ART 330

Book info)Chapter 39 in The Humanities: Culture, Continuity, and Change by Sayre, H. M.

Chapter 39Multiplicity and Diversity

Cultures of Liberation and Identity in the 1960s and 1970s

By April 1963, the focus of the civil rights movement that had begun with Rosa Parks and the Little Rock Nine had shifted to Birmingham, Alabama (map 39.1). In protest over desegregation orders, the city had closed its parks and public golf courses. In retaliation, the black community called for a boycott of Birmingham stores. The city responded by halting the distribution of food normally given to the city’s needy families. In this progressively more heated atmosphere, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68), decided Birmingham would be their battlefield.

Just a few months later, King would deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd of more than 200,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (fig. 39.1). But in the spring of 1963, King led groups of protesters, gathering first at local churches, who descended on the city’s downtown both to picket businesses that continued to maintain “separate but equal” practices, such as different fitting rooms for blacks and whites in clothing stores, and to take seats at “whites-only” lunch counters. The city’s police chief, Bull Connor, responded by threatening to arrest anyone marching on the downtown area. On April 6, 50 marchers were arrested. The next day, 600 marchers gathered, and police confronted them with clubs, attack dogs, and the fire department’s new water hoses, which, they bragged, could rip the bark off a tree. But day after day, the marchers kept coming, their ranks swelling. A local judge issued an injunction banning the marches, but on April 12, King led a march of 50 people in defiance of the injunction. Crowds gathered in anticipation of King’s arrest, and, in fact, he was quickly taken into custody and placed in solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail. From jail, King dispatched a letter to a group of local white clergy who had publicly criticized him for willfully breaking the law and promoting demonstrations. Published in June 1963 in The Christian Century, what came to be known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” became the key text in the civil rights movement, providing the philosophical framework for the massive civil disobedience that King believed was required (Reading 39.1): READING 39.1

from Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws … [but] there are two types of laws. There are just laws and there are unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. … We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

In the days between King’s incarceration and the letter’s publication, the situation in Birmingham had worsened. A local disc jockey urged the city’s African-American youth to attend a “big party” at Kelly Ingram Park, across from the 16th Street Baptist Church (see map 39.1). It was no secret that the “party” was to be a mass demonstration. At least 1,000 youths gathered, most of them teenagers but some as young as 7 or 8 years old. As the chant of “Freedom, freedom now!” rose from the crowd, the Birmingham police closed in with their dogs, ordering them to attack those who did not flee.

Police wagons and squad cars were quickly filled with arrested juveniles, and as the arrests continued, the police used school buses to transport over 600 children and teenagers to jail. By the next day, the entire nation—in fact, the entire world—had come to know Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor, as televised images documented his dogs attacking children and his fire hoses literally washing them down the streets.

The youths returned, with reinforcements, over the next few days. By May 6, over 2,000 demonstrators were in jail, and police patrol cars were pummeled with rocks and bottles whenever they entered black neighborhoods. As the crisis mounted, secret negotiations between the city and the protestors resulted in change: Within 90 days, all lunch counters, restrooms, department-store fitting rooms, and drinking fountains would be open to all, black and white alike. The 2,000 people under arrest would be released.

It was a victory, but Birmingham remained uneasy. On Sunday, September 15, a dynamite bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a center for many civil rights rallies and meetings, killing four girls—one 11-year-old and three 14-year-olds. As news of the tragedy spread, riots and fires broke out throughout the city and two more teenagers were killed.

The tragedy drew many moderate whites into the civil rights movement. Popular culture had put them at the ready. In June 1963, the folk-rock trio Peter, Paul, and Mary released “Blowin’ in the Wind,” their version of the song that Bob Dylan (1941–) had written in April 1962. The Peter, Paul, and Mary record sold 300,000 copies in two weeks. At the March on Washington later that summer—an event organized by the same A. Philip Randolph who had conceived of a similar event over 20 years earlier, this time to promote passage of the Civil Rights Act—Peter, Paul, and Mary performed the song live before 250,000 people, the largest gathering of its kind to that point in the history of the United States. Not many minutes later, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to the same crowd. The trio’s album, In the Wind, released in October, quickly rose to number one in the charts. The winds of change were blowing across the country.

The civil rights movement that was ignited in Birmingham was just one manifestation of a growing dissatisfaction in America—and abroad—with the status quo, especially among a younger generation that had not experienced the hardships of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II. African-American artist Faith Ringgold (1930–) captures something of the dynamics of this dissatisfaction in her 1964 painting God Bless America (fig. 39.2

).

Fig. 39.2

Faith Ringgold, GOD BLESS AMERICA

The blue-eyed white woman portrayed in the painting embodies the status quo of blind patriotism, hand over her heart as she hears the song composed by Irving Berlin (1888–1989) in 1918, and revised in 1938 as a rallying cry against the rise of Hitler’s Germany. But this same woman, the image implies, is also a racist, as on the right side of the painting the stripes of the flag are transformed into the black bars of a jail cell—and the star of the flag, by implication, into a sheriff’s badge. This is an image painted by a 34-year-old female artist challenging the world view of an older generation—and not without a sense of righteous indignation.

That challenge is the subject of this chapter. It manifested itself not only in the civil rights movement, but in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in the burgeoning feminist movement, and in student unrest both in the United States and abroad, and it found particularly powerful expression in popular music, epitomized by Bob Dylan’s 1964 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” It manifested itself in ways that, in retrospect, seem slightly ridiculous—in the way, for instance, that long hair, on young males especially, signified to their elders a rejection of traditional values. But it manifested itself in other ways that have had a profound impact on American culture ever since—in, for instance, the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion. This challenge to traditional values found a sympathetic audience in the arts, which, after all, had been challenging the authority of tradition since at least Picasso. But as never before, except perhaps in Berlin as Hitler rose to power (see Chapter 37), did the arts so overtly engage in social critique.

The 1960s—a decade whose spirit extended well into the 1970s, until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975—was an era with many centers. New York was the center of the art world; Birmingham of the civil rights movement; Berkeley, California, of the student movement. Women began to question their central role as homemakers. And while Washington, D.C., was the center of government, it was being torn apart, as marchers filled its streets in protest and an embattled president was forced to resign before he could be impeached. Without a well-defined center—geographic or otherwise—the nation seemed to many unmoored and adrift; “blowing in the wind.”

Black Identity

1. 39.1 What factors contributed to changes in African-American self-definition in the 1960s?

It is probably fair to say that an important factor contributing to the civil rights movement was the growing sense of ethnic identity among the African-American population. Its origins can be traced back to the Harlem Renaissance (see Chapter 36), but throughout the 1940s and 1950s, a growing sense of cultural self-awareness and self-definition was taking hold, even though African Americans did not share in the growing wealth and sense of well-being that marked postwar American culture.

Sartre’s “Black Orpheus”

One of the most important contributions to this development was existentialism, with its emphasis on the inevitability of human suffering and the necessity for the individual to act responsibly in the face of that predicament. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 essay “Orphée Noir,” or “Black Orpheus,” was especially influential. The essay defined “blackness” as a mark of authenticity:

A Jew, a white among whites, can deny that he is a Jew, declaring himself a man among men. The black cannot deny that he is black nor claim for himself an abstract, colorless humanity: he is black. Thus he is driven to authenticity: insulted, enslaved, he raises himself up. He picks up the word “black” [“Négre”] that they had thrown at him like a stone, he asserts his blackness, facing the white man, with pride.

If, like the Jews, blacks had undergone a shattering diaspora, or dispersion, across the globe, traces of the original African roots were evident in everything from American blues and jazz to the African-derived religious and ritual practices of the Caribbean that survived as Vodou, Santería, and Condomblé. For Sartre, these were “Orphic” voices, which like the master musician and poet Orpheus of Greek legend, who descended into Hades to rescue his beloved Eurydice, had descended into the “black substratum” of their African heritage to discover an authentic—and revolutionary—voice. In works like The Siren of the Niger (fig. 39.3), Wifredo Lam (1902–82), a Cuban-born artist of African, Chinese, and European descent, evokes the Orphic voice of Africa, the fertile wellspring of inspiration and creativity.

Fig. 39.3

Wifredo Lam, THE SIREN OF THE NIGER

1950. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 51" × 38⅛". Signed LR in Oil: Wifredo Lam/1950. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972.

 

Lam arrived in Paris in 1938 with a letter of introduction to Picasso, who both befriended him and influenced his work.

Credit: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Similarly, the black American writer James Baldwin (1924–87) would describe the power of the blues in his 1957 short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Playing the jazz standard “Am I Blue,” the band “began to tell us what the blues were all about,” Baldwin writes:

They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

Asserting Blackness in Art and Literature

Baldwin was, in fact, one of the most influential writers of his generation. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Notes of a Native Son (1955), the first a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Harlem and the second a collection of deeply personal essays on race, won him great praise. But probably more instrumental in introducing existentialist attitudes to an American audience was the novel Invisible Man, published in 1952 by Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913–84) and written over a period of about seven years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In part, the novel is an ironic reversal of the famous trope of Ellison’s namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his book Nature (see Chapter 29): “I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all …” Ellison’s hero is invisible, rather than “nothing,” but he too sees all. He lives in a subterranean “hole” in a cellar at the edge of Harlem into which he has accidentally fallen in the riot that ends the novel (fig. 39.4). As “underground man,” his self-appointed task is to realize, in the narrative he is writing (the novel itself), the realities of black American life and experience. It is to take the responsibility, he realizes, to find words adequate to the history of the times. Throughout his life, his own people have been as invisible to him as he to them. He has opened his own eyes as he must now open others’. At the novel’s end, he is determined to come out of his “hole.”

1999–2000. Cibachrome transparency, aluminum light box, fluorescent bulbs, 75¼" × 106¼" × 10¼". Edition of two.

 

In his photographic re-creation of the setting of Ellison’s novel, Wall emphasizes, as does the novel, the 1,269 light bulbs in the room, all illegally connected to the electricity grid. “I love light,” Ellison writes; “perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But it is precisely because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.” Wall recognizes in these words a definition of photography as well.

Credit: Marian Goodman Gallery/Jeff Wall Studio

One of Ellison’s narrator’s most vital realizations is that he must, above all else, assert his blackness instead of hiding from it. He must not allow himself to be absorbed into white society. “Must I strive toward colorlessness?” he asks.

But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. … Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.

There could be no better description of the collages of Romare Bearden (1911–88), who had worked for two decades in an almost entirely abstract vein, but who in the early 1960s began to tear images out of Ebony, Look, and Life magazines and assemble them into depictions of black experience. The Dove (fig. 39.5)—named for the white dove that is perched over the central door, a symbol of peace and harmony—combines forms of shifting scale and different orders of fragmentation. For example, a giant cigarette extends from the hand of the dandy, sporting a cap, at the right, and the giant fingers of a woman’s hand reach over the windowsill at the top left. The resulting effect is almost kaleidoscopic, an urban panorama of a conservatively dressed older generation and hipper, younger people gathered into a scene nearly bursting with energy—the “one, and yet many.” As Ellison wrote of Bearden’s art in 1968:

Bearden’s meaning is identical with his method. His combination of technique is in itself eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps of consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes, and dreams which characterize much of [African] American history.

1964. Cut-and-pasted photoreproductions and papers, gouache, pencil and colored pencil on cardboard, 13⅜" × 18¾". Blanchette Rockefeller Fund. (377.1971). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

The white dog at the lower left appears to be stalking the black cat at the foot of the steps in the middle, in counterpoint to the dove above the door.

Credit: Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala-Art Resource, NY. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The sense of a single black American identity, one containing the diversity of black culture within it that Bearden’s work embodies, is also found in the work of poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (1934–2014). Baraka changed his name from LeRoi Jones in 1968 after the assassination of the radical black Muslim minister Malcolm X in 1965. Malcolm X believed that blacks should separate themselves from whites in every conceivable way, that they should give up integration as a goal and create their own black nation. As opposed to Martin Luther King, who advocated nonviolent protest, Malcolm advocated violent action if necessary: “How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi,” he asked a Detroit audience in 1963, “as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered? … If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad.”

Baraka’s chosen Muslim name, Imamu Amiri Baraka, refers to the divine blessing associated with Muslim holy men that can be transferred from a material object to a person, so that a pilgrim returning from Mecca is a carrier of baraka. Baraka’s 1969 poem, “Ka’Ba,” seeks to imbue baraka upon the people of Newark, New Jersey, where Baraka lived (Reading 39.2):

READING 39.2

Amiri Baraka, “Ka’Ba” (1969)

A closed window looks down on a dirty courtyard, and Black people call across or scream across or walk across defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound Our world is more lovely than anyone’s tho we suffer, and kill each other and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people 10With African imaginations full of masks and dances and swelling chants with African eyes, and noses, and arms tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured, and we labor to make our getaway, into the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves and our Black family. We need magic 20now we need the spells, to raise up return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred word?

The sacred word, the poem’s title suggests, is indeed “Ka’Ba.” But, despite the spiritual tone of this poem, Baraka became increasingly militant during the 1960s. In 1967, he produced two of his own plays protesting police brutality. A year later, in his play Home on the Range, his protagonist, Criminal, breaks into a white family’s home only to find them so immersed in television that he cannot communicate with them. The play was performed as a benefit for the leaders of the Black Panther Party, a black revolutionary political party founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton (1942–89) and Bobby Seale (1936–) and dedicated to organizing support for a socialist revolution.

Other events, too, reflected the growing militancy of the African-American community. In August 1965, violent riots in the Watts district of South Central Los Angeles lasted for six days, leaving 34 dead, over 1,000 people injured, nearly 4,000 arrested, and hundreds of buildings destroyed. In July 1967, rioting broke out in both Newark and Detroit. In Newark, six days of rioting left 23 dead, over 700 injured, and close to 1,500 people arrested. In Detroit, five days of rioting resulted in 43 people dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,000 people arrested, and 2,509 stores looted or burned. Finally, it seemed to many that Martin Luther King’s pacifism had come back to haunt him when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

It was directly out of this climate that the popular poetry/music/performance/dance phenomenon known as rap, or hip-hop, came into being. Shortly after the death of Martin Luther King, on Malcolm X’s birthday, May 19, 1968, David Nelson, Gylan Kain, and Abiodun Oyewole founded the group the Last Poets, named after a poem by South African poet Willie Kgositsile (1938–) in which he had claimed that it would soon be necessary to put poetry aside and take up guns in the looming revolution. “Therefore we are the last poets of the world,” Kgositsile concluded. In performance, the Last Poets were deeply influenced by the musical phrasings of Amiri Baraka’s poetry. They improvised individually, trading words and phrases back and forth like jazz musicians improvising on each other’s melodies, until their voices would come together in a rhythmic chant and the number would end. Most of all, they were political, attacking white racism, black bourgeois complacency, the government, and the police, whoever seemed to stand in the way of significant progress for African Americans. As Abiodun Oyewole put it, “We were angry, and we had something to say.”

Equally influential was performer Gil Scott-Heron, whose recorded poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” appeared on his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (Reading 39.3):

READING 39.3

from Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970)

You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.1 You will not be able to lose yourself on skag2 and skip out for beer during commercials because The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in 4 parts without commercial interruptions. … There will be no highlights on the Eleven O’clock News 10and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or Rare Earth. The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, 20a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, not be televised, be televised. The revolution will be no re-run, brothers; 30The revolution will be LIVE.

As the next section of this chapter underscores, as angry as Scott-Heron’s poem is, the poet’s attitude toward American popular culture, which he strongly condemns, is closely aligned with that of Pop artists of the 1960s as well (see Chapter 38). The Vietnam War: Rebellion and the Arts

1. 39.2 How did artists respond to the Vietnam War?

Even as the civil rights movement took hold, the Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union were increasingly exacerbated by the United States’ involvement in the war in Vietnam. By the mid-1960s, fighting between the North Vietnamese Communists led by Ho Chi Minh and the pro-Western and former French colony of South Vietnam (see Chapter 37) had led to a massive troop buildup of American forces in the region, fueled by a military draft that alienated many American youth—the population of 15- to 24-year-olds that over the course of the 1960s increased from 24.5 million to 36 million.

Across the country, the spirit of rebellion that fueled the civil rights movement took hold on college campuses and in the burgeoning antiwar community. Events at the University of California at Berkeley served to link, in the minds of many, the antiwar movement and the fight for civil rights. In 1964, the university administration tried to stop students from recruiting and raising funds on campus for two groups dedicated to ending racial discrimination. Protesting the administration’s restrictions, a group of students organized the Free Speech Movement, which initiated a series of rallies, sit-ins, and student strikes at Berkeley. The administration backed down, and the Berkeley students’ tactics were quickly adapted by groups in the antiwar movement, which focused on removing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from college campuses and helped to organize antiwar marches, teach-ins, and rallies across the country. By 1969, feelings reached a fever pitch, as over a half million protesters, adopting the tactics of the civil rights movement in 1963, marched on Washington.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Antiwar sentiment was reflected in the arts in works primarily about earlier wars, World War II and Korea, as if it were impossible to deal directly with events in Southeast Asia, which could be seen each night on the evening news. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 was widely read, and the Robert Altman (1925–2006) film M*A*S*H, a smash-hit satiric comedy about the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea, opened in 1970 and spawned an 11-year-long television series that premiered in 1972. But perhaps the most acclaimed antiwar work was the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007). It is the oddly narrated story of ex-World War II GI Billy Pilgrim, a survivor, like Vonnegut himself, of the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden (where 135,000 German civilians were killed, more than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined). Pilgrim claims to have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet of Trafalmadore. At the beginning of the book, the narrator (more or less, Vonnegut himself) is talking with a friend about the war novel he is about to write (Slaughterhouse-Five), when the friend’s wife interrupts (Reading 39.4):

READING 39.4

from Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

“You’ll pretend that you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by … John Wayne. … And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies. …” She didn’t want her babies or anyone else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

In response, Vonnegut creates, in Pilgrim, the most innocent of heroes, and subtitles his novel: The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Pilgrim’s reaction to the death he sees everywhere—“So it goes”—became a mantra for the generation that came of age in the late 1960s. The novel’s fatalism mirrored the sense of pointlessness and arbitrariness that so many felt in the face of the Vietnam War.

Artists Against the War

In the minds of many, the Vietnam War was symptomatic of a more general cultural malaise for which the culture of consumption, the growing dominance of mass media, and the military-industrial complex were all responsible. Among many others, Pop artist James Rosenquist explicitly tied the American military to American consumer culture (see Closer Look).

The establishment itself, especially as embodied by university administrations and their boards of trustees, was often the target of protests. Just such a work was Pop artist Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (fig. 39.6). The work was pulled into a central square at Yale University, Oldenburg’s alma mater, in the fall of 1969 to stand in front of a World War I monument inscribed with the words “In Memory of the Men of Yale who True to Her Traditions Gave Their Lives that Freedom Might Not Perish from the Earth.” In Oldenburg’s typically audacious way, the piece consists of a three-story-high inflatable lipstick tube mounted on tanklike caterpillar treads. At once a missile-shaped phallic symbol and a wry commentary on the fact that Yale had admitted women to the university for the first time that fall, it was commissioned by the university’s architecture graduate students as an antiwar demonstration. Yale authorities were not amused, and had the piece removed before convocation (though it was subsequently reinstalled on campus in 1974).

Fig. 39.6

Claes Oldenburg, LIPSTICK (ASCENDING) ON CATERPILLAR TRACKS

1969. Cor-Ten steel, steel, aluminum; coated with resin and painted with polyurethane enamel, 23'6" × 24'11" × 10'11". Collection of Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Colossal Keepsake Corporation.

 

Initially made of a soft material that would slowly deflate until someone wishing to speak from the sculpture’s platform pumped it up with air to attract attention, the lipstick was constructed of more permanent materials when the piece was reinstalled in 1974.

Credit: Photo by Attilio Maranzano. © 2008 Oldenburg Van Bruggen Foundation, NY

By the fall of 1969, many other artists had organized in opposition to the war. In a speech at an opening hearing that led to the creation of the antiwar Art Workers’ Coalition, art critic and editor Gregory Battcock outlined how the art world was complicit in the war effort:

The trustees of the museums direct NBC and CBS, The New York Times, and the Associated Press, and that greatest cultural travesty of modern times—the Lincoln Center. They own AT&T, Ford, General Motors, the great multi-billion dollar foundations, Columbia University, Alcoa, Minnesota Mining, United Fruit, and AMK, besides sitting on the boards of each other’s museums. The implications of these facts are enormous. Do you realize that it is those art-loving, culturally committed trustees of the Metropolitan and the Modern museums who are waging the war in Vietnam?

In other words, the museums embodied, in the minds of many, the establishment politics that had led to the war in the first place. On October 15, 1969, the first Vietnam Moratorium Day, artists managed to close the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Jewish Museum, but the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim refused to close.

The Art Workers’ Coalition also quickly reacted to reports that American soldiers, the men of Charlie Company, had slaughtered men, women, and children in the Vietnam village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. Over a year later, in November 1969, as the army was investigating Charlie Company’s platoon leader, First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., photographs taken at My Lai by army photographer Ron Haeberle appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Four days later, in an interview by Mike Wallace on CBS-TV, Paul Meadlo, who had been at My Lai, reported that Lt. Calley had rounded up 40 of 45 villagers and ordered them shot. “Men, women, and children?” Wallace asked. “Men, women, and children,” Meadlo answered. “And babies?” “And babies.” The transcript of the interview was published the next day in the New York Times, accompanied by the photograph. Quickly, the Art Workers’ Coalition added Wallace’s question and Meadlo’s response to the image (fig. 39.7), printed a poster, and distributed it around the world.

Fig. 39.7

Ron Haeberle, Peter Brandt, and the Art Workers’ Coalition, Q. AND BABIES? A. AND BABIES

Conceptual Art

Rather than attacking the museums directly, another strategy designed to undermine the art establishment emerged—making art that was objectless, art that was conceived as either uncollectable or unbuyable, either intangible, temporary, or existing beyond the reach of the museum and gallery system that artists in the antiwar movement believed was, at least in a de facto way, supporting the war. The strategies for creating this objectless art had already been developed by a number of artists who, reacting to the culture of consumption, had chosen to stop making works of art that could easily enter the marketplace. In the catalog for an exhibition entitled “January 5–31, 1969,” a show consisting, in fact, of its catalog but no objects, artist Douglas Huebler (1924–97) wrote: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting: I do not wish to add any more.” In this way, he sidestepped both the museum and the individual collector. His Duration Piece #13, for instance, consists of one hundred $1 bills listed by serial number and put into circulation throughout the world, the serial numbers to be reprinted 25 years later in an art magazine. Each person holding one of the bills would receive a $1,000 reward.

In light of such works, critics began to speak of “the dematerialization of art” and “the death of painting,” even as California artist John Baldessari (1931–) destroyed 13 years’ worth of his paintings, cremating them at a mortuary. The following year, he created a lithograph with the single phrase “I will not make any more boring art” written over and over again across its surface.

Land Art

Closely related to both the Conceptualists and the Minimalists (see Chapter 38) are those artists who, in the 1960s, began to make site-specific art. (Such art defines itself in relation to the particular place for which it was conceived.) Many of these were earthworks, conceived as enormous mounds and excavations made in the remote regions of the American West. One of the primary motivations for making them was to escape the gallery system. In an essay published in 1972, Robert Smithson (1938–73) put it this way: “A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. … Works of art seen in such spaces … are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to declare them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society.”

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

One of the most famous of works designed specifically to escape the gallery system is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (fig. 39.8), created in 1970. Using dump trucks to haul rocks and dirt, Smithson created a simple spiral form in the Great Salt Lake. The work is intentionally outside the gallery system, in the landscape—and a relatively inaccessible and inhospitable portion of the Utah landscape at that. Smithson chose the site, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake about 100 miles north of Salt Lake City and 15 miles south of the Golden Spike National Historic Monument, where the Eastern and Western railroads met in 1869, connecting both sides of the American continent by rail, because, in his mind, it was the very image of entropy, the condition of decreasing organization or deteriorating order. Here is a giant lake without outlet, a system coming to a stand still. For Smithson, the condition of entropy was not only the hallmark of the modern, but the eventual fate of all things—“an ironic joke of nature,” as one historian has described the lake, “water that is itself more desert than a desert.”

Fig. 39.8

Robert Smithson, SPIRAL JETTY

Great Salt Lake, Utah, April 1970. Black rock, salt crystals, earth, red water (algae). 3½' × 15' × 1,500'. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York.

 

Smithson’s film of the Jetty’s construction mirrors the earthwork not only by imaging it, but, as a spiral loop of 16mm film, by formally mirroring its structure.

Credit: Gianfranco Gorgoni/DIA Center for the Arts, New York. Art © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

Smithson’s work on the jetty in fact coincided with the rise of ecology as a wider public issue. On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day inaugurated the environmental movement, which could trace its roots back to the publication, in 1953, of Eugene P. Odum’s textbook The Fundamentals of Ecology but, more importantly, in terms of its wide popularity, to the 1962 publication of a book by Rachel Carson (1907–64), Silent Spring, first serialized in three issues of the New Yorker magazine. Carson was a marine biologist who had previously published a series of meditative books on the sea that serve as models of nature writing to this day. But Silent Spring was far more polemical, arguing that the introduction of synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT, into the environment threatened human life itself.

Smithson’s jetty was, as a result, widely understood as a work of environmental art. Humans had already degraded the site: Jetties had once stretched out into the lake to serve now-abandoned oil derricks. As Smithson wrote not long after completing the Spiral Jetty, “Across the country there are many mining areas, disused quarries, and polluted lakes and rivers. One practical solution for the utilization of such devastated places would be land and water re-cycling in terms of ‘Earth Art.’”

As he was constructing the jetty, Smithson made a film of the event. The typical camera angle is aerial, looking straight down at the surface of the lake from above, so that the spiral seems to lie flat, like a two-dimensional design. The image reinforces the spiral’s status as one of the most widespread of all ornamental and symbolic designs on earth, suggesting, too, the motion of the cosmos. The spiral is also found in three main natural forms: expanding like a nebula, contracting like a whirlpool, or ossified as in a snail’s shell. Smithson’s work suggests the ways in which these contradictory forces are simultaneously at work in the universe.

At the end of the film, a helicopter follows Smithson as he runs out the length of the spiral in a dizzying swirl of cinematography that leaves the viewer unsure which direction is which. When Smithson arrives at the center of the spiral, he pauses, breathless, then turns to walk back, a purposefully deflated image of purposelessness, the very image of the tensions between motion and stasis, entropy and creation, expansion and contraction, even life and death, that informed Smithson’s work.

Low Impact: Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy

The work of British artists Richard Long (1945–) and Andy Goldsworthy (1956–) underscores both the fragility of nature and the artists’ respect for it. Long’s A Line Made by Walking (fig. 39.9) is literally a path made by walking back and forth across a field in the west of England until the grass was matted down. Long photographed the line, and then departed. The grass soon returned to its natural state, and the field seemed once again untouched. Long does not consider such work particularly motivated by environmental concerns. When, in 1997, he was asked by an interviewer about his attitudes toward global warming, he replied:

My work is just art, not “political” art … I first chose landscape so as to use the dimension of distance to make a work of art by walking … I was intuitively attracted to such relatively empty, non-urban landscapes partly because they were the best place to realize my ideas, but also because such places were a pleasure to be in. They had a spiritual dimension which was also important for the work. So my work comes from a desire to be in a dynamic, creative and engaged harmony with nature, not actually from any political or ecological motives.

Nonetheless, it is certainly possible to learn certain political and ecological lessons from Long’s work.

1967. Photograph and pencil on board, 14½" × 12¾". Tate, London, purchased 1976 P07149.

 

It is worth considering this work as the photodocumentation of a work of performance art, a brand of non-collectable art that, like conceptual art, takes place outside the culture of consumption.

Credit: © 2017 Tate, London. © 2017 Richard Long. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London / ARS, NY

Andy Goldsworthy’s work has much in common with Long’s. Goldsworthy experiments with the movement of line in art and nature through sculptural works that are constructed entirely out of natural materials. An example is Hazel Leaves (fig. 39.10), made of leaves stitched together with grass stalks, shaped into a spiral, and placed in a pool in a small stream in southern Scotland. The path of a similar work is recorded in the documentary Rivers and Tides (2001). In the film, we see the current take hold of the outer end of the spiral and pull it downstream. As it unfurls in the pool, a long line of hazel leaves undulates downstream on the current. Eventually, parts of the green line are caught on rocks and debris. The leaves break apart, caught in this swirl or that, until the piece’s journey is over. As Goldsworthy told an interviewer in 2004:

My intention is not to improve nature but to know it—not as a spectator but as a participant, I do not wish to mimic nature, but to draw on the energy that drives it so that it drives my work also. My art is unmistakably the work of a person—I would not want it otherwise—it celebrates my human nature and a need to be physically and spiritually bound to the earth.

Like Long’s A Line Made by Walking, Goldsworthy’s changeable and impermanent works are a metaphor for human life, both the paths of our personal lives and the “time line” of human history.

Fig. 39.10

Andy Goldsworthy, HAZEL LEAVES (EACH STITCHED TO NEXT WITH GRASS STALKS/GENTLY PULLED BY THE RIVER/OUT OF A ROCK POOL/FLOATING DOWNSTREAM/LOW WATER)

Temporary Intrusions: Christo and Jeanne-Claude

If Goldsworthy’s work is a metaphor for human time, the works of Christo (1935–) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) seem to evoke, instead, time’s very passing and the fragility of human experience. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works are literally here today and gone tomorrow, leaving no lasting footprint on the landscape and impacting the environment minimally, if at all—considering the enormous scale at which they worked, an extraordinary feat. Running Fence, which took nearly five years to realize, from 1972 to 1976, is a case in point (fig. 39.11). Eighteen feet high and running for 24.5 miles through Sonoma and Marin Counties in Northern California, it extended from US Route 101 across 14 other roadways and the rolling hills of 59 private ranches until descending into the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay. It required more than 2.2 million square feet of white nylon fabric, hung from a steel cable stretched between 2,050 steel poles. It stood in place for 14 days, from September 10 to September 24, 1976. All expenses for the temporary work of art were paid by Christo and Jeanne-Claude through the sale of studies, preparatory drawings and collages, scale models, and original lithographs. On the occasion of the 2010 exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence,” Christo explained the thinking behind both the site-specificity of the work and its temporary qualities: “This project is entirely designed for that specific landscape and nothing can be transported. Nobody can buy the work, nobody can own the work, and nobody can charge tickets for the work. We do not own the projects, they are beyond the ownership of the artists because freedom is the enemy of possession, that’s why these projects do not stay. They are absolutely related to artistic and aesthetic freedom.”

One of the primary features of Running Fence—and all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work—is the public debate and buy-in that was required to execute it, including the ranchers’ participation, 18 public hearings, three sessions at the Superior Courts of California, and the drafting of a 450-page Environmental Impact Report. The debate about the work’s merits as art, the spirit of collaboration that resulted, and, perhaps above all, the stories and memories that the piece subsequently evoked (including Albert and David Maysles’s extraordinary documentary film of the project, released in 1978), are all equally part and parcel of the work itself. But the tranquility and beauty of the Running Fence—to say nothing of the sense of community and cooperation it embodied—could, finally, be taken as a counterstatement to the political climate in which it was realized. In fact, the poles used to construct the fence were Vietnam surplus, used in the construction of military airports in Vietnam, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude were able to purchase them from the Army for $42 each. Then, after the Fence was dismantled, the local ranchers used the poles for their own fences and to build cattle guards. Running Fence thus literally transformed war materials into artistic and peaceable use. The Music of Youth and Rebellion

Given the involvement of American youth in the antiwar movement, it was natural that their music—rock and roll—helped to fuel the fires of their increasingly passionate expressions of dismay at American foreign policy. Rock and roll music had, after all, originated in an atmosphere of youthful rebellion. Beginning at the end of the 1940s, it gained increasing popularity in the 1950s when the gyrating hips and low-slung guitar of one of its earliest stars, Elvis Presley (1935–77), made the music’s innuendo of youthful sexual rebellion explicit. In the 1960s, led by the Beatles, British rock bands (including Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones) transformed rock into the musical idiom of a youthful counterculture that embraced sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Audiences at most concerts openly smoked marijuana, and hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD, a semisynthetic psychedelic drug which was not made illegal in the United States until 1967, were regularly used by rock groups such as the Beatles, the Doors, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. The Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” which appeared on their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow, draws clear analogies between the experiences of Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the hallucinatory effects of taking LSD. And in their self-titled debut album of 1967, the Velvet Underground describes in dark, almost sardonic terms, which would deeply influence the later punk movement, the heroin addiction of its leader, Lou Reed (1942–2013).

One of the great promoters of rock in the 1960s was Bill Graham (1931–91), a refugee from Nazi Germany who was raised by foster parents in New York City. Graham operated two rock venues in San Francisco, the Fillmore West and Winterland, and another in New York, the Fillmore East. Almost every major rock group of the era performed in these halls, and the posters Graham commissioned for these concerts became the emblems of the era.

Bonnie MacLean, a recent graduate of Penn State, was one of the founders of the Fillmore poster “look.” Her poster for Six Days of Sound (fig. 39.12), a Christmas-to-New-Year’s celebration in 1967, captures the mood of the era. Deeply indebted to the Art Nouveau tradition, many of the posters convey the same sexual energy as Art Nouveau, but combined with a spirit of political protest. In her right hand, the long-haired lady of MacLean’s poster carries mistletoe; in her left, the peace sign, large and colored red and green, a Christmas ornament that she is about to hang from the branches of a Christmas tree.

Fig. 39.12

Bonnie MacLean, SIX DAYS OF SOUND

The presence of the peace sign in the Fillmore poster is not only appropriate to the season—“Peace on earth, goodwill to men”—but signals the intimate association between rock music and the antiwar movement. As in the civil rights March on Washington in 1963, which was highlighted by Peter, Paul, and Mary’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in front of the Lincoln Memorial, most peace marches concluded in large public spaces where speakers and bands alternately shared the stage. The peace march in San Francisco on the nationwide Vietnam Moratorium Day, November 15, 1969, concluded at Golden Gate Park, where, among others, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed. A quarter of a million people attended. That same day, a half million people marched in Washington, D.C. (and in Columbus, Ohio, Dave Thomas opened the first Wendy’s restaurant).

The quartet of David Crosby (1941–), Stephen Stills (1945–), Graham Nash (1942–), and Neil Young (1945–) had come together just months before. Their first performance together was at the Fillmore East in July, their second at Woodstock in August.

The Woodstock Festival, which was held on a 600-acre dairy farm outside Woodstock, New York, from August 15 to August 18, 1969, and known soon after, by the subtitle of the film documenting it, as “3 Days of Peace and Music,” has, for an entire generation, become legendary. Approximately 500,000 people attended—and thousands more claim to have been there. On both Saturday, August 16, and Sunday, August 17, bands played all night. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young began their 16-song set at 3 am on Sunday, a marathon evening that concluded on Monday morning with guitarist Jimi Hendrix playing his notorious version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a wailing, weeping, whining electric guitar that to conservative ears seemed a direct assault on American tradition.

Perhaps as important as the event itself was the release, in March 1970, of the documentary film of the event, with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performing “Woodstock,” written by Joni Mitchell (1943–), over the closing credits. The last verse makes the politics of the event concrete (Reading 39.5):

READING 39.5

from Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock” (1970)

By the time we got to Woodstock We were half a million strong And everywhere there was song and celebration And I dreamed I saw the bombers Riding shotgun in the sky And they were turning into butterflies Above our nation We are stardust Billion year old carbon We are golden Caught in the devil’s bargain And we’ve got to get ourselves Back to the garden

The utopian dream of “Woodstock,” the desire to return to “the garden,” was quickly shattered. Just days before the national Moratorium Day March, reporter Seymour Hersh (1937–) broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the New York Times (see fig. 39.7). A few months later, on April 30, 1970, President Nixon announced that American troops had invaded Cambodia five days earlier. Protests erupted on college campuses across the United States. At Kent State University near Akron, Ohio, the governor of Ohio called out the Ohio National Guard, who arrived on campus as students burned down an old ROTC building (already boarded up and scheduled for demolition). On Monday, May 4, some 2,000 students gathered on the school commons. The National Guard ordered them to disperse. They refused. A group of 77 guardsmen advanced on the students, and for reasons that have never been fully explained, opened fire. Four students were killed, nine wounded. Photojournalism student John Paul Filo’s photograph of 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller became an instant icon of the antiwar movement (fig. 39.13). Neil Young quickly penned what would become Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s most famous protest song, “Ohio,” commemorating the four who died. The song quickly rose to number two on the charts.

Fig. 39.13

John Paul Filo, KENT STATE—GIRL SCREAMING OVER DEAD BODY, MAY 4, 1970

1970.

 

Filo’s photograph appeared on the cover of Newsweek on May 18, 1970, beside the headline “Nixon’s Home Front.” Filo was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his work at Kent State.

Credit: John Filo/Getty Images

American involvement in Vietnam would not end until January 1973, when a ceasefire was agreed upon in Paris and American troops were finally withdrawn. Two years later, on April 30, 1975, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army took control of Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City, and Vietnam was reunited as a country for the first time since the French defeat in 1954. The war continues to haunt the American psyche to the present day (see The Continuing Presence of the Past).

High and Low: The Example of Music

1. 39.3 How does the relationship between “high” and “popular” culture manifest itself in music?

Rock and roll’s ascendancy as the favorite music of American popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s underscores a shift in cultural values in which the line between “high” and “low” art became more and more difficult to define. Composers from the time of Dufay and Josquin had based their work on secular melodies, but the phenomenon really began to take shape in the nineteenth century, as nationalist composers such as Giuseppe Verdi in Italy and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Russia began to draw on traditional folk songs for their otherwise Classical compositions. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Classical music was increasingly considered the provenance of elite and intellectual audiences, while lighter fare was understood to appeal to wider, more populist tastes. By the jazz era, everyone from the American George Gershwin to the Russian Igor Stravinsky incorporated jazz idioms into their work, and Aaron Copland, as we have seen, looked to the regional traditions of the Appalachian hills and the American West for inspiration. The Boston Pops Orchestra was founded as early as 1885 to present “concerts of a lighter kind of music.” Its conductor of over 50 years, Arthur Fiedler (1894–1979), was followed by Academy Award-winner John Williams (1932–), composer of the soundtracks to the films Star Wars and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of all of them, twentieth-century composer Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) was probably most at home in both Classical and popular idioms. High and low were distinctions that, in his own work, he tried to ignore. He could write Broadway hit musicals such as Candide (1956) and West Side Story (1957), as well as profoundly moving symphonies such as his 1963 Third Symphony, Kaddish, a musical interpretation of the Jewish prayer for the dead, written for an orchestra, a chorus, a soloist, a children’s choir, and a narrator.

György Ligeti and Minimalist Music

Minimalist music was inspired by advances in new media—particularly electronic recording and production innovations—but their sound was so different that both popular and Classical audiences were often put off. Like Minimalist artists, “minimalist” composers emphasized the use of consciously limited means, but rather than creating Minimalist Art’s simple geometric compositions, minimalist musicians transformed the simple elements with which they began into dense, rich compositions.

Interest in electronic music was stimulated, in New York, by the Radio Corporation of America’s development of the electronic synthesizer in 1955. But Europeans were equally committed to its development, among them Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923–2006). After World War II, the Soviet Union controlled all of Eastern Europe, and when Hungary tried to break away in 1956, the Soviets sent their tanks into Budapest. Ligeti, then 32 years of age, ignored the gunfire and shellbursts that had sent most of his fellow citizens into basement shelters so that he could continue to listen to a West German radio broadcast of a piece by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007). Stockhausen had composed the first piece of music using synthesized tones in 1953, Studie I. Its instrumentation consisted of three tape recorders, a sine wave generator, and a “natural echo chamber.” Stockhausen felt he was returning to the very basis of sound, which, in his words, rises from “pure vibration, which can be produced electrically and which is called a sine wave. Every existing sound, every noise, is a mixture of such sine waves—a spectrum.” For the first time, the musical composition existed entirely on tape and required no performer to produce it.

When Ligeti escaped Hungary late in 1956, he joined Stockhausen at the Studio for Electronic Music in West Germany. Stockhausen was editing tapes of electronically generated sounds—as well as music generated by traditional instruments and voices—in the same way that a filmmaker edits film. And he was experimenting with the ways in which sound was heard by an audience as well. In what is probably the hallmark electronic composition of the era, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Children), composed in 1956, was one of the first works to include spatialization as a compositional element, inaugurating the “stereo” and “surround sound” era. Combining taped voices in combination with taped electronic sounds, the original version utilized five loudspeakers, positioned to surround the audience. Stockhausen’s plan was to play the work at the Cologne Cathedral, but the archbishop did not think loudspeakers belonged in church. As Stockhausen described it: “The direction and movement of the sounds in space is shaped by the musician, opening up a new dimension in musical experience”—and, he thought, spiritual experience as well.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s, Ligeti was moving in a very different direction. Rather than exploring the vast diversity of sound, as Stockhausen did, he developed a rich, but much more minimal, brand of polyphony—which he called “micropolyphony”—dense, constantly changing clusters of sound that blur the boundaries between melody, harmony, and rhythm. This effect can be heard in Ligeti’s 1966 Lux Aeterna (Track 39.1), the parts of which seem to blend together in a sort of shimmering atmosphere of overall sound. The piece is actually a canon, an arrangement of theme and variations, except that the entrances are neither contrapuntal nor harmonic, but rather densely compacted and atonal. In 1968, the composition reached a mass audience when American director Stanley Kubrick (1928–99) used it in the soundtrack of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 Listen to the Track 39.1

György Ligeti, LUX AETERNA

Ligeti gradually became aware of the young American minimalist composers Terry Riley (1935–), Steve Reich (1936–), and Philip Glass (1937–). Like the Minimalist artists, their work relied on repetition of units that differ only slightly or that vary only gradually over extended periods of time. In his groundbreaking In C of 1964, Riley created 53 brief thematic fragments, to be played in any combination by any group of instruments. Though each musician plays these fragments in the same sequence, they are free to repeat any fragment as many times as they like. The one constant, providing a foundation for the texture of interweaving fragments in the piece, is a C octave played in a high range of the piano throughout the piece, repeating as many as ten or fifteen thousand times in any given performance (the length of performance will vary depending upon how many times each musician repeats each fragment). Steve Reich’s 1965 It’s Gonna Rain consists of the repetition of a single phrase of text (the title), taken from a tape recording of a street preacher by the name of Brother Walker sermonizing on the subject of Noah and the Flood. Reich spliced together two copies of the same tape played at slightly different speeds, so that they gradually shift, in his words, “out of phase,” and the monotony of the repetition is transformed as the original sound of the phrase gradually comes to sound entirely different.

John Adams (1947–) echoed Reich’s practice in It’s Gonna Rain to create a composition for the Shaker religion, Shaker Loops. But in this piece, Adams added a profoundly emotional, almost Romantic dynamic to its minimalist repetition. In 1987, Adams wrote an opera, Nixon in China, based on the February 1972 meeting between American president Richard Nixon (1913–94) and Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. Adams created what he describes as “the first opera ever to use a staged ‘media event’ as the basis for its dramatic structure.” Nixon and Mao were both adept manipulators of public opinion, and in his opera, Adams sought to reveal “how dictatorships on the right and on the left throughout the century had carefully managed public opinion through a form of public theater and the cultivation of ‘persona’ in the political arena.” Nixon made much of his visit, the first by an American president to Communist-controlled China, and the driving propulsion of Adams’s repetitive score captures perfectly Nixon’s excitement, his passionate desire to leave an indelible mark on history.

The Theatrical and the New Gesamtkunstwerk

The ambition and scope of Adams’s opera reflects a renewed interest in reinventing what, in the nineteenth century, the German composer Richard Wagner had called the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” merging visual art, music, opera, dance, and so on, into a single integrated whole (see Chapter 30). Decades later, Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright, warned in response:

So long as the expression “Gesamtkunstwerk” means that the integration is a muddle, so long as the arts are supposed to be “fused” together, the various elements will all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere “feed” to the rest. The process of fusion extends to the spectator who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art. … Words, music, and setting must become more independent of one another.

It was this aesthetic philosophy that guided Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg in collaborations that combined independent compositions (see Chapter 38). In their intentional heterogeneity, the Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg “events” created a clear precedent for postmodern theatrical practice, which sought not to “fuse” the arts but underscored their difference within the same stage space.

Robert Wilson and Postmodern Opera

Describing his 1976 postmodern opera Einstein on the Beach, innovative director and producer Robert Wilson (1941–) explained:

In making Einstein, I thought about gestures or movements as something separate. And I thought about light … the decor, the environments, the painted drops, the furniture, and they’re all separate. And then you have all of these screens of visual images that are layered against one another and sometimes they don’t align, and then sometimes they do. If you take a baroque candelabra and you put it on a baroque table, that’s one thing. But if you take a baroque candelabra and you place it on a rock, that’s something else. …

The music for Wilson’s opera is also its own “separate” entity. Created by minimalist composer Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach has a score that brims with slowly developing variations that accompany recurring patterns. As Glass himself says, “The difficulty is not that it keeps repeating, but that it almost never repeats.” It is thus a fabric composed not of sameness but difference. The five-hour opera unfolds, subtly, as in John Ashbery’s expression, like “A whispered phrase passed around the room” (Track 39.2).

 Listen to the Track 39.2

Philip Glass, KNEE PLAY 2 from EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

Glass was chiefly inspired by the music of Indian sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar (1920–2012), whose raga improvisations he had transcribed into Western notation for a soundtrack to the 1966 counterculture film Chappaqua. He was fascinated by the structure of Indian ragas, which he perceived to be made up of small units of notes built up into chains of larger rhythmic patterns. The compositions Glass subsequently created based on this understanding had little in common with Indian music, but they did incorporate the hypnotic, almost mystical, cyclic repetitive patterns that he equated with meditative aural space.

In Einstein on the Beach, Wilson set Glass’s music to dance sequences choreographed by Lucinda Childs (1940–) to create contrasting elements (fig. 39.14). “I thought of the dances as landscapes, as fields,” Wilson said, “And so the space is the biggest. They break apart the space.” In much of the opera, the visual backdrops create a shallow visual field, but the dances occur in a space that is lighted as if receding into the infinite. Each dance sequence occurs twice, the second time to music so distinctly different from the first instance that it is virtually unrecognizable the second time around. This doubling—at once the same and not the same—is another facet of postmodern experience.

Fig. 39.14

Robert Wilson, EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH, DANCE 1

Laurie Anderson and Rock Postmodernism

While Robert Wilson’s Einstein remained a relatively “high art” phenomenon, the possibility of creating a work of “total art” that spoke more directly to a popular culture, rock and roll aesthetic, remained an attractive alternative, one addressed first by the rock band The Who when they created the “rock opera” Tommy in 1969. However, it was Laurie Anderson who most fully realized the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, with her four-part, four-night, eight-hour multimedia United States, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “New Wave Festival” in 1983, a year before Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach was revived there.

Anderson’s work was categorized as a “rock” phenomenon, and drew the kind of criticism that rock music has often attracted, especially after a song from United States, Part II, “O Superman,” became a pop hit in 1981, selling over 1 million records. The eight-minute video version of “O Superman” even helped inaugurate MTV, being broadcast during that channel’s first year of existence. The song was an indictment of the American dream—“So hold me, Mom, in your long arms, in your petrochemical arms, your military arms, in your arms”—as a mother’s arms and the country’s armaments combine to form a distinctly chilly postmodern embrace. But despite the song’s antiestablishment attitude, Anderson’s success was, to many in the avant-garde art scene, a sure sign that she had “sold out,” just as many other artists in New York seemed to have submitted to the attractions of postmodern consumer culture. After she reached a lucrative agreement with Warner Brothers records and then made a feature-length performance film, Home of the Brave, in 1985, their suspicions seemed confirmed.

But Anderson remains one of the most distinctive innovators in the postmodern scene. Early on, in her role as a musician, she began creating new electronic instruments, including a series of electronic violins, called “tape-bow violins,” on which a tape playback head has been mounted on the body of the instrument and a strip of recorded audiotape on the bow. She transforms her voice, in the narratives that compose what she calls her “talking operas,” by means of a harmonizer that drops it a full octave and gives it a deep male resonance, which she describes as “the Voice of Authority,” an attempt to create a corporate voice. She has attached microphones to her body, transforming it into a percussion instrument. And the projected imagery and lighting that provide the backdrop for her performances (fig. 39.15) are a combination of pop imagery and cultural critique, which unite the local and the global in an image that underscores the not-always-positive results of the “American dream.”

Fig. 39.15The Birth of the Feminist Era

1. 39.4 How did the feminist movement impact the arts?

At the same time that the antiwar and civil rights movements galvanized political consciousness among both men and women, “the Pill” was introduced in the early 1960s. As women gained control over their own reproductive functions, they began to express the sexual freedom that men had always taken for granted. The struggle for gender equality in the United States found greater and greater expression throughout the 1960s until, by the early 1970s, a full-blown feminist era emerged.

The Theoretical Framework: Betty Friedan and NOW

In 1963, a freelance journalist and mother of three, Betty Friedan (1921–2006), published The Feminine Mystique. In many ways, hers was an argument with Freud, or at least with the way Freud had been understood, or misunderstood. While she admits that “Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on freedom from a repressive morality to achieve sexual fulfillment, was part of the ideology of women’s emancipation,” she is aware that some of Freud’s writings had been misused as a tool for the suppression of women (Reading 39.6):

READING 39.6

from Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

The concept “penis envy,” which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women—that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era—was seized in this country in the 1940s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women. Many who preached the doctrine of endangered femininity … seized on it—not the few psychoanalysts, but the many popularizers, sociologists, educators, ad-agency manipulators, magazine writers, child experts, marriage counsellors, ministers, cocktail-party authorities—could not have known what Freud himself meant by penis envy. … What was he really reporting? If one interprets “penis envy” as other Freudian concepts have been reinterpreted, in the light of our new knowledge that what Freud believed to be biological was often a cultural reaction, one sees simply that Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against. If a woman who was denied the freedom, the status, and the pleasures that men enjoyed wished secretly that she could have these things, in the shorthand of the dream, she might wish herself a man and see herself with that one thing which made men unequivocally different—the penis. She would, of course, have to learn to keep her envy, her anger, hidden: to play the child, the doll, the toy, for her destiny depended on charming man. But underneath, it might still fester, sickening her for love. If she secretly despised herself, and envied man for all she was not, she might go through the motions of love, or even feel a slavish adoration, but would she be capable of free and joyous love? You cannot explain away woman’s envy of man, or her contempt for herself, as mere refusal to accept her sexual deformity, unless you think that a woman, by nature, is a being inferior to man. Then, of course, her wish to be equal is neurotic.

Latent in Friedan’s analysis, but central to the feminist movement, is her understanding that in Freud, as in Western discourse as a whole, the term woman is tied, in terms of its construction as a word, to man (its medieval root is wifman, or “wife [of] man”). It is thus a contested term that does not refer to the biological female but to the sum total of all the patriarchal society expects of the female, including behavior, dress, attitude, and demeanor. Woman, said the feminists, is a cultural construct, not a biological one. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan rejects modern American society’s cultural construction of women. But she could not, in the end, reject the word woman itself. Friedan would go on to become one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the primary purpose of which was to advance women’s rights and gender equity in the workplace. In this, she dedicated herself to changing, in American culture, her society’s understanding of what “woman” means.

LAURIE ANDERSON PERFORMING “O SUPERMAN”

Feminist Poetry

The difficulties that women faced in determining an identity outside the patriarchal construction of “woman” became, in the 1960s, one of the chief subjects of poetry by women, particularly in the work of the poets Anne Sexton (1928–74) and Sylvia Plath (1932–63). Both investigate what it means to be, in an existential sense, “woman.”

Plath had famously examined the psychology of being in her poem “Lady Lazarus.” The major tension of this poem lies in its flippant tone compared with the seriousness of its subject—repeated suicide attempts. Plath wrote the poem and several other of her greatest works in the last month of her life, after her separation from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes (1930–98), and just before her suicide in London. It establishes her poetic voice as a kind of performance, making light of her desire to die and her failure to succeed in accomplishing the deed. The title alludes to T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” specifically to Eliot’s lines: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” Like Lazarus, Lady Lazarus is reborn in the poem in order to attack the male ego, specifically that of her former husband. She is, thus, a deeply ironic Lazarus, returned from the dead, resurrected, but not in joy (Reading 39.7).

READING 39.7  Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” (1962)

Sexton’s marriage was probably more problematic than Plath’s. An affluent housewife and mother, she lived in a house with a sunken living room and a backyard swimming pool in the Boston suburb of Weston, Massachusetts. But she was personally at odds with her life, and as her husband saw his formerly dependent wife become a celebrity, their marriage dissolved into a fabric of ill will, discord, and physical abuse. The poem with which she opened most readings, the ecstatically witty “Her Kind,” published in 1960 in her first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, captures the sense of independence that defined her from the beginning (Reading 39.8):

READING 39.8

Anne Sexton, “Her Kind” (1960)

I have gone out, a possessed witch haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, 10closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. 20A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

Another important poet of the era is Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), whose poem “Diving into the Wreck” was published in 1973. The poem delves into a metaphoric wreck created by a patriarchal culture that inherently devalues anything female or feminine, a wreck that would include the lives of both Plath and Sexton. Rich’s project was to dissolve myth, discover truth, and recover the treasures left by her feminist forebears (Reading 39.9):

READING 39.9

from Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck” (1973)

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed

10the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

20This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he

The first-person “I” of her poem is androgynous, a figure who has given up the sexual stereotyping that constitutes the battered hulk of the wreck. And what Rich discovers in her explorations there is the will to survive.

Feminist Art

In the 1960s and 1970s—in fact well into the 1990s—the art world was dominated by male artists. Although in 1976 approximately 50 percent of the professional artists in the United States were women, only 15 in 100 one-person shows in New York’s prestigious galleries were devoted to work by women. Eight years later, in 1984, the Museum of Modern Art reopened its enlarged facilities with a show entitled “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture.” Of the 168 artists represented, only 13 were women.

As a result, many women artists were insistent that their work be approached in formal, not feminine terms—that is, in the same terms that the work of men was addressed. Eva Hesse (1936–70), for instance, when asked if works such as Ringaround Arosie (fig. 39.16) contained female sexual connotations, quickly shot back: “No! I don’t see that at all.” Of the work’s circular forms, she later said, “I think the circle is very abstract. … I think it was a form, a vehicle. I don’t think I had a sexual, anthropomorphic, or geometric meaning. It wasn’t a breast and it wasn’t a circle representing life and eternity.”

Even when an artist like Judy Chicago (1939–) would try to invest her work with feminist content, the public refused to recognize it. Her series of 15 Pasadena Lifesavers (fig. 39.17) exhibited in 1970 at Cal State Fullerton, expressed, she felt, “the range of my own sexuality and identity, as symbolized through form and color.” Their feminist content was affirmed by a statement on the gallery wall directly across from the entrance, which read:

Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name Judy Chicago.

But male reviewers ignored the statement. As Chicago says in her 1975 autobiography, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist: “[They] refused to accept that my work was intimately connected to my femaleness.” But, in part, their misapprehension was her own doing. As she explains in Through the Flower, “I had come out of a formalist background and had learned to neutralize my subject matter. In order to be considered a ‘serious’ artist, I had had to suppress my femaleness. … I was still working in a frame of reference that people had learned to perceive in a particular, non-content-oriented way.”

Fig. 39.17

Judy Chicago, PASADENA LIFESAVERS RED SERIES #3

Chicago’s great collaborative work of the 1970s, The Dinner Party (fig. 39.18), changed all that. In its bold assertion of woman’s place in social history, the piece announced the growing power of the women’s movement itself. More than 300 women worked together over a period of five years to create the work, which consists of a triangle-shaped table, set with 39 places, 13 on a side, each celebrating a woman who has made an important contribution to world history. The first plate is dedicated to the Great Goddess, and the third to the Cretan Snake Goddess. Around the table the likes of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Artemisia Gentileschi (see fig. 21.17), novelist Virginia Woolf (see Chapter 35), and Georgia O’Keeffe (see fig. 36.22) are celebrated. Where the Pasadena Lifesavers had sheltered their sexual content under the cover of their symbolic abstraction, in The Dinner Party, the natural forms of the female anatomy were fully expressed in the ceramic work, needlepoint, and drawing. But, as Chicago is quick to point out, “the real point of the vaginal imagery in The Dinner Party was to say that these women are not known because they have vaginas. That is all they had in common, actually. They were from different periods, classes, ethnicities, geographies, experiences, but what kept them within the same historical space was the fact that they had vaginas.” One of the woman artists who has most consistently explored the construction of female identity in contemporary American society is Eleanor Antin (1935–). Beginning in the early 1970s, Antin began assuming a series of personae designed to allow her to explore dimensions of her own self that might otherwise have remained hidden if she had not adopted these other identities. One of the earliest of these personae was the King—a medieval knight errant, decked out in a false beard, a velvet cape, lacy blouse, and leather boots, who would wander the streets of “his” kingdom, the small town of Solana Beach, just north of San Diego, California, conversing with his “subjects” (fig. 39.19). “The usual aids to self-definition,” Antin wrote the same year as this performance piece, “sex, age, talent, time, and space—are merely tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice.” Here she explores the possibilities of being not merely male, but a powerful male—something wholly at odds with her diminutive physical presence. “I took on the King,” Antin further explained, “who was my male self. As a young feminist I was interested in what would be my male self … he became my political self.” Beginning in 1979, Antin adopted another persona, this time a black ballerina by the name of Eleanora Antinova who had once danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (see Chapter 34). In this guise, which she performed in blackface (actually more of an artificial tan), she explored the dimensions of racism in America by imagining the fate of a black ballerina in the “white machine” that is classical ballet. Antin’s King was designed to reveal that gender is constructed—her sex remained constant even as her gender changed—and, by extension, that our social “being” is equally constructed. This too would become the project of Cindy Sherman (1954–) who in 1977 began casting herself in a variety of roles, all vaguely recognizable as stereotypical female characters in Hollywood and foreign movies, television shows, and advertising. These Untitled Film Stills, as the original series of black-and-white photographs are known, do more, however, than simply assert that “woman” is a construction of consumer society. They address, in particular, the question of the gaze. In Untitled Film Still #35 (fig. 39.20), Sherman turns to face someone—perhaps another figure in the room, perhaps the camera, perhaps the audience—but she is clearly the object of someone’s gaze. The image purposefully evokes the 1975 essay by film critic Laura Mulvey (1941–), “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” For Mulvey, women in cinema reflect a “traditional exhibitionist role” in which they are “simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.” This, she says, is “the magic of the Hollywood style,” which “arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.” Mulvey’s project, in writing her essay, was to subvert this pleasure and the patriarchal order it sustained by exposing it. Sherman’s project is the same. She is, after all, both subject and object of her own gaze, literally exposing in her photographs the vocabulary of the patriarchal order. In essence, she returns our gaze with the same sense of condescension and superiority as Manet’s Olympia (see Closer Look, Chapter 30).

Fig. 39.20

Cindy Sherman, UNTITLED FILM STILL #35

Questions of Male Identity

1. 39.5 In what ways have artists approached the question of male self-definition?

It stands to reason that if female identity is not essential but socially constructed, the same should hold true for men. Mel Bochner’s Win! (fig. 39.21), commissioned by the Dallas Cowboys for their new stadium in Arlington, Texas, subtly challenges the macho culture of professional football—and its fan base—even as it seems to celebrate it. As one of the pioneers of conceptual art during the 1960s, Bochner (1940–) became interested in the relationship between words and their visual display and began a series of “thesaurus paintings” which delve more deeply than one might expect into the cultural implications of words like “Money,” “Die,” “Useless,” “Obscene,” and “Sputter.” Win! is representative of this ongoing series. By the time one finishes reading the painting, the violence that underscores the game of football is manifest, alarmingly closer to war than sport.

If football represents the macho side of American male identity, the gay rights movement would play a dramatic role in challenging such American attitudes about the nature of masculinity. In the early hours of Saturday morning, on June 28, 1969, police officers entered a gay nightclub in New York’s Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn, more or less expecting to close the establishment down for lack of a liquor license. But the Inn’s patrons reacted violently, throwing garbage cans, bricks, beer cans, and bottles at the windows and what a reporter for the Village Voice called “a rain of coins” at the police. Very soon after, the Inn was on fire. Rioting continued until about 4 am, and nightly for several days thereafter. A year later, the first ever gay pride parade was staged to celebrate the events of June 1969.

The gay struggle for equal rights continues, of course, to this day. Even 16 years after Stonewall, in 1985, Andy Warhol conceived of his book America, a collection of his Polaroid photographs, at least in part as a means to “out” America, to show it its own gay side. At the very heart of the book is a “Physique Pictorial,” showing male bodybuilders. Early on he includes a portrait of himself in drag, just one of many he shot in the early 1980s. There is an image of a gay pride parade. And then there are the portraits of gay celebrities, such as Liberace (with punk star John Sex), Keith Haring, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Warhol also includes a portrait of Lance Loud (fig. 39.22). Loud was the first reality TV star. Born in 1951, he grew up in Eugene, Oregon, before moving to Santa Barbara for his teenage years. He discovered Warhol in his early teens, became his pen pal, and then, as a young man, moved to New York. When he was 22, in 1973, PBS featured the William C. Loud family—Mom and Dad, Bill and Pat (who incidentally separated and divorced on the show) and their five children, Delilah, Kevin, Grant, Michele, and Lance—in a 12-hour documentary series entitled An American Family. It chronicled the day-to-day lives of the family for seven months, and it attracted 10 million viewers. As a Newsweek cover story proclaimed in March 1973, the show torpedoed the fantasy of the American family embodied in shows like The Brady Bunch. Lance’s openly gay lifestyle spurred a national controversy, especially after he appeared on the Dick Cavett Show and other talk shows, and as it became apparent that he was inspiring countless other gay and lesbian Americans to acknowledge their own sexuality. By 1978, Lance had started the band The Mumps, a rock band that played weekly at CBGBs and Max’s in New York; Warhol’s photograph is of Lance Loud, the rock star. American attitudes about masculinity and male identity were in a state of transition. If nothing else, sexual stereotypes were being challenged as never before.

Fig. 39.22

Andy Warhol, LANCE LOUD, FROM AMERICA

Continuity & Change: The Global Village

On the morning of October 9, 1991—a morning that began 16 hours earlier in Japan than in California—along a stretch of interstate highway in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles, 1,760 yellow umbrellas, each 19 feet 8 inches tall, and 28 feet 5 inches wide, weighing 448 pounds, appeared. Each one was slowly opened across the parched gold hills and valleys (fig. 39.23). Meanwhile, in the prefecture of Ibaraki, Japan, north of Tokyo, in the fertile, green Sato River valley, with its small villages, farms, gardens, and fields, 1,340 blue umbrellas had opened as well (fig. 39.24). Built at a cost of $26 million, which the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude (see fig. 39.11) had raised entirely through the sale of their proprietary work, The Umbrellas, blue on one side of the Pacific, yellow on the other, symbolized both the differences underlying global culture and its interdependency.

California and Japan were, after all, the two places from which the electronic revolution of the 1970s and 1980s had sprung, California’s Silicon Valley providing the innovation and invention, and Japan providing the practical application in its massive industrial complex south of Tokyo. Together they changed the world, but their differences were as striking as their interdependence, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work underscored this. The landscapes in which The Umbrellas rose differed dramatically. In Japan, where less space is available (steep volcanic mountains make most of the land unusable), 124 million people live on only 8 percent of the land. Christo and Jeanne-Claude responded by densely positioning The Umbrellas, sometimes following the geometry of the rice fields. In California, in the vast grazing lands of the Tehachapis, The Umbrellas seemed to stretch in every direction, along the ridges, down hills, with great spaces between them. Still, in both cultures, the umbrella is an image of shelter and protection, from both rain and sun, and therefore a symbol of community life. If visitors could never experience the work as a whole, they were always aware that the work continued, in a way, on the other side of the world, that in some sense the umbrellas sheltered a global village.

Fig. 39.23

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, THE UMBRELLAS, JAPAN—USAThe term “global village” was coined in 1962 by Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) to describe the way that electronic mass media fundamentally altered human communication, enabling people to exchange information instantaneously, across the globe. In the half century since then, of course, the introduction of personal computers and cell phones has empowered individuals to expand this communication further on an almost unimaginable scale. McLuhan idealistically viewed media as the means of creating a united, global community, bridging the gap between the world’s haves and have-nots. But because much of the electronic mass media has been controlled by the West, many critics have seen it as a new means of asserting commercial and political control over the rest of the world—a new kind of imperialism. But in fact, the globalization of mass media has resulted in a crisis of identity for most world cultures, as local values and customs have come into conflict with, or been assimilated by, those of the West.

Global media—whether it be motion pictures, cable television channels such as CNN, or Internet sites like Google and Wikipedia—have also transmitted many elements of popular foreign culture to the West. Asian and Middle Eastern cuisines, Japanese comic books and video games, and a vast array of foreign films, fashions, and fads have become popular in the West, aided by the “unlimited bandwidth” of modern telecommunications that offers individuals massive quantities of whatever information or entertainment they desire. International art exhibits, music and film festivals, and book fairs attract visitors and collectors from around the world in search of the latest trends and directions in contemporary art.

In his 2001 book Culture in a Liquid Modern World, the British-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the present day as an “age of diasporas: an infinite archipelago of ethnic, religious and linguistic settlements … [in which] ways of life … drift in varied and not necessarily coordinated directions … come into contact and separate … approach and distance themselves from one another, embrace and repel.” It seems likely that this dance of global interaction will define the future as well.

Chapter Review: Multiplicity and Diversity

1. 39.1 Outline the factors contributing to African-American self-definition in the 1960s.

By 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had decided that Birmingham, Alabama, would be the focal point of the burgeoning civil rights movement. What message to the movement did King provide in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”? In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people marching in Washington, D.C., heard Martin Luther King deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, shortly after the folk-rock trio Peter, Paul, and Mary sang Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

One of the most important factors contributing to the success of the civil rights movement was the growing sense of ethnic identity among the African-American population. How did French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre contribute to this newfound sense of self? How did it find expression in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man? How did Romare Bearden celebrate the diversity of black experience? What contributed to the growing militancy of the civil rights movement, as reflected, for instance, in the poetry and drama of Amiri Baraka?

1. 39.2 Examine the response of artists to the Vietnam War.

As American involvement in the war in Vietnam escalated throughout the 1960s, artists and writers responded in a number of ways. What tack did Kurt Vonnegut take in his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five? Artworks like Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks were conceived as antiwar protests, but more direct protests were taken up by the Art Workers’ Coalition. What steps did they take? How did the artists’ relationship with museums and galleries motivate both Conceptual Art and Land Art? But it was rock music that most reflected the spirit of rebellion and protest that characterized the antiwar movement. Musicians called for peace at festivals such as Woodstock and wrote songs reflecting the events of the day. How does Joi Mitchell’s “Woodstock” reflect the era?

1. 39.3 Describe the relationship between “high” culture and “popular” culture in the musical world.

The ascendancy of rock and roll in popular culture underscored the ongoing intrusion of “low” or popular forms into the world of “high” culture that had begun with nationalist music movements in the nineteenth century. But minimalist musicians such Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti put off both Classical and popular audiences. What characterizes Ligeti’s music? On what techniques did American minimalist composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass rely? How does Glass’s Gesamtkunstwerk, Einstein on the Beach, differ from Wagner’s conception of the form? How does Laurie Anderson’s United States transform the Gesamtkunstwerk in a popular idiom?

1. 39.4 Discuss the impact of feminism on the arts.

In 1963, in her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan attacked the patriarchal construction of the idea of “woman.” What was the primary object of her attack? Women artists and writers were equally engaged in asserting their place in an art world which, if it did not completely exclude their work, demeaned it as second rate. Poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich wrote overtly feminist tracts directed against the social institutions that relegated women to second-place status in American society. Artists Eva Hesse and Judy Chicago fought to find a place in an art world that almost totally excluded women from exhibition and even gallery representation. However, the primary focus of artists like Eleanor Antin and Cindy Sherman was the social construction of female identity. How did each approach the issue?

1. 39.5 Identify the ways in which artists have approached the question of male self-definition.

Following the lead of artists like Sherman and Antin, male artists have explored the ways in which male identity is socially constructed. What in particular does Mel Bochner focus on? How did the growing gay rights movement challenge male stereotypes?