion of, 258; and meaninglessness, 46– 47, 50–53, 150; and Modernism (poetry), 8, 200–2, 258; music as paradigm for, 50, 200–2 absurdity: and Aristotle, 253; and Beckett, 315; and Calderon, 263; and Dada, 221; and dreams, 263; and Duchamp, 136, 139–40; and Fluxus, 102, 149; and Joyce, 216; and Kaprow, 149, 151–53; and Lichtenstein, 161; and Morris, 102–3, 107, 110, 116, 118; and Rothko, 127; and Schwerner, 250; and video art, 94; and Warhol, 16, 18, 26; and Wittgenstein, 309, 311, 325 Academic poets, 192, 200, 205 Acconci, Vito H., 43, 94 “Ada” (Stein), 204–5 Advancement of Learning (Bacon), 218 Adventures of 100 Boots, The (Eleanor Antin), 114 advertising, 87–91, 113, 231, 258; aerial, 292–93, 295 Afanasiev, Alexander, 258–59

air, as element, 58 airplanes, 56, 96, 339–40 airport public artwork, 298–302 Albers, Josef, 100 Alberti, Rafael, 10 Alchemy of the Word (Rimbaud), 221 Alcheringa, 10–11 Alexander, 125, 319 Alice in Wonderland (Dodgson), 170 A l’Infinitif (Duchamp), 137 Allen, Donald, 9, 163 Alloway, Lawrence, 6 “All the Things You Are” (song), 325 alpha waves, 69–70 Altsheler, Joseph, 127 “America” (Ginsberg), 191–92 American Theater Association, 156–57 “ ‘American-Type’ Painting” (Greenberg), 48 Amet, Edward Hill, 84 Anderson, Laurie, 114 Anderson, Marian, 117 Andre, Carl, 54–55, 102, 119 Andromache, 176 anechoic chamber, 67–69, 246 Annual Hog Pasture Mix (Harrison), 72 Anthology, 149 Anthology of British and American Poetry, 1900–1950 (Tate and Cecil), 163 Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Williams), 10 “Anti-Form” (Morris), 103–4 antiform art, 103–4, 111–12 Antin, Blaise, 5, 237, 281–83 Antin, Eleanor (Elly), 4, 5–6, 7, 43, 95, 96, 114, 145, 280–81, 283, 342

anti-poetry, 179, 191, 192–93 anti-Semitism, 315 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 10, 189 Apple, Jackie, 296–97 AP wire service, 299–302 architecture, 21, 36, 45, 50, 52; destruction of, 303–4; and gothic cathedrals, 339; and Modernism (poetry), 161; in Southern California, 147; and technology, 64 Aristophanes, 254 Aristotle, 245, 252–53, 263, 279–80 Armajani, Siah, 271–72, 277–78, 281, 287 Arman, 214 Armory (New York), 73 Arnold, Matthew, 188 Arp, Jean (Hans), 10, 146, 196, 208–9, 219, 221–22, 254 arrangement: and Guston, 214; and Modernism (poetry), 200–3, 206, 208–9, 211–14; and Morris, 104; and music, 200–1. See also composition “Ars Moriendi According to Robert Morris, The” (Kuspit), 112 Art and Literature, 1 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 3, 255n3 Art and Technology show (LACMA), 61–77, 108; “Experiments” (Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz), 67–71; Harrison’s shrimp ranch, 63, 72; Ice Bag (Oldenburg), 62, 76; Mud Muse (Rauschenberg), 65–67; Reichek’s computer project, 62, 71–72 Art as Experience (Dewey), 148–49, 151–52 “Artaud Drawings” (Spero), 7 art audience, 50–52, 57, 66–67; and airport public art, 298–99, 301–2; and Antin, 228–29, 242, 332; and Aristotle, 253; and Armajani, 278; and contentless art experience, 52; and Happenings, 146–48; inside/outside, 148, 151; and Kaprow, 144–48, 153–54; and Modernism (poetry), 177–80, 228–29, 242, 278; and Morris, 104; and performance art, 242; and Pollution Show (Oakland Museum), 35, 37; and radio, 296; readers as, 177–80, 294–95; and representation, 22, 37; and Rothko, 124–34; and skypoems, 294–96; and video, 81–82, 85, 90; and Wittgenstein, 306 “Art Chronicle” (in Kulchur), 1–2, 127, 143  •

Index

art criticism: and Antin, 1–7, 11, 123, 271; and genre definition, 245, 255n3; and Morris, 98, 100–3, 110–12, 114, 116, 119; and Rothko, 123–24, 127, 129, 131 Art Deco, 161 art experience: and Aztec definitions, 260; and Calderon, 263; contentless, 52; exhaustion of, 258; and Kaprow’s Happenings, 147–51, 153, 155, 157–58; and Modernism (poetry), 162, 169–70, 172, 177–81, 183, 197–98, 202, 207, 210, 214, 218, 258–61, 263; and narrative, 258–61, 263; and psychoanalysis, 169–70; and Rothko, 127, 129–30, 133–34; and San Diego Union story, 260–61; and sense of history, 169–70; and Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz collaboration, 67–70 Artforum, 99, 102–3, 109–10 art historians, 337 Art in America, 101, 115 Art in Public Places program, 298–301 ARTNews, 2–4, 7, 43, 124, 143 Art Nouveau, 48, 50, 64, 220 Art of Assemblage, The (Seitz), 211, 213 “Art of Existence, The” (Morris), 107–10, 115, 120–21nn24–25 Art of the Fugue, The (Bach), 336–38 Ashbee, Charles Robert, 64 Ashbery, John, 1–2, 4, 179, 221 Asher, Michael, 51, 107, 109 “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” (Olson), 185–87 Astro Artz, 297 Asymmetries (Mac Low), 251 atomic age, 34, 94, 132–33, 191 Auden, W. H.: appeal to psychoanalysis in, 167, 168–70; historical sense in, 168–70; and prose, 244; tradition of, 8, 163–69, 200; and vector analysis, 182 auteur theory, 79 authenticity, 98–101, 111, 119 Aztec definitions, 9, 244–45, 248, 251, 255n2, 259–60 Babbitt, Milton, 333–34 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 195, 336–38, 340 Bachman, Ingeborg, 306 Bacon, Francis, 218–19 La Bagarre d’Austerlitz (Duchamp), 141–42

Baldessari, John, 7, 86, 94 Balkan oral poets, 11, 194, 331n26 Ball, Hugo, 10 Balla, Giacomo, 208 Ballerina and the Bum, The (Eleanor Antin), 95, 96 banality: and Katz, 23–24, 30; and Kiefer, 116; and Modernism (poetry), 205, 213– 14; and radical coherency, 236; and Warhol, 15 Banana (Warhol), 20 Banham, Rayner, 73 Battcock, Gregory, 102 Baudelaire, 175–78, 181, 323 Bauhaus, 5, 50, 64, 161–62 Baxter Art Gallery (Cal Tech), 271–75, 277– 78, 281 Beat poets, 9, 192, 194–95 Beautiful People, 19, 28, 30 “Beautiful Youth” (Warhol), 19 Bechtle, Robert, 6 Beckett, Samuel, 216, 306–7, 315–16 Beethoven, 195 beggar, transformation of, 12, 262–63, 270 Bell, Clive, 22 Bell, Larry, 107 Bell, Robert, 96 Ben Day dots, 161 Benglis, Lynda, 85, 94 Bentham, Jeremy, 170 Beowulf, 194, 205 Berger, Maurice, 120n24 Berkson, Bill, 124 Berle, Milton, 79 Berlin Wall, 151 Bernhardt, Thomas, 306 Berrigan, Ted, 3 Bertran de Born, 188 Betty Parsons Gallery, 148 “Between the Porch and the Altar” (Lowell), 172 Beuys, Joseph, 98, 101 biography, artistic, 100–1 Blackburn, Paul, 18, 179 Black English Vernacular, 259 Black Mountain poets, 9, 183, 187, 192, 194–95 Black Mountain Review, 184 black paintings: and Reinhardt, 51, 100,

129–30; and Rothko, 124–33; and Stella, 123 Black Power, 113 blacks: and jazz, 25–26, 128, 324–25, 331n26; and Modernism (poetry), 174– 75; in Oakland (CA), 37 Bladen, Ronald, 102 Blaine, Marvin, 108, 120–21n25 Blake, William, 4, 179, 191, 195, 221 Blowjob (Warhol), 18–19 Blue Book, The (Wittgenstein), 305–6, 316–19 Blurring of Art and Life, The (Kaprow), 157 Boice, Bruce, 85, 96 Book of Hours (Gomringer), 222 Borofsky, Jonathan, 114 Boston Common, 174–77 boundaries: and Duchamp, 139–40; and Frost, 276; of genre, 11; of painting surface, 47; and radical coherency, 231–35; of science/technology, 64; and television, 83–84, 87 boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature, 7, 208 Box of 1914 (Duchamp), 137 Box with the Sound of its Own Making (Morris), 102 Boyce, Jane, 267–68 “Boy’s Will, A” (Frost), 286 Brach, Paul, 4, 5–6 Brakhage, Stan, 5, 331 Braque, Georges, 49, 202–3, 208–9 Breath Exchange (Kaprow), 152 Brecht, George, 11, 239–44, 246–51, 254; “Dances, Events & Other Poems,” 240– 41; “Gloss for an Unknown Language,” 249–51, 254; and performance art, 143, 155, 237, 239–44, 246–51, 254, 256n7; “Three Dances,” 240–41; “Three Yellow Events,” 240; “Two Definitions,” 248– 49, 256n7; “Two Signs,” 243, 246–47; Water Yam, 240 Der Brenner, 329n11 Breton, André, 1, 10, 196 Bretz, Rudy, 83–85 Breuer, Joseph, 20 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, The (Duchamp), 141–42 British Heath Killers, 17

Index

• 

Brizo, Joe, 287–91 Brooks, Cleanth, 180–82 Brown, Bob, 144 Brown, Earle, 336–38, 340 Brown, G. Spencer, 254 Brown Book, The (Wittgenstein), 316 Browning, Robert, 197 Buck Rogers, 161 Bucky Fuller Dome (Montreal), 5 Buddhism, 255n1 Bunting, Basil, 184–85, 271–72 Burgstiner, Susan, 299–302 Burning Planet (Morris), 116 Burton, Richard, 94 Bushmiller, Ernie, 16 Buson, Yosa, 247 Byars, James, 62 Caesar, Sid, 79 Café Metro, 10 Cage, John, 331–43; aleatoric composition, 255n3; and Brecht, 246, 251; “Composition as Process,” 326, 330n30, 335–42; and Indian mental practice, 333, 338, 341; Lectures, 225, 251; and Modernism (poetry), 196, 200, 217, 219, 225, 332– 40; Music of Changes, 336–38, 340; and Rauschenberg, 67; Silence, 332–35; and Silliman, 326, 330n30 Cahiers du Cinéma, 79 Calas, Nicolas (Nicco), 1, 127–28 Calder, Alexander, 31, 315 Calderon, 263 California Institute of Technology, 271–75, 277–78, 281 “California Lives” (Eleanor Antin), 43 Campus, Peter, 93, 97 Cancelled Crop (Oppenheim), 41–42 Cannon, Walter Bradford, 155 Cantos (Pound), 9, 164, 169, 199, 208, 214 Carman, Bliss, 285 Carnegie Recital Hall, 144 cartoon-like figures, 100–1 Casebook on the Four Quartets, 200 Castelli, Leo, 3, 96, 103 Castelli Gallery, 3, 15, 63, 85–86, 99, 110, 111–12 Castelli Warehouse show, 103, 110, 120– 21n25  •

Index

Caterpillar, 7 Catullus translations, 216 Cavell, Stanley, 130, 245, 255n3 CBS, 145–46 Cecil, David, 163 Cedar Bar, 2 celebrities, 28–29, 74 Cendrars, Blaise, 10, 188–89, 237, 254, 282–83 cenotaphs, 110–11, 115–16 Césaire, Aimé, 10 Cezanne, Paul, 23–24, 49 Charles, Daniel, 334 “Charles Dodgson’s Song” (Jarrell), 170 Chekhov, 54 Chermayeff, Ivan, 4–5 chess, 46–47, 52, 59n3, 135 Children’s Tapes (Fox), 95 “Chinese Notebook, The” (Silliman), 326– 27, 330n31 Chippewa songs, 246–48, 255–56n5 Chirico, Giorgio de, 34 Chocolate Grinder (Duchamp), 32 Chomsky, Noam, 139 Christ, 165, 173 Christianity, 173 Christo, 100, 119 Ciardi, John, 8–9 Ciceronian rhetoric, 218 Citron, Jack, 72 City College of New York, 236 civil rights movement, 113 clichés, 8, 15, 116, 223, 323 Cloud Pump (Arp), 221 “Code, The” (Frost), 276–77 Cohen, Harold, 7 coherency. See radical coherency collage: and Antin, 227–29; in art, 16, 49, 146, 208–9, 211–14, 246; covert collage, 171–72; and dream narratives, 264; exhaustion of, 258; metonymy in, 211–13; and Modernism (poetry), 8–9, 169–78, 183–84, 193, 208–9, 211–15, 217, 224, 258; and radical coherency, 227–29, 235, 237 Collage (Benglis), 94 Collected Poems (Eliot), 8 color: and Judd, 53; and Kandinsky, 220, 224; and Katz, 24; and Lewitt, 46; and metonymy, 210, 212–13; and Modern-

ism (poetry), 210, 212–13, 220–21, 224; and Newman, 224; and Olitsky, 48; and Reinhardt, 51, 129; and Rothko, 124–33; and Stella, 48, 53; and Stills, 224; and Vasarely, 64–65; and videos, 93; and Warhol, 17–20 Colossus, The (Goya), 117–18 “Columbus” (Miller), 285 “Come be with me and be my love” (Marlowe), 327 Comfort Zones (Kaprow), 152–54 comic strips, 16, 26, 161, 284 commercials. See advertising composition: and machines, 65; and Modernism (poetry), 208–9, 212–14; on tape recorder, 195; of tribal/archaic poetries, 10. See also arrangement “Composition as Process” (Cage), 326, 330n30, 335–42 computers and art, 42, 46, 62, 71–72 Conceptual Art, 7, 40–43, 52, 57–58, 61, 63; and Brecht, 249; and Kaprow, 147, 150; and Kosuth, 306; and Morris, 100, 104, 110–11, 112; and self-referential object, 150 “Concord” (Lowell), 172–74 Concrete poetry, 10–11, 55, 154, 195, 204, 326 Concrete Poetry: A World View (Solt), 10 Confucius, 188 Constable, John, 64 Constructivism, 45, 49–50, 161, 197 Container Corporation of America, 75 contemporary, 45, 161–62 Continuities (Kermode), 217 contracts, 299–301 cooch dance exoticism, 198 “cool,” 24–26, 30 Coplans, John, 6 Corbiere, Tristan, 189 Corcoran Museum (Washington, D.C.), 98, 116–18 corporations and art, 61–77 Corso, Gregory, 179, 194 Cosmopolitan, 114 Courbet, Gustave, 220 Cox, Sidney, 274–75 Crane, Hart, 163 Crane, Nathalia, 285

Creeley, Robert, 179, 181, 185, 306, 320, 324–25, 331 Cronkite, Walter, 79 Crow, Tom, 126 Cuban missile crisis, 94, 132 Cubism, 47–50, 59–60n7, 112, 121n29; and Lichtenstein, 161; and metonymy, 209; and Modernism (poetry), 161, 200, 202– 3, 204, 220, 224; pseudo-Cubism, 47–48; and representation, 48–49, 202–3, 220; and Stein, 202–3, 204 culture, 113, 131; and abstraction, 8; of ancient Greece, 252, 256n8; artistic biography of, 100; and Brecht, 250; and collage, 8–9; and contentless art experience, 52; “domino theory” of, 180; and Eliot, 199, 214, 223; and fashion, 25, 27, 53, 113; and folklore, 258; and Joyce, 216; and Kaprow, 143, 151–52; and Kennedy administration, 27, 113; and Los Angeles, 73; and Modernism (poetry), 8–9, 162, 180, 188, 199, 214, 216, 223, 245, 250; and Morris, 104, 112–13, 115; of mound-building Indians, 39; and narrative, 268; and Oakland Museum, 35–37; and Olson, 188; oral culture, 11, 157–58, 194–96, 259, 267, 325, 331n26; and Pop art, 52–53, 73, 101, 112–13; and Pound, 188, 199, 214; and Rothko, 123, 131; and Stella, 123; and video art, 78, 82, 94 Culture and Value (Wittgenstein), 310, 312– 14, 328n4 Culture Hero (Levine), 118 Cummings, E. E., 8, 163 Cunningham, Merce, 225 “Le Cygne” (Baudelaire), 175–78 Dada, 50; and Modernism (poetry), 10, 146, 196, 213, 216, 221–24; and Morris, 100, 102–3; neo-Dada, 100, 102–3 Daily News, 17 Daley, Arthur, 285 dance: in ancient Greece, 252; and Brecht, 240–41; “dance-instruction poem,” 222– 23, 225, 241–43, 254, 255n1; and Graham, 198; Judson dancers, 73, 148, 225, 241; and Katz, 30; and Laban, 198; and Mac Low, 222–23, 241–42; and Modernism (poetry), 184–85, 194, 198; and O’Hara,

Index

• 

dance (continued) 194; and Pound, 184–85; and Rainer, 73, 225; and Warhol, 20 “Dances, Events & Other Poems” (Brecht), 240–41 dandyism, 24–25, 29–30, 193 Danto, Arthur, 124 D’Arcangelo, Allan, 1, 4 Darwin, Charles, 170 David, atelier of, 50 Davies, Alan, 325–27, 330n31 Davies, Arthur B., 199 Davis, Douglas, 79 Dayton, Robert, 108–9 Deak, Frantisek, 156 Deak, Norma Jean, 156 Death Makers, The (painting), 37 “Death of the Hired Man, The” (Frost), 283–84, 287, 291 Debussy, 237 decorative formalist art, 46–49, 53, 59n6, 161 Defoe, Daniel, 108 Degas, Edgar, 202 de Kooning, Willem, 24, 127, 150, 331n26 ∆ώρία (Pound), 8 de Maria, Walter, 149–51 democratic artworks: and Kaprow, 148; and Rothko, 133–34; and skypoems, 294; and technology, 64–65, 67 Dennis, John, 206 Densmore, Frances, 246–48, 255–56n5 De Regnier, Henri, 189–90 Derrida, Jacques, 326 Descartes, 218–19 de Stijl, 199, 224 Dewey, John, 148–49, 151–52 Dewey, Ken, 146 Diaghilev, 113 Dichtung and Wahrheit (Goethe), 324 Diderot, 254 “Dimanches” (Laforgue), 190 Dine, Jim, 143, 146 Dioptrics (Descartes), 218 discotheque, 19–21 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 218 Disney, 62, 76 documentaries, 94, 96 “documentation art,” 40–43, 57–58  •

Index

Dodgson, Charles, 170 domain: and Impressionism, 220; and Modernism (poetry), 219–21, 225–26; and radical coherency, 231; and Romanticism, 219–21, 225–26; and Wittgenstein, 323 Donne, John, 182 Door, 11 Rue Larrey (Duchamp), 142 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 17 dreams: Borofsky’s dream texts, 114; and Brecht, 240; dream narratives, 10, 262– 66; and Freud, 117, 264–65; and Morris, 117, 119; and Schwerner, 250 Dubliners (Joyce), 204 Duchamp, Marcel, 2, 32, 33, 107, 135–42, 249; La Bagarre d’Austerlitz, 141–42; Box of 1914, 137; Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, The, 141–42; and “delay in glass,” 136–38, 140–41; Door, 11 Rue Larrey, 142; 50 cc of Paris Air, 137–38; Fresh Widow, 141–42; Green Box, The, 136–39; as “indigestible,” 135–37, 140, 142; and language, 138–42; A l’Infinitif, 137; and puns, 141–42; ready-mades, 51, 102, 214; as window-maker, 141–42 Duchess of Alba, 22 Duncan, Isadora, 162 Duncan, Robert, 179, 181, 185, 188, 221 Duo for 2 Pianists (Wolff ), 337–38, 340 Duration Piece 2 (Huebler), 40–41 Earth as element, 56–58, 60n12 earthworks, 57–58, 100, 105–6, 117, 246 E. A. T., 32, 64, 73 Eat (Warhol), 19–20 Eckhardt, Meister, 338, 340–41 ecological art, 35–37, 39–43, 72 Edwards, Douglas, 84 Edwards, Mark N., 110, 120–21n25 Egan Gallery, 148 “8th Dance: Making Something Narrow and Yellow” (Mac Low), 242–43 Eighth Street Bookshop, 3 Eigner, Larry, 179 Eisenhower, Dwight, 280 “Elegy for a Dead Soldier” (Shapiro), 166–67 elements, 45, 54–59, 60n12; and Cage, 335; and corporate art, 71–72, 75; and Lich-

tenstein, 161; and Modernism (poetry), 169, 201–2, 209–11, 219, 225; and Morris, 102, 104; and Rothko, 133 Elements show (Boston), 72 Elga’s Incantation (Owens), 240 Eliot, T. S.: and collage, 169, 214; Collected Poems, 8; as critic, 164, 180–81, 205, 244; and Dada, 223; and end of Modernism, 162; Fire + rose = 1, 223; Four Quartets, 197, 199–200; and historical sense, 168– 69, 173; and late Tudor blank verse, 165, 190; and myths, 170; and prose, 205– 6, 244; provincialism of, 180, 183, 190, 199; “Prufrock,” 8; tradition of, 8, 163– 66, 168–70, 180, 183–84, 190–91, 200; Waste Land, The, 164, 169–70, 183–84, 208, 214 Ellmore, Lewis, 66 Elmslie, Kenward, 29 Empedocles, 253 Enthusiastic for the Ratio (Morris), 117 environmental artists, 107–9 environment shows, 35–37, 39–44 Ernst, Max, 146 eroticism, 30, 58, 152–53 Ervin, Sam, 79 Erwartung (Schoenberg), 317–18 Eshleman, Clayton, 7, 272 Essays of Four Decades (Tate), 178–79 Estes, Richard, 6, 23 Ethnopoetics, 10 Eugenie, Empress, 170 events: and Brecht, 240–41, 248, 250–51; and narrative, 259–61, 263–64, 266–67, 269–70 Exchange (Morris), 86, 94 Exercises in Meditation (Wortz), 69 “Experiments” (Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz), 67–71 Exploding Plastic Inevitable (Warhol), 20 Expressionism, 24, 27, 38–39, 50–51, 111, 115, 123; neo-Expressionism, 111–12, 115, 116 expressivity, 8, 184–85 eyesight, 125, 129–30 Factory (Warhol studio), 143–44 “Factum 1” (Rauschenberg), 127–28 “Factum 2” (Rauschenberg), 127–28

Fahlstrom, Öyvind, 62 Farber, Manny, 79 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 315 fashion, 25, 27, 53, 113 Feininger, Lyonel, 6 Feldman, Morton, 336–38, 340 feminism, 113, 230 Fenollosa, Ernest, 199 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 179 Ferrer, Rafael, 58 50 cc of Paris Air (Duchamp), 137–38 “Fifty Years of American Poetry” (Jarrell), 163 figurative art: and Guston, 100–1; and Katz, 22–30 film: of elements, 57; and IBM, 42; and Modernism (poetry), 214; and Morris, 105–6; and television, 79, 82–84, 89, 91, 94; and video, 79, 92, 94; and Warhol, 18–21 fin de siècle: and Joyce, 216; and Pound, 190, 199; and psychoanalysis, 169; and Schoenberg, 317–18; and Stein, 306; and technological art, 64 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 216 Fiorentino, Rosso, 16 Fire + rose = 1 (Eliot), 223 Fire as element, 58–59 First World War: and Frost, 285, 287; and Modern Art, 162; and Wittgenstein, 306, 312, 315–16, 328n10, 329n11 Fischback Gallery, 1, 29 Fitzpatrick, Tim, 300–1 Five Spot, 26 Flaherty, Robert, 84 flatness, 23–25, 28–30, 47–49, 59nn5–6, 207 Flaubert, 204 Flavin, Dan, 102 Flint, Henry, 145 Fluids (Kaprow), 147–49, 151 Fluxus, 6, 102, 144–45, 149, 240–41 Flying Wallenda, death of, 266–67 folk etymology, 137, 207, 324, 331n26 folklore: of machines, 32; and narrative, 258–59, 263 Folkways recordings, 10 Ford, Henry, 101 Fords, 101, 172–74 forest fires, 297

Index

• 

Forkner, John, 75 formalism: and Babbitt, 334; death of, 52– 53, 55, 213; decorative formalists, 46–49, 53, 59n6; and Greenberg, 123; Jacobsonian, 206; and Modernism (poetry), 206, 213; and video, 78 “For the Union Dead” (Lowell), 174–78 “40th Dance” (Mac Low), 222–23 Foucault, Michel, 326 4 Systems (Brown), 337–38 Four Quartets (Eliot), 197, 199–200 4th of July in Saugerties (Schneider and Korot), 96 Fox, I. J., 292–93 Fox, Terry, 95 Frames of Mind (Kaprow), 155–57 Frame Works (Kaprow), 155–56 framing devices, 170–72, 192 Frampton, Hollis, 79 Frankenthaler, Helen, 99 free speech, 295–96, 303 Frege, Gottlob, 312, 316 French poetry, 188–91. See also names of French poets Fresh Widow (Duchamp), 141–42 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 117, 264–65, 319 Fried, Michael, 3, 59–60n7, 245, 255n3 Friedländer, Walter, 16 Friends of the Earth, 35 Frobenius, 188 frontality, 19, 27–28 Frost, Robert, 163, 184, 245, 272–79, 281, 283–87, 291; biography of, 273, 275–76, 286–87; “Boy’s Will, A,” 286; “Code, The,” 276–77; “Death of the Hired Man, The,” 283–84, 287, 291; letter to Sidney Cox, 274–75; “Mending Wall,” 272, 274–76, 278; “North of Boston,” 286 Frottscher, Gerhardt, 201 Fuller, Bucky, 5, 33 Fuller, Pat, 298 Fundamentals of Language (Jacobson), 209 furs, 292–93 Fuseli, Henry, 4 Futurism, 49, 161–62, 197, 208–9 Gabo, Naum, 31, 45–46 Gain Ground (West Side experimental gallery), 42–43  •

Index

Galileo, 218 “Game at Salzburg, A” (Jarrell), 171–72 Garrett Industries, 61, 69 GAS (Kaprow), 4 Gauguin, Paul, 50 Gautier, Théophile, 189–90 Geheime Tagebücher (Wittgenstein), 328n9 Geldzahler, Henry. See Malanga, Gerard Gemini atelier, 76 General History of the Things of New Spain (The Florentine Codex) (Sahagún), 9, 244–45, 255n2, 259–60 genres: in ancient Greece, 252–53; in art, 46, 55, 86, 101, 212, 241–42, 245–46, 251; and Cage, 340–41; genre definition, 245–46, 255n3; and Modernism (poetry), 170, 172–73, 184, 196, 204, 212, 215–16, 244–46, 249–55, 255n3, 256n9; poetry as supergenre, 323–24; and Postmodernism, 11–12; and television, 90– 91; and video, 78, 81, 84, 85, 86, 94; and Wittgenstein, 318, 322, 323–25, 327 Gentleman’s Quarterly, 114 Geometry (Descartes), 218 Georges, Paul, 25 Gilbert, William, 218 Gilgamesh, 268–70 Gillette, Frank, 78–79, 81–82, 93 Ginsberg, Allen, 4, 18, 144, 179, 191–92 La Gioconda (Warhol), 19 “Giuseppe da Barber” (Daley), 285 glamour, 26–29, 53, 62, 71, 94, 113 Glass, Philip, 246 “Gloss for an Unknown Language” (Brecht), 249–51, 254 Goethe, 219, 324 Golden Electric Chairs (Warhol), 17 Gomringer, Eugen, 222, 225 Gordian knot, 125, 319 Gorky, Arshile, 200 gossip, art-world, 98–99, 110 gothic cathedrals, 337, 339 Goya, 117–18 graffiti painting, 115 Graham, Dan, 7, 93 Graham, Martha, 162, 198–99 Great Bear Pamphlets, 154 Greenberg, Clement, 19, 23, 48, 59–60nn5–7, 112, 121n29, 123

Green Box, The (Duchamp), 136–39 Green Gallery (New York), 101–3, 119–20n8 Gregorian chant, 246 Griffith, D. W., 214 Grimm brothers, 258–59 Gris, Juan, 49, 209 Grooms, Red, 146 Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Frege), 316 Guggenheim, 99 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 285 Guston, Philip, 100–1 Gymnopédies (Satie), 246 Haacke, Hans, 58 haiku, Japanese, 246–47, 255n4 Haircut (Warhol), 19 Hall, Donald, 9, 165 Hall, Edward, 152 Hamilton, Richard, 136 Happenings, 4, 143, 145–58, 246 Hard-Edge painting, 71, 73, 112–13, 150 Harrison, Charles, 7 Harrison, Newton, 62–63, 72 Hartman, Charles, 325 Harvard murals (Rothko), 133 hat tricks, 280–81, 284–87 Havelock, Eric, 253, 256n8, 333 Hawks, Howard, 79 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 173–75 HD, 8 Hearing (Morris exhibition), 110, 114 Hebrew prophets, 246 Heidegger, 7 Heizer, Michael, 57 Hejinian, Lynn, 325 Held, Al, 2 Hemingway, Ernest, 117–18, 248, 315 Herakleitos, 158, 199 Heredia, José-Maria de, 189 Herodotus, 253 Hess, Tom, 2–3, 124, 143 High Performance magazine, 297 “Highwayman, The” (Noyes), 285 Hirshhorn Museum, 110 “History of the Industrial Revolution” (Kitaj), 62 Hitchcock, Alfred, 79 hitchhiking, 280 Hitler, 6

“Hiver” (Laforgue), 190 Holt, Nancy, 94 Homer/Homeric poets, 11, 194, 273, 325, 331n26, 335 homonymy, 203 Hooke, Robert, 16 Hornick, Lita, 1–2, 26, 127, 143 Horticultural Hall (Boston), 5 hotel (upstate New York), 287–91 Houston (Tex.), 124–25 Hovey, Richard, 285 Howl (Ginsberg), 191 Hudson Review, 163 Huebler, Douglas, 40–41, 57–58 Huidobro, Vicente, 10, 189, 196, 254 Hulten, K. G. Pontus, 32 “Human Universe, The” (Olson), 188 Huston, John, 79 I Am Curious (Yellow) (film), 37 IBM, 42, 46, 65, 71–72 I-Box (Morris), 102 Ice Bag (Oldenburg), 62, 76 ice structures, 149 “I Declare the War is Over” (song), 151 Idiot, The (Dostoyevsky), 17 Idomeneo, 170 Ignatow, David, 179 Iliad, 205, 274, 335 illusion, 23–25; and film, 84; and Kennedy administration, 113; and Modernism (poetry), 113, 204, 215, 220; and Olitsky, 48; and Romanticism, 220; and television, 85; and video art, 96 Imagism, 199, 200–3, 255–56n5 imitation, 252–53 Impressionism, 24, 47, 49, 202, 220 Inability to Endure or Deny the World (Morris exhibition), 98 “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound), 248 Indiana, Robert, 20 Indices (Brown), 337–38, 340 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz), 165 Ingres, 19 “In Memory of Arthur Winslow” (Lowell), 172 installation art, 85, 93; and Morris, 100, 102, 110–11, 115–16; and Rothko, 128

Index

• 

Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, Boston), 4–5 interactive art: “Experiments” (Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz), 67–71; and Morris, 114; Mud Muse (Rauschenberg), 65–67; and video, 81–82 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 264–65 Intersection 3 (Feldman), 336–38 “In the Naked Bed in Plato’s Cave” (Schwartz), 165 In the Penal Colony (Kafka), 250 Inventory (Baldessari), 94 irony, 30; and Duchamp, 107; and Lowell, 175; and Modernism (poetry), 175, 182– 83, 190, 192; and Morris, 104–10, 117, 119, 120n24; and Richards, 182–83 Irwin, Robert, 51, 61–62, 67, 107, 109, 298, 300–1 Issa, Kobayashi, 246–47 Itten, Johannes, 22 Jacob, Max, 10 Jacobson, Roman, 206, 209 James, Henry, 173–74 James, William, 175 Jammes, Francis, 190 Janis, Sidney, 63 Japanese haiku, 246–47, 255n4 Jaquet-Droz, Pierre, 31, 33 Jarrell, Randall, 8, 163, 165, 167–68, 170–72 Jawlensky, Alexei, 6 jazz, 25–26, 128; and improvisation, 324– 25, 331n26 Jazz Text (Hartman), 325 Jeanette (mother-in-law), 287–91 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 228–29 Jewish Museum (New York), 37–39 Jews, 223, 237–38, 315 Johns, Jasper, 53, 102, 113, 136, 139–40, 217, 225 Johnson, Lyndon, 17 Johnston, Jill, 118, 144 Jonas, Joan, 7 Jones, LeRoi, 2, 38 Jornada del Muerto (Morris installation), 110–11, 116 Josef, Attila, 189 Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe), 108  •

Index

Joyce, James, 199, 203, 215–16; Finnegans Wake, 216; Ulysses, 8, 216 Judd, Donald, 53, 102, 119, 214, 225 Judson Church, 20; Judson dancers, 73, 148, 225, 241 Judy, Richard, 299 jukebox, 342–43 Kafka, Franz, 250, 269–70 Kahn, Herman, 62 Kandinsky, Wassily, 6, 50, 150, 198–99, 219–20 Kant, Immanuel, 219, 320 Kaprow, Allan, 11–12, 143–58, 225, 254; Blurring of Art and Life, The, 157; Breath Exchange, 152; cinder blocks, 151, 157– 58; Comfort Zones (Kaprow), 152–54; as director of Originale opera, 4, 144– 45; Fluids, 147–49, 151; Frames of Mind, 155–57; Frame Works, 155–56; Great Bear Pamphlet, 154; Happenings, 4, 143, 145–58; ice structures, 58, 147–49, 151; precisionism of, 147, 152; Pre-Socratic, 155; Pulse-Breath Exchange, 152; Pulse Exchange, 152; Satisfaction, 152–54; “Some Recent Happenings,” 154–56; Sweet Wall, 151; Tail Wagging Dog, 151; Time Pieces, 152; Trading Dirt, 157; and “unart,” 149, 158; video art, 93, 157; work choices of, 147–58 Karp, Ivan, 35 Katz, Ada, 27 Katz, Alex, 2, 6, 22–30; Ada, 27, 29; compared to Warhol, 26–27; and “cool,” 24– 26, 30; and dandyism, 24–25, 29–30; and flatness, 23–25, 28–30; flower paintings, 29–30; and glamour, 26–29; large-scale work of, 27; Lita Hornick, 26; One Flight Up, 29; Paul Taylor Dance Company, 30; Rauschenberg, 27; and representational painting, 22–30 Kaun, Alex, 306 Keaton, Buster, 118–19 Keats, John, 219–20 Kelley, Jeff, 149, 157 Kelly, Ellsworth, 2, 98 Kelly, Robert, 248 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 17–18, 19, 27, 113 Kennedy, John F., 113, 132

Kennedy, Robert, 6, 113 Kennedy administration, 27–28, 113 Kenner, Hugh, 208 Kenyon Review, 163, 224 Kermode, Frank, 217 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 10, 189, 254 Kiefer, Anselm, 116 Kienholz, Ed, 32 Kierkegaard, 168, 254, 323 Kinematics (Tyson), 32 kine-recordings, 83–84 Kineticism, 73, 225 King, Martin Luther, 113 “Kingfishers, The” (Olson), 178 King James Bible, 246 King Philip’s War, 172–73 kinship analysis, 252, 253–54 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 6 Kitaj, R. B., 62, 76 Klavierstueck XI, The (Stockhausen), 336, 338 Klee, Paul, 6 Kline, Franz, 148, 324, 331n26 Kluver, Billy, 64 Koch, Kenneth, 179 Konitz, Lee, 325 Koons, Jeff, 100 Kora in Hell (Williams), 9 Korn, Henry, 297 Korot, Beryl, 96 Kosuth, Joseph, 249, 306 Kovacs, Ernie, 79 Kowalski, Piotr, 61–62 KPFK radio station, 296–97 Kramer, Hilton, 98, 101 Kramer, Samuel, 256n7 Krebs, Rockne, 62 Kruchonykh, Alexei, 10 Kruger, Barbara, 115 Kubler, George, 100 Kuhn, Thomas, 169–70 Kulchur, 1–2, 127, 143 “Kunigundula” (Arp), 221–22 Das Kunstwerk, 129 Kürnberger, Ferdinand, 324 Kuspit, Donald, 111–12 Laban, Rudolf von, 198 Labov, William, 259, 267

Labyrinth (Morris), 114 Lacy, Suzanne, 303 Laforgue, Jules, 189–90 Laguna Beach Unitarian Fellowship, 75 La Jolla Museum, 295, 297 “Lamia” (Keats), 220 Land, Edwin H., 221 language, 9; and Antin, 228; and Aristotle, 279; and Beckett, 306, 316; and Brecht, 249–51; and Duchamp, 138–42; and Frost, 274–76, 284–85; and Jacobson, 209–11; and Joyce, 203, 216; and Modernism (poetry), 184–85, 190, 202–7, 209–16, 221–22, 252; and Morris, 113, 117; and Rothko, 123–24, 130–32; and Stein, 203–5, 216, 306; and Wittgenstein, 306–9, 313–14, 316–27, 329n15 Language poets, 306, 325–27 Laughlin, Jay, 294 Lautréamont, 33, 190 Lawrence, D. H., 191, 208 Lear Siegler, 42 Leary, Timothy, 52 Lebel, Robert, 135 Lectures (Cage), 225, 251 Ledoux, Marc André, 50 Leo Castelli Warehouse, 103, 110, 120– 21n25 Leonardo da Vinci, 31, 58–59, 105–6, 228– 29 Lepke, execution of, 17 Lequeu, Jean-Jacques, 50 Levertov, Denise, 179 Levine, Les, 33, 86, 93, 118 Levine, Sherry, 115 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 202 Lewis, Sinclair, 205 Lewis, Wyndham, 199, 208 Lewitt, Sol, 46–47, 51, 102, 119, 225 lexicography, 248–49 Library of Congress, 179 Lichtenstein, Roy, 6, 25–26, 40, 53, 62, 161, 225 lighting: and Reinhardt, 129–30; and Rothko, 124–25, 129–31 Light Poems (Mac Low), 251 Lippard, Lucy, 7 literary criticism: and Antin, 7–12, 258; and genre definition, 245, 255n3; and

Index

• 

literary criticism (continued) Modernism (poetry), 163–70, 177–85, 188–90, 205, 208, 217, 221, 248, 251; and Postmodernism, 217 literary significance in art: and de Maria, 150; and Duchamp, 141–42; and Eastern religions, 51; and Kaprow, 157; and Katz, 23–24; and Morris, 86, 110, 121; and Rothko, 133; and Schwitters, 211– 13; and Smithson, 57 “Little Friend, Little Friend” (Jarrell), 172 Litton Industries, 74 Livingstone, Jane, 69–70, 75 Living Theater, 148 Lockheed, 76 logic: and structuralism, 259, 266; and Wittgenstein, 308–12, 315–16, 328n10 Lone Ranger, The (radio program), 88 Lonidier, Fred, 7 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 10, 189 Lord, Albert, 11, 194, 325, 331n26 Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell), 172–73 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 42, 61–77, 108 Louis, Morris, 99 Louis Philippe, King of France, 176 Love Nest, The (film), 118 Lowell, Robert, 8, 163, 165, 170, 172–78, 180, 183, 273 Lowth, Bishop, 206 Luminism, 62, 73 luminosity, 24, 49, 131–32 “Lunes” (Kelly), 248 Lustra (Pound), 190–91 Lyrical Ballads, 206–7 Mach, Ernst, 312 Machine, The (Hulten), 32 “Machine, The” (MOMA show), 32 machines, 31–34; and Cage, 342–43; machine methods in art, 25–26; and Morris, 101–2, 104; and Pollution Show (Oakland Museum), 39; and Reinhardt, 51; and Stella, 126; as technology, 64–65, 72, 74–75 Maciunas, George, 144–45, 240 Mac Low, Jackson: Art and Technology show (LACMA), 42; Asymmetries, 251; editor of Fluxus-oriented Anthology,  •

Index

149; “8th Dance: Making Something Narrow and Yellow,” 242–43; “40th Dance,” 222–23; Light Poems, 251; and Originale (Stockhausen opera), 4, 144; and performance art, 222–23, 225, 241– 43, 254, 255n1; Presidents, 251; and primitive poetry, 10; Pronouns: A Collection of 40 Dances, The, 222–23, 241–43, 255n1; “Reflections on the Occasion of the Dance Scope Issue,” 255n1; “Some Remarks to the Dancers,” 241–42 Making of Americans, The (Stein), 203–4, 306 Malanga, Gerard, 3, 20, 144 Malcolm, Norman, 321 Malcolm X, 37, 113 Malevich, Kazimir, 52, 162, 209, 312 Mallarmé, 201 Manet, Édouard, 202, 220 Mangold, Robert, 1 Manhattan Project, 132 Mann, Andy, 96 Ma Perkins (radio program), 88 “Maple Sugar” (Chippewa song), 247 Marie Therese, 171 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 189 Markopoulos, Gregory, 5 Marlborough Gallery (New York), 100 Marlowe, Christopher, 327 Marx, Karl, 168, 319 Marxism, 167–69 “Mary Winslow” (Lowell), 172 Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, 4–5 Matthews, Camp, 6 Mauthner, Fritz, 312 Maxwell’s demon, 170 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 189 Mays, Wolfe, 321 McCann-Erickson, 79 McClure, Michael, 179 meaninglessness, 46–47, 50–53, 149–51 “Meaningless Work” (de Maria), 149–51 Meat Joy (Schneemann), 143 meditation: and Beckett, 315; in “Experiments” (Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz), 69– 70; and Wittgenstein, 308, 310–12, 315, 328n10 Meditations (Antin), 227, 248 Mefferd, Boyd, 62 “Melanctha” (Stein), 8

Méliès, Georges, 84 Melville, Herman, 173–74 memory: and Antin, 133, 229; and Morris, 117–18; and performance art, 242; and Rothko, 126, 128, 130, 133; and Wittgenstein, 305–6 Memory Is Hunger (Morris), 117–18 “Mending Wall” (Frost), 272, 274–76, 278 MENSA, 62 Merzbau (Schwitters), 213 Messerli, Doug, 130 Metamorphosis (Kafke), 269–70 metaphor: and Aristotle, 279–81, 283; and Armajani, 277–78; and Cage, 340; and Duchamp, 136; and Freud, 117; and Frost, 276–79, 281, 283; and Jacobson, 209–10; and machines, 64; mapping metaphors, 57; and Modernism (poetry), 136, 185, 209–10; and Morris, 111, 115, 117; of music, 185; and Plato, 253; and Rothko, 133; and Wittgenstein, 307, 311, 320 Metaphysical Modernist tradition, 181–83 Meteors (Descartes), 218 meter, 179–80, 183, 185, 205, 275, 325 metonymy, 169, 209–13, 223 Metropolitan Museum (New York), 38 Miami International Airport, 298–302 Mid-Century American Poets (Ciardi), 8–9 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 52 Mill, John Stuart, 170 Miller, Joaquin, 285 Mills, Paul, 35–37 Milton, John, 197 mimesis, 252–53 Minimal Art, 7; and Creeley, 324; and Fried, 3, 245; and Judson dancers, 148; and Kaprow, 147–48, 150; and Morris, 52–53, 100, 102–4, 111–14, 214; and Rothko, 123, 125; sculpture, 73, 102, 112–13, 150, 214; and self-referential object, 150; and technology, 143; and tensecond glance, 296 Minute Men, 172–73 “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (Stein), 204–5 M.L. D’Arc Gallery, 154 modern American poetry. See Modernism (poetry)

Modern Art, 47–48, 112–15, 161–62, 220, 224, 245, 255n3 (see also names of Modern artists and types of Modern art); and collage, 16, 49, 146, 208–9, 211–14; and elements, 45, 54–59, 60n12, 71–72, 75, 102, 104, 133, 161, 201; and Greenberg, 19, 23, 47–48, 59–60nn5–7, 112; pathos of, 18, 69, 115, 161–62, 197–99 ModernArt (Lichtenstein), 53, 161 Modernism (poetry), 7–10, 161–96; and abstraction, 8, 200–2, 258; appeal to psychoanalysis in, 167, 168–70; and Aztec definitions, 9, 244–45, 255n2; and collage, 8–9, 169–78, 183–84, 193, 208– 9, 211–15, 224, 258; critics of, 7–10, 163– 70, 177–85, 188–90, 205, 208, 217; and Cubism, 161, 200, 202–3, 204, 220; and Dada, 10, 146, 196, 213, 216, 221–24; divergent traditions of, 165, 180–96, 200– 8, 217–20, 224–25; end of, 7–8, 161– 63, 197–99, 226; and framing devices, 170–72, 192; and Frost, 163, 184, 245, 272–79, 281, 283–86, 291; and genres, 170, 172–73, 184, 196, 204, 212, 215–16, 244–46, 249–55, 255n3, 256n9; historical sense in, 168–70, 172–78; international modern style, 189; and meter, 179– 80, 183, 185, 205; and metonymy, 169, 209–13, 223; and music, 184–86, 195, 199, 200–2, 206, 214, 221–22, 242, 245, 255n3, 256n6; and narrative, 8, 169–71, 174, 183, 199–200, 203–5, 214–16, 258; neo-Modernists, 217; pathos of, 161– 62, 199–200; questions about, 197–226; Tate’s views on, 163, 165–66, 177–80; universalist claims of, 45, 50, 55–56, 59, 114, 139, 150, 196, 197–98; and Wittgenstein, 306–7, 323–27 Modern Sculpture (Lichtenstein), 161 Moholy-Nagy, László, 31, 162 Mondrian, 150, 198–99, 209, 224 Monk, Ray, 313 Monk, Thelonious, 26, 128 Monroe, Marilyn, 16–17, 26–27 Montauk Happening (Kaprow), 4, 145–47 Montreal Expo show, 5 monumentality, 28, 102 Monument for the Third International (Tatlin), 34

Index

• 

Moody, William Vaughan, 285 Moore, Marianne, 8, 163, 275 Moore, Peter, 6, 242 Moorman, Charlotte, 144 Morphology of the Folktale, The (Propp), 259 Morris, Robert, 3, 11, 98–119, 214, 217, 225; “advertisement” (November 1970), 104– 7; “Anti-Form,” 103–4; antiform art, 103–4, 111; “Art of Existence, The,” 107– 10, 115, 120–21nn24–25; and authenticity, 98–101, 111, 119; Box with the Sound of its Own Making, 102; Burning Planet, 116; Corcoran show, 98, 116–18; cover of some/thing, 143, 242; as curator, 103, 110, 120–21n25; encaustic on aluminum paintings, 98; Enthusiastic for the Ratio, 117; environment shows, 42–44; Exchange, 86, 94; Green Gallery shows, 101–3; Hearing (exhibition), 110, 114; hydrocal reliefs, 112, 116–17; I-Box, 102; Inability to Endure or Deny the World (exhibition), 98; interactive show at the Tate (1971), 114; Jornada del Muerto (installation), 110–11, 116; Labyrinth, 114; lead reliefs, 101–2, 143, 242; Memory Is Hunger, 117–18; and myths, 143, 145; “Notes on Sculpture,” 52, 53–54, 102; “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects,” 103–4; and persistence of use, 100–1, 119; Preludes, 115; Preludes (for A.B.) (exhibition), 110; Project, 111–12; and proprietary rights, 98–100, 110, 120–21n25; Ring with Light, 103; “Roller Disco: Cenotaph for a Public Figure,” 115–16; S and M poster, 110, 116, 117; Second Study for a View from a Corner of Orion (installation), 110–12; “Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographies,” 115; Time and Loss and Grief and the Body, 118–19; and video art, 74, 86, 94; Voice (exhibition), 110, 114; “white show,” 102, 119–20n8 Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro (Fiorentino), 16 Movable Feast (Hemingway), 117 movies. See film Moynihan, Daniel, 5 Mozart, 195 Mud Muse (Rauschenberg), 62, 65–67  •

Index

Munari, Bruno, 31–32 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 31– 32, 38–39, 43–44, 296 Museum of the University of Utah, 6 music, 71; in ancient Greece, 252; and Arp, 221–22; and Babbitt, 333–34; and Cage, 255n3, 333–40; and Chippewa songs, 247; and Eliot, 199–200; jazz, 25–26, 128, 324–25, 331n26; and Mac Low, 242; and Modernism (poetry), 184–86, 195, 199, 200–2, 206, 214, 221–22, 242, 245, 255n3, 256n6; opera, 246; as paradigm for abstraction, 50, 200–2; and Pound, 184–85, 200–1, 206; and radical coherency, 237; raga music, 155; tonal music, 214; and Wittgenstein, 323, 324–25 “Music Discomposed” (Cavell), 255n3 Music of Changes (Cage), 336–38, 340 Must We Mean What We Say? (Cavell), 130 myths, 11, 143, 145; Aztec, 244; and Modernism (poetry), 170, 173–75, 178, 184, 216 names, 279–84 “Napoleon Crosses the Berezina” (Lowell), 172 Napoleon III, 176 narrative: in Antin’s talk poems, 11, 331– 32; in art, 25–26, 86, 101, 114–15, 149; in Aztec definitions, 260; and Cage, 340; and Dewey, 149; dream narratives, 10, 262–66; and Eliot, 169–70, 183, 199– 200, 203, 214; and folklore, 258–59; and Gilgamesh, 268–70; grammar of, 259; and Guston, 101; of Jane Boyce, 267–68; and Kafka, 269–70; and Kaprow, 149, 155, 157–58; logic of, 259; master narratives, 114; and Modernism (poetry), 8, 169–71, 174, 183, 199–200, 203–5, 214– 16, 258; and Morris, 114–15; and Oedipus Rex, 263, 264, 270; and Pound, 169, 199, 203, 214; pseudo-narrative, 171, 174; and radical coherency, 237; and Ricoeur, 259, 261, 266; and San Diego Union story, 260–61; and Stein, 204–5; and structuralism, 259–70; uselessness of, 258; and video, 86, 91; Wittgenstein’s examples as, 305–6, 316–23, 325, 329n15

NASA, 42, 74 Nashville critics, 170 Native Americans: Chippewa songs, 246– 48, 255–56n5; and elements, 56, 60n12; and King Philip, 172–73; and Modernism (poetry), 172–73, 175, 178, 186–87; mound-building Indians, 39–40; storytelling of, 11; and tepees, 4, 145–47; Zuni tales, 11, 259 Nauman, Bruce, 107 neo-Dada, 100, 102–3 neo-Expressionism, 111–12, 115–16 neo-Modernists, 217 Neruda, Pablo, 10, 189 Nerval, Gérard de, 107, 116 Neubert, George, 36 Neuhaus, Max, 298 New American Poetry, The (Allen), 9, 163 New Brutalism, 36 Newbury Street gallery (Boston), 5 New Directions, 294 New England Myth, 173–75 New Left, 113 Newman, Barney, 5, 48, 59n6, 150, 224 New Poets of England and America (Hall, Pack, and Simpson), 9, 165 Newport Harbor Art Museum, 112 newswires, 298–302 The New Tendency work, 64 New York Review of Books, 174 New York school, 9, 29, 193–95 New York Times, 98 Nez Perce chief, 56, 60n12 Nico, 19–20, 144 Nicolaidis, George, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 319, 323 9-Evenings show, 73, 74 9 in a Warehouse (exhibition), 103, 110 Nixon, Richard, 35, 37, 94, 104, 113 Nochlin, Linda, 23 Nodelman, Sheldon, 131 Noland, Kenneth, 2, 46 Norris Industries, 74 “North of Boston” (Frost), 286 “Notes on Sculpture” (Morris), 52, 53–54, 102 “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects” (Morris), 103–4 novels, 5, 21, 204, 215–16, 218

Noyes, Alfred, 285 nuclear energy, 132–33 “Nymph’s Reply, The” (Raleigh), 327 Oakland Museum (Oakland, Calif.), 35– 37, 39, 44 Objectivists, 8 Ochs, Phil, 151 Odyssey, 189, 190, 335 Oedipus Rex, 263, 264, 270 O’Hara, Frank, 1, 4, 179, 193–94 Oldenburg, Claes, 62, 75–76, 146 Olitsky, Jules, 46, 48 Olson, Charles, 178–79, 181, 183–88, 191, 194–95, 200, 208, 224; “As the Dead Prey Upon Us,” 185–87; “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things,” 185; “Human Universe, The,” 188; “Kingfishers, The,” 178; and myths, 178; “Projective Verse,” 184–85 One-Eyed Bum (Mann), 96 One Flight Up (Katz), 29 opera, 246 Oppen, George, 8, 184 Oppenheim, Dennis, 41–42, 57 Oppenheimer, Joel, 179 oral culture: and Kaprow, 157–58; and Labov, 259, 267; and Modernism (poetry), 194–96; Native American storytelling, 11; Parry and Lord’s work on, 11, 194, 325, 331n26; and Tedlock, 11, 259; Zuni tales, 11, 259 Origin, 184 Originale (Stockhausen opera), 4, 144–45 orthogonality, 33, 47 Osaka World’s Fair (1970), 61, 63 Osgood, Charles E., 182 Ossian, 195 Ovaltine, 88 Owens, Rochelle, 10, 240, 254 Owens, Thomas, 325 Oxydol, 88 Pack, Robert, 9, 165 Paik, Nam June, 78, 93, 144, 298 painterly sense, 24, 59n5, 146, 211 painting surface, 24, 45–48 Painting with Stars, A (Schwitters), 211–13 Palmer, Samuel, 4

Index

• 

Panama or The Adventures of my Seven Uncles (Cendrars), 188 Panofsky, Erwin, 131 “Papyrus” (Pound), 248 paradigms, 169–70, 183, 220 paradox, 102–3, 250–51, 259 Parker, Charlie, 324–25 parody: and Cage, 336; and Cubism, 48–49; and Modernism (poetry), 170, 183, 192; and Morris, 94, 116, 120n24; self parody, 116; and video art, 94 Parry, Milman, 11, 194, 325, 331n26 Partisan Review, 163, 174–75 Pasadena Art Museum, 6, 46, 147 Pasadena Star News, 156 Paston, John, 267–68 pathos, 18, 69, 115, 161–62, 197–200, 250 Paul Taylor Dance Company, 30 “Perceptual Psychology” (Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz), 67–71 Peret, Benjamin, 196 performance art: in ancient Greece, 252– 53; and Antin’s talk poems, 11, 227, 271, 273, 297, 331–32; and Brecht, 143, 155, 239–44, 246–51, 254, 256n7; and Jonas, 7; and Kaprow’s Happenings, 4, 143, 145–58; and Mac Low, 222–23, 225, 241– 43, 254, 255n1; and Morris, 100, 114–15; and Socrates, 324; time spent looking at, 296; and Wittgenstein, 321–24 Perloff, Marjorie, 306–7, 311–12, 315–16, 319, 325–27 persistence of use, 100–1, 119 Personae (Pound), 8, 197, 199 phenomenology: and elements, 54, 56; and Modernism (poetry), 195, 207; and Morris, 11, 104–6, 114; and Ricoeur, 259; and Spanos, 7; and television, 87; and video art, 93; and Wittgenstein, 308; and Wordsworth, 207 Philco-Ford, 75 Philip, KIng, 172–73 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 251, 316–18, 320–21, 326 photography, 113; of elements, 57; and Huebler, 40–41; and Kaprow, 154–55, 157; and Katz, 25; and machines, 32; and Montauk Happening, 145–46; and Moore, 242; and Pollution Show (Oak •

Index

land Museum), 35, 36; and Pop art, 22; and television, 80–82, 91, 94, 132, 145– 46; and video, 82, 86, 91–94, 96–97 Picabia, Francis, 33 Picasso, Pablo, 49, 162, 202–4, 208–9, 213 picture plane, 47, 49, 59n5 plainsong, 246 Plato, 252–53, 274, 323–24 Playboy, 114 plot, 259–61, 263, 266, 269 “poem in a minor key” (Antin), 8 Poetics (Aristotle), 252–53, 279–80 poetry, modern. See Modernism (poetry) poetry lounge, 271–75, 277–78, 281 Poetry Magazine, 163, 189 Poet’s Hardware Theater, The, 10 politics and art/poetry: and environment shows, 36–37, 39–40; and Modernism (poetry), 113–14, 191–92, 224; and Morris, 104–6; and Schwitters, 212; and Silliman, 326 Pollock, Jackson, 25, 104, 117, 121n29, 127– 28, 148, 150, 224, 331n26 pollution, criminal or tragical, 39–41 Pollution Show (Oakland Museum), 35– 37, 39, 44 Polski Dom Narodne, 20 Pop art, 1, 6, 15–16, 22, 25, 40, 112–13; and glamour, 26–29, 53; and Happenings, 147; and Kennedy administration, 27; and self-referential object, 150; and technology, 63, 66, 73–74, 77, 143; and ten-second glance, 296; and video, 79 Popova, Lyubov, 31 pornography, 1, 30, 73, 183 Portapak, 91–92, 93, 96 Porter, Fairfield, 24 Postmodernism, 11–12, 113–14, 161, 213, 217, 219, 226; Postmodern American poetry, 7, 10; and Wittgenstein, 306, 327 Pound, Ezra: Cantos, 9, 164, 169, 199, 208, 214; and collage, 169, 183, 214; and Dada, 223; ∆ώρία, 8; and end of Modernism, 162; expressivist theory of, 184– 85; and historical sense, 169; and Imagism, 199, 200–1, 203; and language, 185, 190, 199, 203; and logopoeia, 323; Lustra, 190–91; and melopoeia, 205; and music, 184–85, 200–1, 206; “Papyrus,” 248;

Personae, 8, 197, 199; and prose, 205–7; provincialism of, 183, 188, 189–90, 199, 200–1, 205; “Serious Artist, The,” 206; “In a Station of the Metro,” 248; and Stein, 183, 196, 200–1, 205; tradition of, 8, 163–65, 169, 180–81, 183–84, 187–88, 190–92, 196, 200; and vortex, 208 Poussin, Nicolas, 26, 162 praise poetry, 90 precisionism, 147, 152 Preface to Plato (Havelock), 333 Preludes (for A.B.) (Morris exhibition), 110 Preludes (Morris), 115 present, 7–8, 161–62, 197; and narrative, 263, 266 “Present State of Poetry, The” (Schwartz), 163–64 Presidents (Mac Low), 251 Presley, Elvis, 16–17 Pre-Socratic (Kaprow), 155 Previn, Andre, 156 Previn, Dory, 156 “Primitive and Archaic Poetry” (poetry readings), 10 Primitives, 49–50, 146 Prince, Richard, 115 Principles of Mathematics (Russell), 316 Prisoners’ Dilemma (Serra), 85–86, 95–96 Project (Morris), 111–12 “Projective Verse” (Olson), 184–85 Pronouns: A Collection of 40 Dances, The (Mac Low), 222–23, 241–43, 255n1 Propp, Vladimir, 259 proprietary rights, 99–101, 110, 120–21n25 prose: and Auden, 244; and Cage, 333; and Duchamp, 136–37; and Eliot, 205–6; and hybridism, 57; and Joyce, 215–16; and Modernism (poetry), 204–7, 215–16, 244; and Pound, 205–7; and Stein, 204– 5, 215–16; and video art, 78; and Wordsworth, 206–7 Prototractatus (Wittgenstein), 314–15 provincialism, 180, 183, 188, 189–90, 199, 200–1, 205 “Prufrock” (Eliot), 8 psychoanalysis, 167, 168–70 psychologism, 45–46 public. See art audience public artworks, 57, 106, 295–304; in air-

ports, 298–302; destruction of, 303; and Duchamp, 137; and free speech, 295–96, 303; and Kaprow, 148; and Morris, 113, 116–19; and radio, 296–97; and skypoems, 294–95, 297 Pulse-Breath Exchange (Kaprow), 152 Pulse Exchange (Kaprow), 152 punk painting, American, 111, 115 puns, 141–42, 203, 216 “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, The” (Lowell), 172 Quintilian, 203 Racine, 183 radical coherency, 227–38; and collage, 227–29, 235, 237; and death of grandmother, 237–38; and French professor, 236; and human mind, 236–38; and music remembered by son, 238; and shopping at Sears with mother, 229–36 radio, 8–9, 80, 87–88, 90; listener-funded, 296–97 Radio City Music Hall, 161 Rainer, Yvonne, 11, 114, 118–19, 225 Rakosi, Carl, 184 Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 327 Ransom, John Crowe, 163, 179–80, 183 rapid eye movement, 250, 263 Rauschenberg, Robert, 113, 143, 217, 225; Art and Technology show (LACMA), 62, 64–67; Factum 1, 127–28; Factum 2, 127– 28; and Katz, 26, 27; Mud Muse, 62, 65– 67; and Warhol, 19, 26 Ray, Nicholas, 79 readers, 177–80, 294–95. See also art audience ready-mades: in art, 22, 26, 51, 102, 214; and collage, 170, 208; and Duchamp, 51, 102, 214; and Modernism (poetry), 170, 208, 213–14; and Warhol, 26 realism, 23–24, 171, 174, 202, 220 “Red Wheelbarrow, The” (Williams), 208, 248 Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 285 “Reflections on the Occasion of the Dance Scope Issue” (Mac Low), 255n1 Reich, Steve, 11, 255n3 Reichek, Jesse, 62, 71–72

Index

• 

Reinhardt, Ad, 51, 59, 100, 129–30 Rembrandt, 150 Renaissance, 24, 217, 319 Renoir, 23 repetition: and Cage, 335–36, 339, 341; and Gilgamesh, 268–69; and Wittgenstein, 310 Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967–1971, The, 61–73 representation: and Aristotle, 253, 279; and art criticism, 124, 213; and Beckett, 306; and collage, 209, 212–13; and Cubism, 48–49, 202–3, 220; and Dada, 216, 222; and elements, 54–59; and figurative painting, 22–30; and Imagism, 200– 2; and Impressionism, 24, 47, 49, 202; and Kaprow, 154, 157; and Katz, 22–30; and Lichtenstein, 40; and Modernism (poetry), 8, 169, 195, 198, 200–3, 206, 209, 212–13, 216–20, 222, 258, 261–62; and Morris, 114–17; and narrative, 258, 261–62; and Newman, 5; and Pop art, 6, 26–27, 40, 53–54; and self-reference, 25, 26, 150; and television, 79, 87, 90; and video, 79; and Warhol, 26–27, 40; and Wittgenstein, 306 Republic (Plato), 252 Responsibilities (Yeats), 166 Return of the Muse, The (Georges), 25 Reverdy, Pierre, 10 Revue Wagnerienne, 50 Rexroth, Kenneth, 181, 184, 191–92 Reznikoff, Charles, 8, 184 rhetoric: of Abstract-Expressionism, 150; Ciceronian rhetoric, 218; and Modernism (poetry), 167–68, 199, 203, 206, 209, 218; and Morris, 108, 110; Roman rhetoric, 45; and Rothko, 123, 131–32 Rice, Ron, 5 Richards, I. A., 181–82 Richards, M. C., 333 Ricoeur, Paul, 259, 261, 266 riddles, 249, 270 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 323 Rimbaud, Arthur, 190, 221 Ring with Light (Morris), 103 Rivers, Larry, 113 Rockwell, Norman, 278  •

Index

Roethke, Theodore, 165 “Roller Disco: Cenotaph for a Public Figure” (Morris), 115–16 Romanticism: and domain, 220, 221, 225– 26; and Kandinsky, 220; and Katz, 29–30; and Modernism (poetry), 177– 78, 179, 181, 185, 190, 192–93, 195–96, 198, 217, 219–21, 225–26, 242; neoRomanticism, 179; “the new Lyrical Romanticism,” 35; and Postmodernism, 217; and Rothko, 130, 132; Tate’s views on, 177–78 Rosenberg, Harold, 127, 223 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 117 Rothenberg, Diane, 10 Rothenberg, Jerome (Jerry), 3, 7, 10, 143, 239, 244–45, 248 Rothko, Mark, 48, 59n6, 99, 150; classic paintings of, 126, 131–32; Harvard murals, 133; natural light preference of, 124–25, 129–31, 133; Rothko Chapel, 123–34; Seagram paintings, 133 Russell, Bertrand, 308, 312, 316 Russian folktales, 259 Russo-Japanese war, 189, 283 Ryman, Bob, 124 Saarinen, Eero, 52 Sahagún, Bernardino de., 9, 244–45, 255n2, 259–60 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 174–75 Salle, David, 115 Samain, Albert, 189 Sand 30⬙ by 4⬘ (Huebler), 40–41 San Diego Union, 260–61 S and M poster (Morris), 110, 116, 117 San Francisco Renaissance poets, 9, 191, 194 Sanouillet, Michel, 136 Santa Monica Arts Commission, 297 Santiago Bay, bathtub battle of, 84 Saret, Alan, 7 Sarris, Andrew, 79 Satie, Erik, 246 Satisfaction (Kaprow), 152–54 Saturday Review of Literature, 163 Schamberg, Morton, 32 Schering, Arnold, 201 Scheyer, Galka, 6

Schneemann, Carolee, 143, 242, 254 Schneider, Ira, 81–82, 96 Schoenberg, Arnold, 162, 198, 317–18 Schopenhauer, 50, 312 Schwartz, Arturo, 136–38 Schwartz, Delmore, 8, 163–69, 179, 191–92 Schwerner, Armand, 249–50, 254, 256n7 Schwitters, Kurt, 10, 31, 146, 196, 208–9, 254; Merzbau, 213; Painting with Stars, A, 211–13 science and art/poetry, 50, 64, 220–21; “Experiments” (Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz), 67–71; and paradigms, 169–70, 183, 220; and Schwerner, 250; and Wordsworth, 206–7 science fiction: at Art and Technology show (LACMA), 62; beggar’s transformation as, 262–63; and Brecht, 250; and machines, 33; and Morris, 116; and Wittgenstein, 319 Scientific American, 71 Scott, Gail, 69–70 sculpture: and Andre, 55; antiform, 112; and Armajani, 277; at Art and Technology show (LACMA), 63, 73, 75; and Brecht, 11, 240; Cubist, 49; and Duchamp, 136; and elements, 55, 58; and Happenings, 146; metal sculpture, 54– 55; Minimalist, 73, 102, 112–13, 150; and Morris, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 119, 225; and Picasso, 49; at Pollution Show (Oakland Museum), 35–36; and Pound, 201; and Smithson, 225; and Stankiewicz, 170 Seagram paintings (Rothko), 133 Sears, 229–36 Second Study for a View from a Corner of Orion (Morris), 110–12 Second World War/post–Second World War: and Antin, 32–33; and Beckett, 315; and kinship analysis, 252, 253–54; and Modern Art, 112, 150; and Modernism (poetry), 8, 170–72, 176, 178, 191, 219, 221, 224; and television, 80 secret celebrities, 28–29 Sedding, John Dando, 64 seediness, 19–20 Seitz, William, 211, 213

self, formation of, 262 self-reference: and de Maria, 150; and Descartes, 218; and dream narratives, 266; and Kaprow, 148, 150–51; and Morris, 102; and Oppenheim, 41 Semantic Differential, 182 semiotics, 259 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 10 sensation, 50–51, 207 sequences, 260–61, 264, 269 “Serious Artist, The” (Pound), 206 Serra, Richard, 7, 62–63, 79, 225, 303; Prisoners’ Dilemma, 85–86, 95–96; Tilted Arc, 295 Seven League Crutches, The (Jarrell), 170–72 Seventeen, 114 Sewanee Review, 163, 224 Sforza, Ludovico, 105 Shape of Time, The (Kubler), 100 Shapiro, Karl, 165–67, 333 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 179 Sherman, Cindy, 115 shopping centers, 229–36 Sid Caesar Show (TV show), 79 Siegelaub, Seth, 7 Sierra Club, 35 “Sightings” (Rothenberg), 248 signification, artistic: and abstraction, 258; and collage, 208–9, 212, 258; and Postmodernism, 12, 113–14 signifiers: in art, 18, 116–17, 138, 161–62; and dream narratives, 266; and Duchamp, 138; and Modernism (poetry), 184; and Morris, 116–17; and Warhol, 18 Silence (Cage), 332–35 silk screen, 24 Silliman, Ron, 325–27, 330nn30,31 Silvercup bread, 88 “Silver Tenement, The” (Antin), 3 Simpson, Louis, 9, 165 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 130 skypoems, 293–95, 297–98, 302 Skytypers, 293–95, 297–98 skywriting, 292–95, 297–98 Sleigh, Sylvia, 6 slide projectors, 337 Smith, Harry, 5 Smith, Roberta, 98, 101, 110, 111, 112, 116 Smith, Tony, 62, 75

Index

• 

Smithson, Robert, 57, 225 Smohalla, 56, 60n12 Smythies, Yorick, 321 Snelson, Kenneth, 102 Snodgrass, W. D., 164–65, 180–81 “sociology of art, the” (Antin), 11 Socrates, 11, 252, 273, 323–24 Software Show (Jewish Museum, NYC), 37–39 Solomon, Alan, 5 Solomon, Holly, 26 Solt, Mary Ellen, 10 “Some Recent Happenings” (Kaprow), 154–56 “Some Remarks to the Dancers” (Mac Low), 241–42 some/thing, 3–4, 7, 9, 239–44, 246, 254, 256n7; covers of, 3–4, 143–44, 242 Some Words I Mispronounce (Baldessari), 86 “Song of the Butterfly” (Chippewa song), 247 Sonnabend, Ileana, 143–44 Sonnabend Gallery, 110–12, 116 Sonnier, Keith, 7, 86, 93 Sophron, 252 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 194 Southwell, Richard, 267–68 Soutine, Chaim, 98 Soviet Union, 259 Spanos, Bill, 7 speech, freedom of, 295–96, 303 Spero, Nancy, 7 Spicer, Jack, 179 spirituality, 50–51, 53 spontaneity, 84–85 Spring and All (Williams), 9 squeegee, 24 Stael, Madame de, 50 stake, 262–63, 267 Stankiewicz, Richard, 31, 170 Stasheff, Edward, 83–85 St. Denis, cathedral of, 131 St. Denis, Ruth, 162, 198 Stein, Gertrude, 8, 158, 183, 196, 200–5, 208, 224, 242, 251, 254; “Ada,” 204–5; and language, 203–5, 216; Making of Americans, The, 203–4, 306; “Melanctha,” 8; “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” 204–5; Tender Buttons, 204, 208, 246–  •

Index

48, 256n6; Three Lives, 8, 204; “White Hunter, A,” 208, 247–48, 256n6; and Wittgenstein, 306–7 Steinberg, Saul, 150 Stella, Frank, 2, 46–48, 53, 123, 126, 217, 225 Stendhal, 170, 201 Sterne, Laurence, 254 Stevens, Wallace, 163, 203, 312 Stevenson, Adlai, 94, 132 Still, Clyfford, 48, 59n6, 224 Stinis, Gregg, 293–94, 297–98 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 4, 144–45, 225, 336–38 Stonehenge, 63, 246 story, 259–62, 264, 266–69; and Cendrars, 283; and Frost, 276–77, 284 structuralism, 150, 259–70 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 169–70 Studio International, 7 subject positions, 261–62, 266–69 “Sublime Continuation,” 206 Sultan, Terrie, 117–18 Sumerian-Akkadian poetry, 268–69 Sumerian translations, 249, 256n7 sunsets, 35, 130–31 SUNY Binghamton, 7 Superstar, Ingrid, 20 Surrealism, 1, 112, 127, 187, 196, 208–9 Sweet Wall (Kaprow), 151 Swift, Jonathan, 16 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 190 Symbolism, 50, 220 synecdoches, 277–78 Tablets (Schwerner), 249–50, 256n7 Tailhade, Laurent, 189 Tail Wagging Dog (Kaprow), 151 Talking at the Boundaries (Antin), 11 talk poems (Antin), 11, 227, 271, 273, 297, 331–32 Taoism, 255n1 tape recorder, direct composition on, 195 Tate, Allen, 163, 165–66, 177–80, 183, 191, 200, 245; Anthology of British and American Poetry, 1900–1950, 163; and anti-poetry, 179–80, 191; Essays of Four Decades, 178–79 Tate Gallery, 114

Tatlin, Vladimir, 31, 34, 49 Taub, Jason, 108 Taylor, Elizabeth, 19, 26–27, 94 TDR, 157 Technicians of the Sacred (Rothenberg), 10 technology and art, 80, 221; Art and Technology show (LACMA), 42, 61–77; and elements, 54–55; and Schwerner, 250; and television, 80–81, 87–88, 90–91; and video, 78–79, 81–82, 91–94 Tedlock, Dennis, 10–11, 259 Teilhet, Jehanne, 11 Teledyne, 66 telephone, 80–82, 152–53, 193 Telethon’s TV History (Davis), 79 television, 8–9, 17, 36, 74, 113–14; and advertising, 87–91, 258; and duration, 83– 91, 97; handbook for, 83–85; history of, 79–85; and kine-recordings, 83–84; and Modernism (poetry), 177; money metric of, 82–83, 87; and Montauk Happening, 145–46; and skypoems, 295; and Stevenson, Adlai, 94, 132; and transmission, 80–84, 87–88; and video, 78–82, 84–87, 92–97 Television Delivers People (Serra), 79 Tender Buttons (Stein), 204, 208, 246–48, 256n6 “THIMK,” 326 Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Warhol), 17, 18 This is the story of a woman who . . . (Rainer), 114 Thomas, Dylan, 163, 184 Thoreau, Henry David, 172–73 “Three Dances” (Brecht), 240–41 three-dimensionality, 23, 25, 47, 49 “Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographies” (Morris), 115 Three Lives (Stein), 8, 204 Three Soldiers (Dos Passos), 315 “Three Yellow Events” (Brecht), 240 Thurman, Sue, 4 Tiger’s Eye, 191 Tillim, Sidney, 23, 25 Tilted Arc (Serra), 295, 303 Time and Loss and Grief and the Body (Morris), 118–19 Time and Narrative (Ricoeur), 261 Time Pieces (Kaprow), 152

Tinguely, Jean, 31, 34 Toche, Jean, 39 “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things” (Olson), 185 Tolstoy, Leo, 218 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 251, 306–16, 324, 327–28nn3,5,6,8 Trading Dirt (Kaprow), 157 Trakl, Georg, 323 transformation, 262, 269–70 Transition, 191 Trans-Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne of France, The (Cendrars), 188–89 Trasobares, Cesar, 298–301 trompe l’oeil painting, 49, 59n5 truth: and Cendrars, 283; and corporate art, 65; and Frost, 281, 283; and Kaprow, 158; and Katz, 29; and Modernism (poetry), 169, 177–78, 199, 218–20, 226, 281; and Morris, 110; and Romanticism, 219–20; and television, 84; and Warhol, 17 Tuchman, Maurice, 42, 61, 69–70, 73–74 Tudor, David, 331–32 Tudor poetry, 165, 190 Tuileries (Paris), 176–77 Turrell, James, 67, 69, 109 “Two Definitions” (Brecht), 248–49, 256n7 “Two Signs” (Brecht), 243, 246–47 Tyson, Howell Newbold, 32 Tzara, Tristan, 10, 196, 223–24, 254 Ulysses (Joyce), 8, 216 Uncle Don (radio program), 88 Underscan (Holt), 94 Undertone (Acconci), 94 Unitarian Church, 172–73 universalist claims: and Constructivism, 45; and Duchamp, 139, 150; and elements, 55–56, 59; and end of Modernism, 197–98; and Gabo, 45; and Graham, 198; and language, 139, 150; of Modernism, 196, 197–98; and Morris, 114; and Newman, 150; and primitive society, 50, 196; and Rothko, 150 University of California at San Diego, 4, 5– 7; Visual Arts Department, 6–7 Untermeyer, Louis, 273 USCO light show, 5

Index

• 

Vallejo, César, 10, 189 van de Velde, Henry, 64 Van Doesburg, Theo, 209 Varese, Edgard, 162, 198 Vasarely, Victor, 64–65 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 31, 33 vector analysis, 181–82 Velvet Underground, 20 Verlaine, Paul, 190 verse (not poetry), 137, 205, 207, 244–45, 252, 324, 333 Vertov, Dziga, 80 Vesnin, Alexander, 31 Vico, 184, 206 La Vida es Sueno (Calderon), 263 video and art, 78–97; artists’ video, 78– 79, 82, 85–86, 91–97, 157; and color, 93; and didactic art, 95–97; and duration, 85–86; and editing, 92–93; as interactive art, 81–82; and television, 78–82, 84–87, 92–97 Vietnam war, 3, 38, 74, 104, 113, 151, 281; Warhol cover of some/thing, 3–4, 143–44 View, 191 Les Vingt, 50 Vinyl (Warhol), 20 visual image, 23, 45–46, 48–49, 55, 58 Voice (Morris exhibition), 110, 114 von Braun, Werner, 106 Von Ficker, Ludwig, 313, 329n11 Vortex + Spatial Forces of Glass (Balla), 208 vorticism, 199, 208 Voulkos, Peter, 74 VVV, 191 Waldrop, Rosemarie, 325 Waller, Fats, 33 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 218 Warhol, Andy, 2, 6, 15–21, 143–44, 225; Banana, 20; and Beautiful People, 19–20; Blowjob, 18–19; Cagney, 16; and “cool,” 25–26; cover of some/thing, 3–4, 143–44; “deteriorated image” of, 18; discotheque of, 19–21; Eat, 19–20; Elizabeth Taylors, 19, 26–27; Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 20; and failure, 20–21; fake piece at LACMA, 62; films of, 18–21; Flowers, 18, 19; fluorescent pink cows, 15–16; La Gioconda, 19; and glamour, 26–29, 53;  •

Index

Golden Electric Chairs, 17; Haircut, 19; Holly Solomon, 26; Jackies, 17–18, 19; Leonardo’s angels, 19; Lita Hornick, 26; and machines, 33; Marilyns, 16–17, 26–27; Nancy comic strip, 16; Nico, 19– 20; Presleys, 16–17; Rauschenberg, 19, 26; and representation, 26–27, 40; selfportraits, 26; shooting of, 6, 113; and “Silver Tenement, The” (Antin), 3, 15– 21; Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 17, 18; Vinyl, 20; Warhol Diaries, 266–67 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 164, 169–70, 183– 84, 208, 214 Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses), 228–29 Water as element, 58 Watergate scandal, 113 Water Yam (Brecht), 240 Watt (Beckett), 315–16 Watteau, Antoine, 18 WED Enterprises, 76 Weininger, Otto, 315 Wellman, Don, 227 Wesselman, Tom, 2, 6, 73 WGBH-TV (Boston), 97 Whisper Project (Lacy), 303 Whistler, James McNeill, 22 “White Hunter, A” (Stein), 208, 247–48, 256n6 white paintings: and Morris, 102, 119– 20n8; and Ryman, 124 Whitman, Robert, 62, 75, 146 Whitman, Walt, 190–91, 246 Wilbur, Richard, 8 Williams, Emmett, 10 Williams, William Carlos: autobiography of, 184; Kora in Hell, 9; and language, 185, 203; “Red Wheelbarrow, The,” 208, 248; Spring and All, 9; and Stein, 183, 196, 200, 205; tradition of, 8–9, 163, 180–81, 183–85, 187–88, 191–92, 196, 200 Wilson, Robert Anton, 8 Wipe-Cycle (Schneider and Gillette), 81–82 Wisdom of the Body (Cannon), 155 Wittgenstein, 15, 117, 215, 305–27, 339; Blue Book, The, 305–6, 316–19; and Brecht, 249, 251, 254, 256n9; Brown Book, The, 316; at Cambridge, 316, 321–23; Culture and Value, 310, 312–14, 328n4; on

difficulty of writing, 312–14, 320–21; and First World War, 306, 312, 315– 16, 328n10, 329n11; Geheime Tagebücher, 328n9; and improvisation, 324–25, 331n26; and language, 306–9, 313–14, 316–27, 329n15; and mathematics, 310, 312, 315–16, 322; and narrative (examples), 305–6, 316–23, 325, 329n15; notebooks of, 307, 310, 312–16, 323, 328nn9,10; and personal identity, 305–6; Philosophical Investigations, 251, 316–18, 320–21, 326; and poetry, 306–7, 323–27; Prototractatus, 314–15; and repetition, 310; Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, 251, 306–16, 324, 327n3, 328nn5–6, 328n8; unpublished writings of, 313; Zettel, 256n9, 316, 323 Wittgenstein’s Ladder (Perloff ), 306–7, 311– 12, 315–16, 319, 325–27 Wolff, Christian, 337–38, 340 Wordsworth, William, 170, 195, 206–7, 219 Work 1961–1973 (Rainer), 118

Woronov, Mary, 20 Worthington, Cal, 79 Wortz, Edward, 67, 69 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 64 Wright, James, 242 Wyeth, Andrew, 278 Xenarchos, 252 Xenophon, 253 Yeats, William Butler, 163, 166, 184, 242 Yesenin, Sergei, 189 Young, La Monte, 149, 241 Youngerman, Jack, 2 Yugen, 194 Zaum poets, 10 Zen, 18, 336 Zettel (Wittgenstein), 256n9, 316, 323 Ziegler, Ron, 79 Zukofsky, Louis, 8, 181, 183–85, 191, 216 Zuni tales, 11

Index

• 