Turinbaar
6th June 2011, 23:13
The development of American history, and its revolutionary dynamism, manifests itself in its continuous artistic dialectic, and the various rivaling schools of thought that have arisen from it. The rise to prominence of American art coincides with the rise of the nation itself as a global empire, and the different, and often times opposing, modes of expression that have marked its historical landscape reflect the contradictions that have defined it as a society. From its humble beginnings, to its present day existence as a superpower greater than any preceding it, revolution has always been a central element in the nature of American art, both as a subject matter, and as an ironic outcome of historical development.
In the beginning, there was God, or so the Puritans thought as they sailed west, away from the stagnated traditions of the English monarchy, its established church, and away from political and religious repression, to a new land where they sought to create a city on a hill, where the state and the official clergy could not impede their path to divine bliss. As a group of extreme protestants who took seriously the biblical inhibition of the creation of religious iconography, they brought with them little, if any, artistic material from the old world, seeking instead a pure rebirth, uncorrupted by the old ways. Their iconoclastic dogmatism ironically produced an environment for a purely secularized form of expression, the most notable being the portraits of the limners, who were self-trained common individuals, not bound by the guild and class restraints of the European artistic traditions. After settling in the New World, the puritans were joined by several other religious groups, and later on by refugees of the bourgeois revolution in England. The reprisals against the ruling class enacted by the so-called “Lord Protector of England,” Oliver Cromwell, drove many away from their homes to seek new prospects in Virginia, where they would bring their archaic traditions of domination with them, best illustrated by the limner painting by Justus Engelhardt Kühn, Portrait of Henry Darnall III. In it we see an overdressed boy with a hunting bow, and to the left a pet-like slave graciously attends him as he poses in front of a landscape that resembles more the gardens of Versailles than a southern plantation. The painting itself is an idealistic lie and a flat, anatomically stiff, and crudely executed illustration of a barbaric system of quasi-feudal race domination, but the traditions of artistic secularism, and individual expression that gave birth to the limner style were themselves the seedbed for a radical challenge to the status quo.
During the revolutionary crisis that threatened to tear England’s transatlantic empire apart, the colonial subjects in the New World, including their artists (who had largely been parasitical upon the elite) began developing a political consciousness of their own, inspired by such thinkers as John Locke, and Thomas Paine, who challenged the legitimacy of the privately owned English state and its official church to extended its rule over the colonies in the new world. This development of political consciousness among the emerging bourgeoisie class coincides with an elevation in classical nuance among the brighter of the American artists of the time. The most eclectic, influential and revolutionary figure among them was Charles Wilson Peale, a self taught polymath and inventor who, after studying art in Europe, decided to bring enlightenment culture to America. Along with his contributions to science education and the arts, both in the form his personal work and also that of his children, Raphaelle, Rembrandt, and Titian Ramsey III, Peale fought alongside General Washington at Valley Forge and fostered a friendship that would last for decades. His oil painting of George Washington at Princeton was done several times and in several versions. The one hanging currently behind of the seat of the Speaker of the House depicts the general leaning against a cannon, with the Union Jack at his feat. In the background, soldiers march in front of Princeton University. The one hanging in the university itself depicts Washington with a sword, the stars and strips waving behind him as he stairs obliviously out into the distance, while one of his comrades dies right behind him. The popularity of Peale’s George Washington portraits helped to foster a personality cult that threatened a total negation of the democratic ideals the two of them had fought for. Peale also did portraits of Thomas Jefferson, whose own contributions to classical Greek architecture as the American Federal style are substantial and revolutionary in a time when classical knowledge and ideas were just beginning to re-emerge out of an era of religious backwardness. His home, Monticello, is a microcosm of Greek classicism. Jefferson himself was unable to completely rid himself of the barbaric traditions of race slavery, and as the US later defined itself as a nation, those who studied the revolutions it had inspired elsewhere observed that the contradictions inherent in its society, would ultimately force the American Revolution to reinvent itself, violently if necessary.
Westward expansion brought with it many immigrants from Germany, whose grandiose and romanticized artistic vision, largely influenced by Hegelian idealism depicted the west as a God given gift, ripe for the taking, and perhaps in need of some clearing out of weeds in the form of the local Native American population. It also brought with it, the Mason Dixon line, and the various compromises that would be struck between the north and the south over the issue of slavery as a moral and economic question in American culture. Eventually the tensions erupted into conflict as the southern Confederacy seceded from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter, initiating a civil war that would kill many hundreds of thousands and this course of folly lead eventually to the end of slavery as a system in America. In his letter to Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx expressed the importance of this revolutionary period and said:
“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”
Artists in that period were less enthusiastic is their discussion of the conflict, but metaphorical references to it can be detected in Frederick Church’s Cotopaxi Eruption done at the height of the Civil War. To the left, the great conical volcano spews a messy cloud of ash over a lakefront in the foreground. The sky is covered in an orange haze as though set on fire. Two figures stand dwarfed by the immensity of the cloud, which threatens to blot out the sun, perhaps an existential commentary by the artist in the face of great historical forces. The destruction of the slave system would usher in the era of industrial capitalism, replacing forced labor with wage labor as the great robber barons ushered into existence the armies of the proletariat.
The modernization of America, and the effect it had on the common workingman, was covered by virtually the only major artist to depict the Civil War, Winslow Homer. His illustrations for Harpers Weekly depicted the conditions of the early textile factories, and his paintings of the Civil War demonstrate the change in the face of war itself. In his piece, Sharpshooter a union soldier carefully aims his sophisticated new piece of machinery, a sniper riffle, produced by a system of mass production with great creative potential, designed purely for the purpose of destruction. He sits in a tree, far away and well hidden from the enemy, a clear contrast to the traditional concepts of honor in face-to-face combat. This mechanization of the human would become an increasing theme in art as the trends of military industrialism began to emerge on the global stage.
The Civil War was a baptism of fire for the creation of the American realists. Winslow Homer would inspire a realist school in America pushed forward most by the artist Robert Henri, whose painting, Salome took the principles of classical composition, anatomy, and technique and stripped it of its pretentious European traditional iconography, and whose students include among others, Leon Trotsky. They sought to depict the world objectively, and that purpose would be aided by one of the new inventions of the industrial revolution, photography. Cameras did what no painter could do by capturing a reflection of the world itself onto a piece of film. They first made their debut documenting the civil war. In its beginning, photography was considered merely a tool for documentation, and perhaps for aiding in the production of “real art,” but it was not considered to be an art form on its own. As the century wore thin, this prejudice was challenged by a school of photographers known as “pictorialists,” who used greased lenses to give their photos of white veiled nudes and idyllic settings a blurred and painterly look, but this limited style was pushed further into the modern era by students within its own school who saw the revolutionary potentials of the medium, as something which could be America’s great contribution to the artistic world.
Photography handed the torch of realism from the painters to the cameramen, who challenged the idea that a photograph had to look like a painting or drawing in order to be considered art. This was not purely for the sake of aesthetics, for they were not merely image-makers, but political thinkers. Many of them were socialists and they sought to depict the modern world with all of its contradictions and crisis in stark, unforgiving realism. The catalyst moment when pictorialism met its end was when Alfred Stieglitz, published the works of Paul Strand in his magazine called Camera Work. Strands realism was a fundamental break with the magazine’s old aesthetic and was the momentum of a new movement in photography, eventually carried westward by Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. The Strand Issue would be the final edition of the magazine and occurred during a massive war that was said to be one which would end all others, and threatened in doing so to destroy the whole of Europe and beyond. The enormous costs of America’s involvement in this weighed on all society and forced the end of both Camera Work and Steiglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York City, but not before he was able to display the work of a new generation of hitherto unknown painters, a school lampooned by the establishment, known today as the modernists.
A new interest in Freudian and Jungian phycological analysis imported from Europe brought with it a new focus in painting, depicting the inner world of the mind, largely in response to the horrors of the First World War. The modernist Arshile Gorky was himself a refugee of the Armenian Genocide that resulted from the global jihad declared by the Ottoman Empire during that period. His mother, who saved him from the slaughter, is the subject of many of his works, including his 1929 peice, The Artist and His Mother. Relieved by the mechanical precision of the camera of the burden of total realism, the modernists sought to express their perspective in a stylized interpretation of reality.
The retrospectively categorized matriarch of these painters, and wife to Stieglitz, was Georgia Okeif. She became famous for (among others) her painting Saint Francis Church, Rancho de Taos, New Mexico 1929, depicting a squat and humble pueblo basilica, which was also the subject matter for famous photographers like Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. The church is small, but dignified, much like the artistic movement at the time, and its meagerness and state of collapse echoed the economic crisis that was rapidly overtaking the country. As modernism grew and evolved, American art made ever-increasing challenges to the principles of society, art, and reality itself.
The growth of the United States as a global empire was facilitated by a system of production commonly known as the military-industrial complex, whereby labor was developed and directed by rival empires for the purpose of arms production, the crowned jewel of which was the thermo-nuclear warhead. This was adopted by the ruling classes as the necessary instrument with which to close the gap between overproduction and under consumption that is the classic contradiction of the capitalist system, as well as to use against others abroad in Germany, Japan and later the Soviet Union who had all adopted this system. War is the logical outcome of an economic system that produces the means of making war, as it is the logical means of ridding the system of its surplus product. With the surplus consumed, and only money remaining, the process may begin anew. At the time President Eisenhower coined the phrase, the world was locked in a heated ideological battle, whose face was the glowing red mushroom crowd. This ultimate weapon struck fear in the hearts of all men who could visualize the future as an unending nuclear winter, an existential crisis registered in the artistic styles known as abstract expressionism. Jasper Johns’, Target with Four Faces, was a mixed media piece, featuring several stony and eyeless faces, overlooking a painted yellow and blue target below. The painting is an articulation of, and a protest against, the fact that the nuclear state had, at the behest of nameless men from behind closed doors, converted the citizen into a potential target of total war and annihilation. In the mean time the state invested heavily in propaganda to placate the working class, which it disseminated across the land through the newly developed mediums of radio, and television. This new culture of lies and euphemism would force new developments in art as American youth began to question the dogmas they were raised to believe.
Modernism’s focus on the subjective view of the world eventuated in a style that reflected the Nietzschean assertion that reality itself is a fabrication of the mind, and that the very notion of objective truth is unjustified. This was a register of the resistance to the increasing role of the secret state and official propaganda in the lives of ordinary citizens. The patron saint of this movement was the art critic Clement Greenberg, who declared that “representation is dead,” a statement that was a cheap repackaging of an old platitude, but one which was taken as profound by a new school of artists, like Mark Rothko, whose Ochre Red on Red shows the abstract expressionist redefinition of painting as simply the arrangement of colors and shapes on a surface. Greenberg’s philosophy of “pure painting” rejected all artistic representation of narrative, irony, politics, or even reality, as a form of propaganda, which later created an aftershock wave of post-modernism that even Greenberg came to dislike. The distrust of official standards spurred on major innovations in art, music, and political criticism among the radical oppositionists of the era, but the rejection of objective reality by the strawberry fields crowd of the 1960’s helped to establish an idealized cult of the painter as the Lord and creator of independent abstract reality, conjured ex-nihilo, and one who is enlightened as to the sole universal truth, which is the inexistence of truth, redefining nihilism as realism, and bringing into modern vernacular the ultimate defense against art criticism, that now old and tired out phrase: “that’s just your opinion.” The dialectical reaction to Greenbergism were the Pop artists commonly associated with Andy Warhol, who used representation, often of commercial icons, like his famous Campbells Soup Can series, to comment on (or embrace in the case of Warhol), mass production culture. Some dared to speak of deeper things, such as Edward Kienholz, whose Portable War Memorial installation takes the iconic symbols of American patriotism, its hymns and heroes from days long past, and exposes their hollowness in the face of the aggressive war against an independence revolution in Vietnam whose origins predate the second World War, and whose program had been appealed to President Wilson by Ho Chi Minh as a synthesis of the ideas of Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson. These effigies, which include the marines planting the flag at Iwo Jima, the then newly erected Vietnam war memorial and a recording of "God Bless America" blasted from inside a trash can, are juxtaposed against a scene depicting a complacent american couple, happily consuming in isolation from the wider world and their fellow human beings. Despite their overall reactionary idealism, petty egotism, and embrace of obscene consumerism, the abstract expressionists, and the Warholians produced art that was a revolutionary challenge to the stagnated and oppressive style of Socialist Realism (an Orwellian linguistic negation if there ever was one), the official art of Stalinist Russia, as well as a lampoon of the traditional American artistic provincialism. Their work was unusable to official propaganda to promote anything, either because, by the abstractionist's own definition, they contained nothing, or because of Pop-art's tendency to positively mock propaganda itself. Abstract expressionism, and its Pop counter-part, not only defied the norms of Soviet and American art, it defied the worldviews on which those empires based the domination of the lives of citizens at home and abroad, and they helped to inspire a rebellion that defined that period in history against the universal atmosphere of impending doom and police repression.
As decades wore on, and the Cold War ended, the common attitude at the time among victorious conservatives was exemplified by Francis Fukuyama, who proposed that the American ideal had created an ultimate synthesis that would be the standard to which all other nations in the world (except the dictatorial middle east) would aspire to, thus bringing about an end to historical development, and ushering in the universal domination of culture, including artistic expression, by cheap commodity fetishism. This coincided with a flood of finance capital into America thanks to Reaganomic debt creation, facilitating an artificial art boom whose patrons took an "anything goes" approach defining, understanding and promoting art. As a result, the cult of the artist began to hit diminishing returns, producing a universal atmosphere of nihilism, egotism, and self destruction, in which superficiality rules, and the artist need not even know how to draw or paint in order to be considered a creative genius. Indeed the artist Donald Judd, in the ultimate post-modern exercise of what John Lydon called "grotesque acts of laziness," ordered his pieces from a factory for others to arrange in a gallery, in his name. After removing reality from the art, the artist removed himself from the art, and indeed reality. Having lost its revolutionary spirit (and indeed its common sense), America lost its artistic vitality. The ugliness of this complacency found its lowest point in the paranoid years of the 9-11 era, where the nihilism of a fascist cult in the middle east was echoed by the masochism and relativism of the artistic community at home, particularly actors and directors in the film industry, such as Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, who asserted that either America had deserved the attacks, or that it had engineered them itself, with its all powerful CIA and its Zionist global New World Order. In that decade it was quite common to hear the opinion that the American revolution had either been completely negated, or that it was not even worth fighting in the first place. The partisans of this position, trapped in their reactionary delusion, are currently deploying all of their energy to define revolution as the defense of Colonel Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad against American empire. They are complimented by another pseudo-radical crowd who insist that the American revolution needs most to be defended against black presidents of questionable birth origin. All the while, art in America has become stale, mass produced, and replagiarized to the point of exhaustion. The response to this must, and necessarily will be an artistic search for truth and humanity against the endless waves of propaganda and lies from all quarters, as the American Revolution is again forced to reinvent itself in the face of global crisis.
Work’s Cited
Marx, Karl and the International Workingman’s Association, Marx’s letter to Abraham Lincoln, written between November 22 & 29, 1864, published The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7 1865;http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...oln-letter.htm
In the beginning, there was God, or so the Puritans thought as they sailed west, away from the stagnated traditions of the English monarchy, its established church, and away from political and religious repression, to a new land where they sought to create a city on a hill, where the state and the official clergy could not impede their path to divine bliss. As a group of extreme protestants who took seriously the biblical inhibition of the creation of religious iconography, they brought with them little, if any, artistic material from the old world, seeking instead a pure rebirth, uncorrupted by the old ways. Their iconoclastic dogmatism ironically produced an environment for a purely secularized form of expression, the most notable being the portraits of the limners, who were self-trained common individuals, not bound by the guild and class restraints of the European artistic traditions. After settling in the New World, the puritans were joined by several other religious groups, and later on by refugees of the bourgeois revolution in England. The reprisals against the ruling class enacted by the so-called “Lord Protector of England,” Oliver Cromwell, drove many away from their homes to seek new prospects in Virginia, where they would bring their archaic traditions of domination with them, best illustrated by the limner painting by Justus Engelhardt Kühn, Portrait of Henry Darnall III. In it we see an overdressed boy with a hunting bow, and to the left a pet-like slave graciously attends him as he poses in front of a landscape that resembles more the gardens of Versailles than a southern plantation. The painting itself is an idealistic lie and a flat, anatomically stiff, and crudely executed illustration of a barbaric system of quasi-feudal race domination, but the traditions of artistic secularism, and individual expression that gave birth to the limner style were themselves the seedbed for a radical challenge to the status quo.
During the revolutionary crisis that threatened to tear England’s transatlantic empire apart, the colonial subjects in the New World, including their artists (who had largely been parasitical upon the elite) began developing a political consciousness of their own, inspired by such thinkers as John Locke, and Thomas Paine, who challenged the legitimacy of the privately owned English state and its official church to extended its rule over the colonies in the new world. This development of political consciousness among the emerging bourgeoisie class coincides with an elevation in classical nuance among the brighter of the American artists of the time. The most eclectic, influential and revolutionary figure among them was Charles Wilson Peale, a self taught polymath and inventor who, after studying art in Europe, decided to bring enlightenment culture to America. Along with his contributions to science education and the arts, both in the form his personal work and also that of his children, Raphaelle, Rembrandt, and Titian Ramsey III, Peale fought alongside General Washington at Valley Forge and fostered a friendship that would last for decades. His oil painting of George Washington at Princeton was done several times and in several versions. The one hanging currently behind of the seat of the Speaker of the House depicts the general leaning against a cannon, with the Union Jack at his feat. In the background, soldiers march in front of Princeton University. The one hanging in the university itself depicts Washington with a sword, the stars and strips waving behind him as he stairs obliviously out into the distance, while one of his comrades dies right behind him. The popularity of Peale’s George Washington portraits helped to foster a personality cult that threatened a total negation of the democratic ideals the two of them had fought for. Peale also did portraits of Thomas Jefferson, whose own contributions to classical Greek architecture as the American Federal style are substantial and revolutionary in a time when classical knowledge and ideas were just beginning to re-emerge out of an era of religious backwardness. His home, Monticello, is a microcosm of Greek classicism. Jefferson himself was unable to completely rid himself of the barbaric traditions of race slavery, and as the US later defined itself as a nation, those who studied the revolutions it had inspired elsewhere observed that the contradictions inherent in its society, would ultimately force the American Revolution to reinvent itself, violently if necessary.
Westward expansion brought with it many immigrants from Germany, whose grandiose and romanticized artistic vision, largely influenced by Hegelian idealism depicted the west as a God given gift, ripe for the taking, and perhaps in need of some clearing out of weeds in the form of the local Native American population. It also brought with it, the Mason Dixon line, and the various compromises that would be struck between the north and the south over the issue of slavery as a moral and economic question in American culture. Eventually the tensions erupted into conflict as the southern Confederacy seceded from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter, initiating a civil war that would kill many hundreds of thousands and this course of folly lead eventually to the end of slavery as a system in America. In his letter to Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx expressed the importance of this revolutionary period and said:
“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”
Artists in that period were less enthusiastic is their discussion of the conflict, but metaphorical references to it can be detected in Frederick Church’s Cotopaxi Eruption done at the height of the Civil War. To the left, the great conical volcano spews a messy cloud of ash over a lakefront in the foreground. The sky is covered in an orange haze as though set on fire. Two figures stand dwarfed by the immensity of the cloud, which threatens to blot out the sun, perhaps an existential commentary by the artist in the face of great historical forces. The destruction of the slave system would usher in the era of industrial capitalism, replacing forced labor with wage labor as the great robber barons ushered into existence the armies of the proletariat.
The modernization of America, and the effect it had on the common workingman, was covered by virtually the only major artist to depict the Civil War, Winslow Homer. His illustrations for Harpers Weekly depicted the conditions of the early textile factories, and his paintings of the Civil War demonstrate the change in the face of war itself. In his piece, Sharpshooter a union soldier carefully aims his sophisticated new piece of machinery, a sniper riffle, produced by a system of mass production with great creative potential, designed purely for the purpose of destruction. He sits in a tree, far away and well hidden from the enemy, a clear contrast to the traditional concepts of honor in face-to-face combat. This mechanization of the human would become an increasing theme in art as the trends of military industrialism began to emerge on the global stage.
The Civil War was a baptism of fire for the creation of the American realists. Winslow Homer would inspire a realist school in America pushed forward most by the artist Robert Henri, whose painting, Salome took the principles of classical composition, anatomy, and technique and stripped it of its pretentious European traditional iconography, and whose students include among others, Leon Trotsky. They sought to depict the world objectively, and that purpose would be aided by one of the new inventions of the industrial revolution, photography. Cameras did what no painter could do by capturing a reflection of the world itself onto a piece of film. They first made their debut documenting the civil war. In its beginning, photography was considered merely a tool for documentation, and perhaps for aiding in the production of “real art,” but it was not considered to be an art form on its own. As the century wore thin, this prejudice was challenged by a school of photographers known as “pictorialists,” who used greased lenses to give their photos of white veiled nudes and idyllic settings a blurred and painterly look, but this limited style was pushed further into the modern era by students within its own school who saw the revolutionary potentials of the medium, as something which could be America’s great contribution to the artistic world.
Photography handed the torch of realism from the painters to the cameramen, who challenged the idea that a photograph had to look like a painting or drawing in order to be considered art. This was not purely for the sake of aesthetics, for they were not merely image-makers, but political thinkers. Many of them were socialists and they sought to depict the modern world with all of its contradictions and crisis in stark, unforgiving realism. The catalyst moment when pictorialism met its end was when Alfred Stieglitz, published the works of Paul Strand in his magazine called Camera Work. Strands realism was a fundamental break with the magazine’s old aesthetic and was the momentum of a new movement in photography, eventually carried westward by Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. The Strand Issue would be the final edition of the magazine and occurred during a massive war that was said to be one which would end all others, and threatened in doing so to destroy the whole of Europe and beyond. The enormous costs of America’s involvement in this weighed on all society and forced the end of both Camera Work and Steiglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York City, but not before he was able to display the work of a new generation of hitherto unknown painters, a school lampooned by the establishment, known today as the modernists.
A new interest in Freudian and Jungian phycological analysis imported from Europe brought with it a new focus in painting, depicting the inner world of the mind, largely in response to the horrors of the First World War. The modernist Arshile Gorky was himself a refugee of the Armenian Genocide that resulted from the global jihad declared by the Ottoman Empire during that period. His mother, who saved him from the slaughter, is the subject of many of his works, including his 1929 peice, The Artist and His Mother. Relieved by the mechanical precision of the camera of the burden of total realism, the modernists sought to express their perspective in a stylized interpretation of reality.
The retrospectively categorized matriarch of these painters, and wife to Stieglitz, was Georgia Okeif. She became famous for (among others) her painting Saint Francis Church, Rancho de Taos, New Mexico 1929, depicting a squat and humble pueblo basilica, which was also the subject matter for famous photographers like Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. The church is small, but dignified, much like the artistic movement at the time, and its meagerness and state of collapse echoed the economic crisis that was rapidly overtaking the country. As modernism grew and evolved, American art made ever-increasing challenges to the principles of society, art, and reality itself.
The growth of the United States as a global empire was facilitated by a system of production commonly known as the military-industrial complex, whereby labor was developed and directed by rival empires for the purpose of arms production, the crowned jewel of which was the thermo-nuclear warhead. This was adopted by the ruling classes as the necessary instrument with which to close the gap between overproduction and under consumption that is the classic contradiction of the capitalist system, as well as to use against others abroad in Germany, Japan and later the Soviet Union who had all adopted this system. War is the logical outcome of an economic system that produces the means of making war, as it is the logical means of ridding the system of its surplus product. With the surplus consumed, and only money remaining, the process may begin anew. At the time President Eisenhower coined the phrase, the world was locked in a heated ideological battle, whose face was the glowing red mushroom crowd. This ultimate weapon struck fear in the hearts of all men who could visualize the future as an unending nuclear winter, an existential crisis registered in the artistic styles known as abstract expressionism. Jasper Johns’, Target with Four Faces, was a mixed media piece, featuring several stony and eyeless faces, overlooking a painted yellow and blue target below. The painting is an articulation of, and a protest against, the fact that the nuclear state had, at the behest of nameless men from behind closed doors, converted the citizen into a potential target of total war and annihilation. In the mean time the state invested heavily in propaganda to placate the working class, which it disseminated across the land through the newly developed mediums of radio, and television. This new culture of lies and euphemism would force new developments in art as American youth began to question the dogmas they were raised to believe.
Modernism’s focus on the subjective view of the world eventuated in a style that reflected the Nietzschean assertion that reality itself is a fabrication of the mind, and that the very notion of objective truth is unjustified. This was a register of the resistance to the increasing role of the secret state and official propaganda in the lives of ordinary citizens. The patron saint of this movement was the art critic Clement Greenberg, who declared that “representation is dead,” a statement that was a cheap repackaging of an old platitude, but one which was taken as profound by a new school of artists, like Mark Rothko, whose Ochre Red on Red shows the abstract expressionist redefinition of painting as simply the arrangement of colors and shapes on a surface. Greenberg’s philosophy of “pure painting” rejected all artistic representation of narrative, irony, politics, or even reality, as a form of propaganda, which later created an aftershock wave of post-modernism that even Greenberg came to dislike. The distrust of official standards spurred on major innovations in art, music, and political criticism among the radical oppositionists of the era, but the rejection of objective reality by the strawberry fields crowd of the 1960’s helped to establish an idealized cult of the painter as the Lord and creator of independent abstract reality, conjured ex-nihilo, and one who is enlightened as to the sole universal truth, which is the inexistence of truth, redefining nihilism as realism, and bringing into modern vernacular the ultimate defense against art criticism, that now old and tired out phrase: “that’s just your opinion.” The dialectical reaction to Greenbergism were the Pop artists commonly associated with Andy Warhol, who used representation, often of commercial icons, like his famous Campbells Soup Can series, to comment on (or embrace in the case of Warhol), mass production culture. Some dared to speak of deeper things, such as Edward Kienholz, whose Portable War Memorial installation takes the iconic symbols of American patriotism, its hymns and heroes from days long past, and exposes their hollowness in the face of the aggressive war against an independence revolution in Vietnam whose origins predate the second World War, and whose program had been appealed to President Wilson by Ho Chi Minh as a synthesis of the ideas of Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson. These effigies, which include the marines planting the flag at Iwo Jima, the then newly erected Vietnam war memorial and a recording of "God Bless America" blasted from inside a trash can, are juxtaposed against a scene depicting a complacent american couple, happily consuming in isolation from the wider world and their fellow human beings. Despite their overall reactionary idealism, petty egotism, and embrace of obscene consumerism, the abstract expressionists, and the Warholians produced art that was a revolutionary challenge to the stagnated and oppressive style of Socialist Realism (an Orwellian linguistic negation if there ever was one), the official art of Stalinist Russia, as well as a lampoon of the traditional American artistic provincialism. Their work was unusable to official propaganda to promote anything, either because, by the abstractionist's own definition, they contained nothing, or because of Pop-art's tendency to positively mock propaganda itself. Abstract expressionism, and its Pop counter-part, not only defied the norms of Soviet and American art, it defied the worldviews on which those empires based the domination of the lives of citizens at home and abroad, and they helped to inspire a rebellion that defined that period in history against the universal atmosphere of impending doom and police repression.
As decades wore on, and the Cold War ended, the common attitude at the time among victorious conservatives was exemplified by Francis Fukuyama, who proposed that the American ideal had created an ultimate synthesis that would be the standard to which all other nations in the world (except the dictatorial middle east) would aspire to, thus bringing about an end to historical development, and ushering in the universal domination of culture, including artistic expression, by cheap commodity fetishism. This coincided with a flood of finance capital into America thanks to Reaganomic debt creation, facilitating an artificial art boom whose patrons took an "anything goes" approach defining, understanding and promoting art. As a result, the cult of the artist began to hit diminishing returns, producing a universal atmosphere of nihilism, egotism, and self destruction, in which superficiality rules, and the artist need not even know how to draw or paint in order to be considered a creative genius. Indeed the artist Donald Judd, in the ultimate post-modern exercise of what John Lydon called "grotesque acts of laziness," ordered his pieces from a factory for others to arrange in a gallery, in his name. After removing reality from the art, the artist removed himself from the art, and indeed reality. Having lost its revolutionary spirit (and indeed its common sense), America lost its artistic vitality. The ugliness of this complacency found its lowest point in the paranoid years of the 9-11 era, where the nihilism of a fascist cult in the middle east was echoed by the masochism and relativism of the artistic community at home, particularly actors and directors in the film industry, such as Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, who asserted that either America had deserved the attacks, or that it had engineered them itself, with its all powerful CIA and its Zionist global New World Order. In that decade it was quite common to hear the opinion that the American revolution had either been completely negated, or that it was not even worth fighting in the first place. The partisans of this position, trapped in their reactionary delusion, are currently deploying all of their energy to define revolution as the defense of Colonel Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad against American empire. They are complimented by another pseudo-radical crowd who insist that the American revolution needs most to be defended against black presidents of questionable birth origin. All the while, art in America has become stale, mass produced, and replagiarized to the point of exhaustion. The response to this must, and necessarily will be an artistic search for truth and humanity against the endless waves of propaganda and lies from all quarters, as the American Revolution is again forced to reinvent itself in the face of global crisis.
Work’s Cited
Marx, Karl and the International Workingman’s Association, Marx’s letter to Abraham Lincoln, written between November 22 & 29, 1864, published The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7 1865;http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...oln-letter.htm