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Liberation and Equality ca. 1930–2000

Chapter

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Figure 36.1 JEFF WALL, After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, “The Preface,” Edition of 2, 1999–2000. Cibachrome transparency, aluminum light box, fluorescent bulbs, 751⁄4 � 1061⁄4 � 101⁄4 in. Wall made this large-scale backlit cibachrome photograph from a scene he himself staged with a hired actor and a fabricated set. He is inspired by subjects and images drawn from the history of art and literature.

“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” James Baldwin

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L O O K I N G A H E A D

Anticolonialism and Liberation

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While the mood of despair pervaded much of the postwar era, a

second, more positive spirit fueled movements to achieve libera-

tion and equality in many parts of the world. Two major liberation

movements marked the second half of the twentieth century. The

first involved efforts on the part of colonial nations to secure

political, economic, religious, and ethnic independence. It also

aimed to reduce poverty and raise standards of living in the

world’s industrially underdeveloped nations, thus bringing them to

the productive status of nations with more highly developed

economies.

The second movement for liberation, fired by opposition to

age-old social injustices and ingrained prejudice, involved the

demand for racial, ethnic, and gender equality. Engaging world-

wide participation, the movement embraced a lengthy struggle for

civil rights in the African-American population of the United

States, the demand for equality among feminists throughout the

West, and a recognition of the inequalities suffered by those of

untraditional sexual orientation.

The movements for liberation and equality—colonial, racial,

and sexual—provided the context for some of the most signifi-

cant literature, art, and music of the twentieth century. In the long

run, all artworks must be judged without reference to the politics,

race, or gender of the artists who created them. Nevertheless, the

works included in this chapter are better understood as expres-

sions of a unique time and place in the history of the humanistic

tradition.

In the postwar era, the weakened European nations were unable to maintain the military and economic forces nec- essary to sustain their empires. At the same time, their colonial subjects increased their efforts to free themselves of Western rulers.

One of the earliest revolts against colonial rule took place in India. During World War I, the Indian National Congress came under the influence of the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948). Gandhi, whose followers called him “Mahatma,” or “great soul,” led India’s struggle for inde- pendence from Great Britain. Guided by the precepts of Hinduism, as well as by the Sermon on the Mount and the writings of Thoreau and Tolstoy, Gandhi initiated a policy of peaceful protest against colonial oppression. His program of nonviolent resistance, including fasting and peaceful demonstrations, influenced subsequent liberation movements throughout the world. Gandhi’s involvement was crucial to India’s emancipation from British control,

which occurred in 1947, only one year before he was assas- sinated by a Hindu fanatic who opposed his conciliatory gestures toward India’s Muslim minority.

Between 1944 and 1960, many nations, including Jordan, Burma, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Malaya, Cyprus, and Nigeria, freed themselves from British rule. Syria, Lebanon, Cambodia, Laos, North and South Vietnam, Morocco, Tunisia, Cameroon, Mali, and other African states won independence from France. And still other territories claimed their freedom from the empires of the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.

In Central America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, however, internal conflicts provoked military intervention by First World powers, that is, the industrialized capitalist nations, including the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan, and Canada. Between 1964 and 1975, the United States succeeded France in an unsuccessful effort to defend South Vietnam from communist control. The Vietnam War—the longest war in American history—cost the lives of some 50,000 Americans and more than fifteen million Vietnamese. More recently, in Eastern Europe, the demise of Soviet authority has unleashed age-old ethnic conflicts, producing fragmentation and bloodshed.

Liberation and Literature in the Islamic World While India achieved its emancipation from British con- trol, a related drive for liberation was underway among the members of the country’s Muslim minority. The quest for an autonomous Muslim state on the Indian subcontinent resulted in the creation of an independent Pakistan in 1947. Other parts of the Islamic world, however, were not so successful. For instance, brutal massacres, riots, and rev- olution plagued Egypt for decades before it became an independent nation in 1971. Impeding the success of inde- pendent Muslim states was the fact that the West, even after granting them their independence, continued to influence key aspects of their economies, such as the pro- duction of oil.

Equally challenging was the process of modernization itself: specifically, the incompatibility between the agenda of modernization, focused on Western-style capitalism and democratic reform, and the fundamentals of Muslim tradition based in the Qur’an and a governing theocracy. In most parts of the Islamic world, the difficulties of introducing modern legal and constitutional innovations into centuries-old Islamic societies proved overwhelming. To this day, in fact, minority elements within the Islamic world remain in violent opposition to the culture of modernization and to Western intrusion in Muslim affairs.

If Western technology and imperialism have weighed heavily in the transition from ancient to modern times, Muslim culture has nonetheless flourished. In India, the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1876–1938) envisioned Islam as the leading moral force in South Asia. While supporting the formation of an independent Muslim state in Pakistan, he emphasized the importance of achieving brotherhood among India’s Muslim, Christian,

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READING 36.1

Q Based on the evidence of these two poems, how would you describe the Muslim response to Western values?

READING 36.2

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and Hindu populations. Educated in law and philosophy at Oxford, England, Iqbal anticipated a pan-Islamic community that transcended ethnic, racial, and national loyalties. He urged his followers to replace Islamic mysticism and passive contemplation with an activist spirit. In his poems, he gave voice to the despair felt by Muslims who viewed imperialism and Modernism as twin threats to spirituality and divine law.

Islamic Poems

Iqbal’s “Revolution” (1938)

Death to man’s soul is Europe, death is Asia To man’s will: neither feels the vital current. In man’s hearts stirs a revolution’s torrent; Maybe our old world too is nearing death.

Iqbal’s “Europe and Syria” (1936)

This land of Syria gave the West a Prophet Of purity and pity and innocence; And Syria from the West as recompense Gets dice and drink and troops of prostitutes. 10

Liberation and Literature in Latin America From the time of Christopher Columbus, the peoples of Latin America have served the political and economic interests of First World countries more powerful than their own. And even after the European nations departed from the shores of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and other Latin American states in the early nineteenth century, the intolerable conditions that had prevailed in the long era of colonialism persisted: the vast majority of Latin Americans, including great masses of peasants of Native American descent, lived in relative poverty, while small, wealthy, landowning elites held power. These elites maintained their position by virtue of their alliance with the financial and industrial interests of First World nations, including (especially since the 1890s) the United States.

Spanish-speaking and predominantly Catholic, the rapidly growing populations of the more than two dozen nations of Latin America have suffered repeated social upheaval in their attempts to cope with persistent prob- lems of inequality, exploitation, and underdevelopment. The long and bitter history of the Mexican Revolution, commemorated in the murals of Diego Rivera (see Figure 34.7), provides a vivid example. From country to country, political and social reformers have struggled to revolution- ize the socioeconomic order, to liberate Latin America from economic colonialism, and to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth. Support for these essen- tially socialist movements has come from representatives of the deprived elements of society, including organized labor

and, often enough, from the Catholic Church, which has acted on behalf of the masses as an agent of social justice. The “liberation theology” preached by reformist elements in the clergy advanced a powerful new rendering of Christian dogma.

Latin America’s artists rallied to support movements for liberation. During the 1960s, the outpouring of excep- tionally fine Latin American prose and poetry constituted a literary boom, the influence of which is still being felt worldwide. Among the champions of reform was the Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), one of Latin America’s most prolific Spanish-language poets. His poems, often embellished with violent, Surrealist images, endorse a radical, populist ideology. In “The United Fruit Co.” he describes the corruption of justice and freedom in the “Banana Republics” of Latin America. The poem, phrased as a mock Last Judgment, smolders with indigna- tion at the United States’ policies of commercial exploita- tion in the nations south of its borders.

Neruda’s “United Fruit Co.”(1950)

When the trumpets had sounded and all 1 was in readiness on the face of the earth, Jehovah divided his universe: Anaconda, Ford Motors, Coca-Cola Inc., and similar entities: 5 the most succulent item of all, The United Fruit Company Incorporated reserved for itself: the heartland and coasts of my country, the delectable waist of America. 10 They rechristened their properties: the “Banana Republics”— and over the languishing dead, the uneasy repose of the heroes who harried that greatness, 15 their flags and their freedoms, they established an opéra bouffe: they ravished all enterprise, awarded the laurels like Caesars, unleashed all the covetous, and contrived 20 the tyrannical Reign of the Flies— Trujillo the fly, and Tacho the fly, the flies called Carias, Martinez, Ubico1—all of them flies, flies dank with the blood of their marmalade 25 vassalage, flies buzzing drunkenly

1 The twentieth-century dictators of Latin America: Rafael Molina Trujillo brutally dominated the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961; “Tacho” was the nickname for Anastasio Somoza, who controlled Nicaragua from 1937 until his assassination in 1956; Tiburcio Carias, self-styled dictator of Honduras, was supported during the 1930s and 1940s by the United Fruit Company; Maximilian Martinez was the ruthless dictator of El Salvador during the 1930s and 1940s; Jorge Ubico seized power in Guatemala in 1931 and served as a puppet of the United States until 1944.

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Q What sentiments dominate this poem? Q What is the function of Neruda’s mock

Last Judgment?

The Quest for Racial Equality

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became the center of economic opportunity, as well as the melting pot for black people from other parts of the world. But white frustration and fear of black competition for jobs led to race riots in over twenty-five cities during the “bloody summer” of 1919 (Figure 36.2).

Between 1920 and 1940, the quest for racial equality and a search for self-identity among African-Americans inspired an upsurge of creative expression in the arts. Centered in Harlem—a part of Manhattan occupied large- ly by African-Americans—poets, painters, musicians, and dancers forged the movement that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance made the self-conscious “rebirth” of the African heritage the principal part of an intellectual and cultural quest for racial identity and equali- ty. A leading figure of the movement was the writer, folk- lorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). Hurston made use of African-American dialect to create some of the strongest female characters in early twentieth- century fiction. Her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is widely regarded as a classic of black literature.

on the populous middens: the fly-circus fly and the scholarly kind, case-hardened in tyranny. Then in the bloody domain of the flies 30 The United Fruit Company Incorporated sailed off with a booty of coffee and fruits brimming its cargo boats, gliding like trays with the spoils of our drowning dominions. 35 And all the while, somewhere in the sugary hells of our seaports, smothered by gases, an Indian fell in the morning: a body spun off, an anonymous 40 chattel, some numeral tumbling, a branch with its death running out of it in the vat of the carrion, fruit laden and foul.

The most turbulent liberation movement of the twentieth century addressed the issue of racial equality—an issue so dramatically reflected in the African-American experience that some observers have dubbed the century “The Race Era.” Since the days of slavery, millions of black Americans had existed as an underprivileged minority population liv- ing within an advanced industrial state.

The Dutch took the first Africans to America in 1619, and during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of slaves were imported to the American colonies, especially those in the South. For 250 years, until the end of the Civil War, slavery was a fact of American life. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 facilitated the liberation of the slaves, but it was not until 1865—with the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—that all slaves were finally freed. This and other constitutional amendments guaranteed the rights of black people; nevertheless, the lives of African-Americans continued to be harsh and poor by comparison with those of their former white masters. Separation of the races by segregated housing, inferior schools, and exclusion from voting and equal employment were only a few of the inequities suffered by this minority in the post-emancipation United States. It was to these issues and to the more general problem of racism that many African-Americans addressed them- selves after World War I.

The Harlem Renaissance World War I provided African-Americans with new oppor- tunities in education and employment. During and after the war, over five million African-Americans migrated from the South to the northern states. New York City

Figure 36.2 JACOB LAWRENCE, “Race riots were numerous. White workers were hostile toward the migrants who had been hired to break strikes.” Panel 50 from “The Migration” series, 1940–1941; text and title revised by the artist, 1993. Tempera on gesso on composition board, 18 � 12 in.

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READING 36.3

Q To what extent do the circumstances described in these poems (written fifty years ago) still pertain?

READING 36.4

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Hurston’s contemporary, Langston Hughes (1902–1967), was one of the most eloquent voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was born in Missouri and moved to New York in 1921, where he became the first African-American to support himself as a professional writer. A musician as well as a journalist and a novelist, Hughes was the rare poet whose powerful phrases (“a dream deferred,” “a raisin in the sun,” and “black like me”) are enshrined in the canon of American literature and in the English language. His poems, which capture the musical qualities of the African oral tradition, fuse everyday speech with the rhythms of blues and jazz. Hughes, who regarded poets as “lyric historians,” drew deeply on his own experi- ence: his “Theme for English B” records his response to the education of black students in a dominantly white culture. In “Harlem,” a meditation on the “bloody summer” of 1919, Hughes looks to the immediate past to presage the angry riots that have recurred regularly since the 1960s in America’s black ghettos.

Like the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago- born poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) drew upon the idioms of jazz and street slang to produce a vivid picture of the black ghettos in her city. The first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1949), Brooks brought to attention the plight of black peo- ple—especially young black men and women—in American society. The two poems in Reading 36.4 are representative of the early part of her long and productive career.

The Poems of Hughes

Hughes’ “Theme for English B” (1949)

The instructor said, 1

Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true. 5

I wonder if it’s that simple?

I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. 10 The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page: 15

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too.) Me—who? 20 Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like 25 the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. 30 You are white— yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That’s American. Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. 35 But we are, that’s true! I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B. 40

Hughes’ “Harlem” (1951)

What happens to a dream deferred? 1

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? 5 Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. 10

Or does it explode?

The Poems of Brooks

Brooks’ “The Mother” (1945)

Abortions will not let you forget. 1 You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat 5 Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. 10

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck 15 And your lives from your unfinished reach,

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READING 36.5

Q In what ways are these poems descriptive? Are they also didactic? How so?

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From Wright’s The Ethics of Living Jim Crow (1938)

My first lesson in how to live as a Negro came when I was 1 quite small. We were living in Arkansas. Our house stood behind the railroad tracks. Its skimpy yard was paved with black cinders. Nothing green ever grew in that yard. The only touch of green we could see was far away, beyond the tracks, over where the white folks lived. But cinders were good enough for me and I never missed the green growing things. And anyhow cinders were fine weapons. You could always have a nice hot war with huge black cinders. All you had to do was crouch behind the brick pillars of a house with your hands 10 full of gritty ammunition. And the first woolly black head you saw pop out from behind another row of pillars was your target. You tried your very best to knock it off. It was great fun. I never fully realized the appalling disadvantages of a cinder environment till one day the gang to which I belonged found itself engaged in a war with the white boys who lived beyond the tracks. As usual we laid down our cinder barrage, thinking that this would wipe the white boys out. But they replied with a steady bombardment of broken bottles. We doubled our cinder barrage, but they hid behind trees, hedges, 20 and the sloping embankment of their lawns. Having no such fortifications, we retreated to the brick pillars of our homes. During the retreat a broken milk bottle caught me behind the ear, opening a deep gash which bled profusely. The sight of blood pouring over my face completely demoralized our ranks. My fellow-combatants left me standing paralyzed in the center of the yard, and scurried for their homes. A kind neighbor saw me, and rushed me to a doctor, who took three stitches in my neck.

I sat brooding on my front steps, nursing my wound and 30 waiting for my mother to come from work. I felt that a grave injustice had been done me. It was all right to throw cinders. The greatest harm a cinder could do was leave a bruise. But broken bottles were dangerous; they left you cut, bleeding, and helpless.

When night fell, my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet her. I could just feel in my bones that she would understand. I knew she would tell me exactly what to do next time. I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound, then 40 slapped me.

“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh awways fightin’?”

I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her that I didn’t have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn’t a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn’t throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the 50 skin was still smarting impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again. And they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle.

If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages,

aches, and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, 20 Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, 25 You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. 30

Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved,

I loved you All.

Brooks’ “We Real Cool” (1959)

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We Die soon.

Richard Wright and the Realities of Racism Richard Wright (1908–1960) was born on a cotton planta- tion in Mississippi and came to New York City in 1937, just after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. Wright brought to his writings the anger of a man who had known physical punishment and repeated injustice at the hands of white people. In his novel Native Son (1940), the night- marish story of a poor, young black man who kills his white employer’s daughter, Wright examined the ways in which the frustrated search for identity led some African- Americans to despair, defiance, and even violent crime. The novel won Wright immediate acclaim and was rewrit- ten for the New York stage in 1941.

In the autobiographical sketch The Ethics of Living Jim Crow (1938), Wright records with grim frankness the expe- rience of growing up in a racially segregated community in the American South. “Jim Crow,” the stage name of a pop- ular nineteenth-century minstrel performer, Thomas D. Rice, had come to describe anything pertaining to African- Americans, including matters of racial segregation.

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Didn’t I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn’t 60 kill me.

All that night I was delirious and could not sleep. Each time I closed my eyes I saw monstrous white faces suspended from the ceiling, leering at me.

From that time on, the charm of my cinder yard was gone. The green trees, the trimmed hedges, the cropped lawns grew very meaningful, became a symbol. Even today when I think of white folks, the hard, sharp outlines of white houses surrounded by trees, lawns, and hedges are present somewhere in the background of my mind. Through the years 70 they grew into an overreaching symbol of fear.

It was a long time before I came in close contact with white folks again. We moved from Arkansas to Mississippi. Here we had the good fortune not to live behind the railroad tracks, or close to white neighborhoods. We lived in the very heart of the local Black Belt. There were black churches and black preachers; there were black schools and black teachers; black groceries and black clerks. In fact, everything was so solidly black that for a long time I did not even think of white folks, save in remote and vague terms. But this could not last 80 forever. As one grows older one eats more. One’s clothing costs more. When I finished grammar school I had to go to work. My mother could no longer feed and clothe me on her cooking job.

There is but one place where a black boy who knows no trade can get a job, and that’s where the houses and faces are white, where the trees, lawns, and hedges are green. My first job was with an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi. The morning I applied I stood straight and neat before the boss, answering all his questions with sharp yessirs and nosirs. I 90 was very careful to pronounce my sirs distinctly, in order that he might know that I was polite, that I knew where I was, and that I knew he was a white man. I wanted that job badly.

He looked me over as though he were examining a prize poodle. He questioned me closely about my schooling, being particularly insistent about how much mathematics I had had. He seemed very pleased when I told him I had had two years of algebra.

“Boy, how would you like to try to learn something around here?” he asked me. 100

“I’d like it fine, sir,” I said, happy. I had visions of “working my way up.” Even Negroes have those visions.

“All right,” he said. “Come on.” I followed him to the small factory. “Pease,” he said to a white man of about thirty-five, “this is

Richard. He’s going to work for us.” Pease looked at me and nodded. I was then taken to a white boy of about seventeen. “Morrie, this is Richard, who’s going to work for us.” “Whut yuh sayin’ there, boy!” Morrie boomed at me. 110 “Fine!” I answered. The boss instructed these two to help me, teach me, give me

jobs to do, and let me learn what I could in my spare time.

My wages were five dollars a week. I worked hard, trying to please. For the first month I got

along O.K. Both Pease and Morrie seemed to like me. But one thing was missing. And I kept thinking about it. I was not learning anything and nobody was volunteering to help me. Thinking they had forgotten that I was to learn something about the mechanics of grinding lenses, I asked Morrie one 120 day to tell me about the work. He grew red.

“Whut yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, get smart?” he asked. “Naw; I ain’ tryin’ t’ git smart,” I said. “Well, don’t, if yuh know whut’s good for yuh!” I was puzzled. Maybe he just doesn’t want to help me, I

thought. I went to Pease. “Say, are yuh crazy, you black bastard?” Pease asked me,

his gray eyes growing hard. I spoke out, reminding him that the boss had said I was to

be given a chance to learn something. 130 “Nigger, you think you’re white, don’t you? “Naw, sir!” “Well, you’re acting mighty like it!” “But, Mr. Pease, the boss said . . .” Pease shook his fist in my face. “This is a white man’s work around here, and you better

watch yourself!” From then on they changed toward me. They said good-

morning no more. When I was just a bit slow in performing some duty, I was called a lazy black son-of-a-bitch. 140

Once I thought of reporting all this to the boss. But the mere idea of what would happen to me if Pease and Morrie should learn that I had “snitched” stopped me. And after all the boss was a white man, too. What was the use?

The climax came at noon one summer day. Pease called me to his workbench. To get to him I had to go between two narrow benches and stand with my back against a wall.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Richard, I want to ask you something,” Pease began

pleasantly, not looking up from his work. 150 “Yes, sir,” I said again. Morrie came over, blocking the narrow passage between the

benches. He folded his arms, staring at me solemnly. I looked from one to the other, sensing that something was

coming. “Yes, sir,” I said for the third time. Pease looked up and spoke very slowly. “Richard, Mr. Morrie here tells me you called me Pease.” I stiffened. A void seemed to open up in me. I knew this

was the showdown. 160 He meant that I had failed to call him Mr. Pease. I looked at

Morrie. He was gripping a steel bar in his hands. I opened my mouth to speak, to protest, to assure Pease that I had never called him simply Pease, and that I had never had any intentions of doing so, when Morrie grabbed me by the collar, ramming my head against the wall.

“Now be careful, nigger!” snarled Morrie, baring his teeth. “I heard yuh call ’im Pease! ’N’ if yuh say yuh didn’t, yuh’re callin’ me a lie, see?” He waved the steel bar threateningly.

If I had said: No, sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you Pease I 170 would have been automatically calling Morrie a liar. And if I

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Q Describe the character, Pease: is he a believable figure?

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said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you Pease, I would have been pleading guilty to having uttered the worst insult that a Negro can utter to a southern white man. I stood hesitating, trying to frame a neutral reply.

“Richard, I asked you a question!” said Pease. Anger was creeping into his voice.

“I don’t remember calling you Pease, Mr. Pease,” I said cautiously. “And if I did, I sure didn’t mean . . .”

“You black son-of-a-bitch! You called me Pease, then!” he 180 spat, slapping me till I bent sideways over a bench. Morrie was on top of me, demanding:

“Didn’t you call ’im Pease? If yuh say yuh didn’t, I’ll rip yo’ gut string loose with this bar, yuh black granny dodger! Yuh can’t call a white man a lie ’n’ git erway with it, you black son-of-a-bitch!”

I wilted. I begged them not to bother me. I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to leave.

“I’ll leave,” I promised. “I’ll leave right now.” They gave me a minute to get out of the factory. I was 190

warned not to show up again, or tell the boss. I went. When I told the folks at home what had happened, they

called me a fool. They told me that I must never again attempt to exceed my boundaries. When you are working for white folks, they said, you got to “stay in your place” if you want to keep working. . . .

The Civil Rights Movement Well after World War II, racism remained an undeniable obstacle to equality. Ironically, while Americans had fought to oppose Nazi racism in Germany, black Americans endured a system of inferior education, restricted jobs, ghetto housing, and generally low living standards. High crime rates, illiteracy, and drug addiction were evidence of affluent America’s awesome failure to assimilate a popula- tion that suffered in its midst. The fact that African- Americans had served in great numbers in World War II inspired a redoubled effort to end persistent discrimination and segregation in the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, that effort came to flower in the civil rights movement.

Civil rights leaders of the 1950s demanded enforcement of all the provisions for equality promised in the United States Constitution. Their demands led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 that banned school segre- gation; by implication, the ruling undermined the entire system of legalized segregation in the United States. Desegregation was met with fierce resistance, especially in the American South. In response, the so-called “Negro Revolt” began in 1955 and continued for over a decade. It took the form of nonviolent, direct-action protests,

including boycotts of segregated lunch counters, peaceful “sit-ins,” and protest marches. Leading the revolt was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), a Protestant pastor and civil rights activist who modeled his campaign of peaceful protest on the example of Gandhi. As president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King served as an inspiration to all African-Americans.

The urgency of their cause is conveyed in a letter King wrote while confined to jail for marching without a permit in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. It addressed a group of local white clergy, who had publicly criticized King for breaking laws that prohibited black people from using public facilities and for promoting “untimely” demonstrations. After King’s letter was published in The Christian Century (June 12, 1963), it became (in a shorter version edited by King himself) the key text in a nation- wide debate over civil rights: it provided philosophic justi- fication for the practice of civil disobedience as a means of opposing injustice. King’s measured eloquence and rea- soned restraint stand in ironic contrast to the savagery of the opposition, who had used guns, hoses, and attack dogs against the demonstrators, 2400 of whom were jailed along with King.

From King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

My dear Fellow Clergymen, While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came 1 across your recent statement calling our present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. But since I feel that you are men of genuine goodwill and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of “outsiders coming in.” Several months ago our local affiliate here in 10 Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented and when the hour came we lived up to our promises. So I am here, along with several members of my staff, because we were invited here. Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in 20 an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outsider agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.

You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking 30

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place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action.

You may well ask, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of 40 direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. So the purpose of the direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges 50 voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr1 has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.” We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 60 three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God- given rights.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws. There are just laws and 70 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.

Now what is the difference between the two? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the 80 segregated a false sense of inferiority.

Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority

compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

I hope you can see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law as the rabid segregationist would do. This would lead to anarchy. One who 90 breaks an unjust law openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

Of course there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar2

because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians.

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany 100 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 your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain 110 his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to gain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. T. S. Eliot has said that there is no greater treason than to do the right deed for 120 the wrong reason.

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will include old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about 130 her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at the lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo- Christian heritage, and thus carrying our whole nation back to great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the

1 An American Protestant theologian (1892–1971) who urged ethical realism in Christian approaches to political debate (see chapter 35).

2 The Chaldean king of the sixth century B.C.E., who, according to the Book of Daniel, demanded that these Hebrew youths worship the Babylonian gods. Nebuchadnezzar cast them into a fiery furnace, but they were delivered unhurt by an angel of God (see Figure 9.7).

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Q What arguments does Dr. King make for nonviolence and negotiation?

Q Evaluate the claim (line 53) that “groups are more immoral than individuals.”

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founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope 140 that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader, but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear- drenched communities and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all of their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood 150 Martin Luther King, Jr.

While Dr. King practiced the tactics of nonviolence to achieve the goals of racial integration and civil rights in America, another protest leader took a very different tack: Malcolm Little (1925–1965), who called himself “Malcolm X,” experienced firsthand the inequities and degradation of life in white America. For a time he turned to crime and drugs as a means of survival. Arrested and sentenced to prison in 1946, he took the opportunity to study history and religion, and most especially the teach- ings of Islam. By the time he was released in 1952, he had joined the Nation of Islam and was prepared to launch his career as a Muslim minister.

Malcolm and other “Black Muslims” despaired over per- sistent racism in white America. They determined that black people should pursue a very different course from that of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. African-Americans, argued Malcolm, should abandon aspirations for integration. Instead, they should separate from white Americans in every feasible way; they should create a black nation in which—through hard work and the pursuit of Muslim morality—they might live equally, in dignity, free of the daily affronts of white racism. These goals should be achieved by all available means, vio- lent if necessary (armed self-defense was a first step). Only by fighting for black nationalism would African- Americans ever gain power and self-respect in racist America. Little wonder that Malcolm was feared and reviled by white Americans and deemed a dangerous radi- cal by more moderate black people as well.

In 1963, Malcolm addressed a conference of black leaders in Detroit, Michigan. In this speech, which later came to be called “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm addressed a large audience representing a cross section of the African-American community. The power and imme- diacy of his style is best captured on the tape of the speech published by the African-American Broadcasting and Record Company. Nevertheless, the following brief excerpt

provides a glimpse into the ferocious eloquence that Malcolm exhibited throughout his brief career—until his death by assassination in 1965.

From Malcolm X’s Message to the Grass Roots (1963)

. . . America has a very serious problem. Not only does 1 America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem. America’s problem is us. We’re her problem. The only reason she has a problem is she doesn’t want us here. And every time you look at yourself, be you black, brown, red or yellow, a so-called Negro, you represent a person who poses such a serious problem for America because you’re not wanted. Once you face this as a fact, then you can start plotting a course that will make you appear intelligent, instead of unintelligent. 10

What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences. When we come together, we don’t come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Baptist, and you don’t catch hell because you’re a Methodist. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Methodist or Baptist, you don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk, and you sure don’t catch hell because you’re an American; because if you were an American, you wouldn’t catch hell. You catch hell because you’re a black man. You catch hell, all of us catch 20 hell, for the same reason.

So we’re all black people, so-called Negroes, second- class citizens, ex-slaves. You’re nothing but an ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the “Mayflower.” You came here on a slave ship. In chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken. And you were brought here by the people who came here on the “Mayflower,” you were brought here by the so-called Pilgrims, or Founding Fathers. They were the ones who brought you here. 30

We have a common enemy. We have this in common: We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator. But once we all realize that we have a common enemy, then we unite—on the basis of what we have in common. And what we have foremost in common is that enemy—the white man. . . .

As long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You bleed for white people, but when it comes to seeing your own churches being 40 bombed and little black girls murdered, you haven’t got any blood. You bleed when the white man says bleed; you bite when the white man says bite; and you bark when the white man says bark. I hate to say this about us, but it’s true. How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi, 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, and at the same time you are going to get violent with Hitler, and Tojo, and somebody else you don’t even know? 50

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If

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Q How does Malcolm justify black violence? Q How do his perceptions differ from King’s?

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it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country. . . .

The Literature of the Black Revolution The passage of the Civil Rights Act in America in 1964 provided an end to official segregation in public places; but continuing discrimination and the growing militancy of some civil rights groups provoked a more violent phase of the protests during the late 1960s and thereafter. Even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, the black revolution had begun to assume a trans- national fervor. American voices joined those of their black neighbors in West India, South Africa, and elsewhere in the world. Fired by apartheid, the system of strict racial segregation that prevailed legally in South Africa until 1994, the poet Bloke Modisane (1923–1986) lamented:

it gets awful lonely, lonely; like screaming, screaming lonely screaming down dream alley, screaming blues, like none can hear

In Black Skin, White Masks (1958)—the handbook for African revolution—the West Indian essayist and revo- lutionary Franz Fanon (1925–1961) defended violence as necessary and desirable in overcoming the tyranny of whites over blacks in the colonial world. “At the level of individuals,” he wrote, “violence is a cleansing force.” In the United States, where advertising media made clear the disparity between the material comforts of black and white Americans, the black revolution swelled on a tide of rising expectations. LeRoi Jones (b. 1934), who in 1966 adopted the African name Imamu Amiri Baraka, echoed the mes- sage of Malcolm X in poems and plays that advocated mil- itant action and pan-Africanism. Rejecting white Western literary tradition, Baraka called for “poems that kill”; “Let there be no love poems written,” he entreats, “until love can exist freely and cleanly.”

Baldwin and Ellison Two luminaries of American black protest literature were James Baldwin (1924–1987) and Ralph Ellison (1914–1994). Baldwin, the eldest of nine children raised in Harlem in conditions of poverty, began writing when he was fourteen years old. Encouraged early in his career by Richard Wright, he became a formidable preacher of the gospel of equality. For Baldwin, writing was a subversive act. “You write,” he insisted, “in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you

probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.”

In his novels, short stories, and essays, Baldwin stressed the affinity African-Americans felt with other poverty- stricken populations. Yet, as he tried to define the unique differences between black and white people, he observed that the former were strangers in the modern world—a world whose traditions were claimed by those who were white. As he explained in the essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953):

[European Whites] cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me . . . . Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

But Baldwin uncovered a much overlooked truth about the character of the modern world: that black culture has influenced white culture, and especially American culture, in a profound and irreversible manner:

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . . . One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. . . . It is precisely this black–white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Baldwin’s contemporary, Ralph Ellison, a native of Oklahoma and an amateur jazz musician, came to Harlem during the 1930s to study sculpture and musical compo- sition. He was influenced by both Hughes and Wright and soon turned to writing short stories and newspaper reviews. In 1945, he began the novel Invisible Man, a fiction masterpiece that probes the black estrangement from white culture. The prologue to the novel, an excerpt of which follows, offers a glimpse into the spiritual odyssey of the “invisible” protagonist, an unnamed black man who lives rent-free in a Harlem basement flat illuminated by 1369 light bulbs he has connected (illegally) to the city’s electrical grid (see Figure 36.1). It broaches, with surrealis- tic intensity, some of Ellison’s most important themes: the nightmarish quality of urban life and the alienation

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Q What does Ellison’s protagonist mean when he says he is “an invisible man”?

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experienced by both black and white Americans in the modern United States.

From Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who 1 haunted Edgar Allan Poe;1 nor am I one of your Hollywood- movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. 10

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You 20 wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.

One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps 30 because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, “Apologize! Apologize!” But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his 40 knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed

him away, letting him fall back to the street. I stared at him 50 hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. I was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened legs. Then I was amused. Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of Death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The 60 next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man! . . .

Morrison and Walker In the literature of the black revolution, especially that of the last three decades of the twentieth century, many of the most powerful voices were female. Succeeding such notable Harlem Renaissance writers as Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and Dorothy West (1912–1998), two contemporary figures—Toni Morrison (b. 1931) and Alice Walker (b. 1944)—have risen to eminence.

Toni Morrison is celebrated as one of the century’s finest writers. Her novels, rich in epic themes, memorable char- acters, and vivid oral rhythms, examine the long-range consequences of slavery in America. Many of her charac- ters, Afro-American women, suffer displacement and despair in their homes and communities. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1988), inspired by the true story of an African-American slave, is a story of racism’s power to destroy the natural impulses of human love. In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to be honored with the Nobel Prize in literature.

Alice Walker, whose novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1982, is celebrated for her can- did characterizations of black women facing the perils of racism, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. Her short story “Elethia” probes the dual issues of identity and liber- ation as they come to shape the destiny of a young black female.

Walker’s “Elethia” (1981)

A certain perverse experience shaped Elethia’s life, and made 1 it possible for it to be true that she carried with her at all times a small apothecary jar of ashes.

There was in the town where she was born a man whose ancestors had owned a large plantation on which everything under the sun was made or grown. There had been many slaves, and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of former slaveowners held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people were concerned. He adored them, of

1 A leading American poet, literary critic, and short-story writer (1809– 1849), noted for his tales of terror and his clever detective stories.

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Walker attack in this story?

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course. Not in the present—it went without saying—but at 10 that time, stopped, just on the outskirts of his memory: his grandfather’s time.

This man, whom Elethia never saw, opened a locally famous restaurant on a busy street near the center of town. He called it “Old Uncle Albert’s.” In the window of the restaurant was a stuffed likeness of Uncle Albert himself, a small brown dummy of waxen skin and glittery black eyes. His lips were intensely smiling and his false teeth shone. He carried a covered tray in one hand, raised level with his shoulder, and over his other arm was draped a white napkin. 20

Black people could not eat at Uncle Albert’s, though they worked, of course, in the kitchen. But on Saturday afternoons a crowd of them would gather to look at “Uncle Albert” and discuss how near to the real person the dummy looked. Only the very old people remembered Albert Porter, and their eyesight was no better than their memory. Still there was a comfort somehow in knowing that Albert’s likeness was here before them daily and that if he smiled as a dummy in a fashion he was not known to do as a man, well, perhaps both memory and eyesight were wrong. 30

The old people appeared grateful to the rich man who owned the restaurant for giving them a taste of vicarious fame. They could pass by the gleaming window where Uncle Albert stood, seemingly in the act of sprinting forward with his tray, and know that though niggers were not allowed in the front door, ole Albert was already inside, and looking mighty pleased about it, too.

For Elethia the fascination was in Uncle Albert’s fingernails. She wondered how his creator had got them on. She wondered also about the white hair that shone so brightly 40 under the lights. One summer she worked as a salad girl in the restaurant’s kitchen, and it was she who discovered the truth about Uncle Albert. He was not a dummy; he was stuffed. Like a bird, like a moose’s head, like a giant bass. He was stuffed.

One night after the restaurant was closed someone broke in and stole nothing but Uncle Albert. It was Elethia and her friends, boys who were in her class and who called her “Thia.” Boys who bought Thunderbird and shared it with her. Boys who laughed at her jokes so much they hardly remembered she was also cute. Her tight buddies. They carefully burned 50 Uncle Albert to ashes in the incinerator of their high school, and each of them kept a bottle of his ashes. And for each of them what they knew and their reaction to what they knew was profound.

The experience undercut whatever solid foundation Elethia had assumed she had. She became secretive, wary, looking over her shoulder at the slightest noise. She haunted the museums of any city in which she found herself, looking, usually, at the remains of Indians, for they were plentiful everywhere she went. She discovered some of the Indian 60 warriors and maidens in the museums were also real, stuffed people, painted and wigged and robed, like figures in the Rue Morgue. There were so many, in fact, that she could not possibly steal and burn them all. Besides, she did not know if these figures—with their valiant glass eyes—would wish to be burned.

About Uncle Albert she felt she knew.

What kind of man was Uncle Albert? Well, the old folks said, he wasn’t nobody’s uncle and

wouldn’t sit still for nobody to call him that, either. 70 Why, said another old-timer, I recalls the time they hung a

boy’s privates on a post at the end of the street where all the black folks shopped, just to scare us all, you understand, and Albert Porter was the one took ’em down and buried ’em. Us never did find the rest of the boy though. It was just like always—they would throw you in the river with a big old green log tied to you, and down to the bottom you sunk.

He continued. Albert was born in slavery and he remembered that his

mama and daddy didn’t know nothing about slavery’d done 80 ended for near ’bout ten years, the boss man kept them so ignorant of the law, you understand. So he was a mad so-an’- so when he found out. They used to beat him severe trying to make him forget the past and grin and act like a nigger. (Whenever you saw somebody acting like a nigger, Albert said, you could be sure he seriously disremembered his past.) But he never would. Never would work in the big house as head servant, neither—always broke up stuff. The master at that time was always going around pinching him too. Looks like he hated Albert more than anything—but he never would let him 90 get a job anywhere else. And Albert never would leave home. Too stubborn.

Stubborn, yes. My land, another one said. That’s why it do seem strange to see that dummy that sposed to be old Albert with his mouth open. All them teeth. Hell, all Albert’s teeth was knocked out before he was grown.

Elethia went away to college and her friends went into the army because they were poor and that was the way things were. They discovered Uncle Alberts all over the world. Elethia was especially disheartened to find Uncle Alberts in 100 her textbooks, in the newspapers and on t.v.

Everywhere she looked there was an Uncle Albert (and many Aunt Albertas, it goes without saying).

But she had her jar of ashes, the old-timers’ memories written down, and her friends who wrote that in the army they were learning skills that would get them through more than a plate glass window.

And she was careful that, no matter how compelling the hype, Uncle Alberts, in her own mind, were not permitted to exist.

African-Americans and the Visual Arts During the Harlem Renaissance, African-American painters and sculptors made public the social concerns of black poets and writers. In picturing their experience, they drew on African folk idioms and colloquial forms of native expression; but they also absorbed the radically new styles of European Modernism. Among these painters, there emerged a “blues aesthetic” that featured bold colors, angular forms, and rhythmic, stylized compositions.

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One of the most notable artists of the twentieth centu- ry, Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) migrated to Harlem with his family in 1930. Lawrence’s powerful style features flat, local colors and angular, abstract forms that owe as much to African art as to Synthetic Cubism and Expressionism. At the same time, his lifelong commitment to social and racial issues made him heir to the nineteenth-century artist–critics Goya and Daumier, whom he admired. Painting in tempera on masonite panels, Lawrence won early acclaim for serial paintings that deal with black history and with the lives of black American heroes and heroines. Among the most famous of these is a series of sixty panels known as “The Migration of the Negro” (1940–1941). For “The Migration”—an expressionistic narrative of the great northward movement of African- Americans after World War I—Lawrence drew on textual sources rather than firsthand visual experience. The drama of each episode (see Figure 36.2) is conveyed by means of bold rhythms and vigorous, geometric shapes that preserve what Lawrence called “the magic of the picture plane.”

Lawrence’s contemporary, Romare Bearden (1916– 1988), was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem. He knew the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Lawrence himself, Langston Hughes, and the leading jazz musicians of New York. Bearden’s favorite medium was collage. The earliest of these emerged against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and took as their theme the African-American struggle. Much like Hannah Höch (see Figure 33.15), Bearden cut bits and pieces of images from popular magazines; but his semi- abstract compositions developed narrative themes drawn from everyday life. Their abrupt shifts in scale and strident

colors call to mind the improvisational phrasing and syncopated rhythms of jazz. Music, in fact, provided the subject matter for some of his most notable works, such as Train Whistle Blues (1964), Three Folk Musicians (1967), New Orleans Ragging Home (1974), and Empress of the Blues (1974, Figure 36.3).

Since the mid-twentieth century, African-American artists have taken ever more cynical approaches to themes of race discrimination and racial stereotyping. The sculptor Betye Saar (b. 1926) abandoned the African-inspired fetishlike sculptures of her early career and turned to fabricating boxed constructions that attacked the icons of commercial white culture. In the mixed-media sculpture entitled The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, Saar transforms the familiar symbol of American pancakes and cozy kitchens into a gun-toting version of the “mammy” stereotype (Figure 36.4).

The satirist–artist Robert Colescott (1925–2009) creates parodies of famous paintings in which whites are recast as cartoon-style, stereotyped black men and women. In doing so, Colescott calls attention to their exclusion from Western art history. His bitter parody of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1976) features a crew of brashly painted African-American rebels commanded by a black-faced Liberty. Colescott’s Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (Figure 36.5), an obvious funk-art clone of Picasso’s landmark painting (see Figure 32.2), slyly challenges contemporary definitions of Primitivism and Modernism. Colescott observes, “Picasso started with European art and abstracted through African art, producing ‘Africanism’ but keeping one foot in European art. I began with Picasso’s Africanism and moved toward European art, keeping one foot in Africanism. . . .”

Figure 36.3 ROMARE BEARDEN, Empress of the Blues, 1974. Acrylic and pencil on paper and printed paper on paperboard, 3 ft. 10 in. � 4 ft. 2 in. Bearden depicts Bessie Smith, the singer known as the “Empress of the Blues.” The artist’s working methods gave visual substance to the “call and response” patterns in African music and jazz: “You put down one color, and it calls for an answer,” he explained.

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The American artist Kara Walker (b. 1969) appreciates the fact that liberation and racial freedom are ongoing processes. Using her trademark silhouettes, she brings to contemporary art a subtle and complex examination of the tangled relationships between white and black Americans, especially as they played out between the male masters and female slaves of the nineteenth-century American South. In the piece A Work on Progress (Figure 36.6) she pictures a stereotypical African-American housemaid sweeping out a sister figure whose chains are newly broken. The liberat- ed female may represent the end of slavery, but like the trash she sweeps from the house, she holds an undefined (and unwelcome) place in society.

African-Americans and Jazz Possibly the most important contribution made by African-Americans to world culture occurred in the area of music, specifically in the birth and development of that unique form of modern music known as jazz. Jazz is a synthesis of diverse musical elements that came together in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but it was after World War I that jazz came to full fruition as an artform. Although some music historians insist that jazz is the product of place, not race, the primary role of African- Americans in the origins and evolution of jazz is indisputable.

Jazz is primarily a performer’s rather than a composer’s art. Dominated by Afro-Caribbean rhythmic styles, it

Figure 36.4 BETYE SAAR, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Mixed media, 113⁄4 � 8 � 23⁄4 in. Saar drew attention to unflattering stereotypes of African Americans: Uncle Tom, Little Black Sambo, and Aunt Jemima. Her version of the trademark figure associated with a popular pancake mix is seen here as a domestic servant with a rifle, a pistol, and a broom. A second version shows her as a nanny, holding a squalling white baby.

Figure 36.5 ROBERT COLESCOTT, Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (Vestidas), 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 8 ft. � 7 ft. 8 in.

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incorporates a wide range of European and African- American concepts of harmony, melody, and tone color. In its evolution, jazz absorbed the musical idioms of the marching brass band, the minstrel stage, the blues, and the piano style known as ragtime. Ragtime is a form of piano composition and performance featuring highly syncopated rhythms and simple, appealing melodies. It apparently originated in the lower Mississippi valley, but it migrated north after the Civil War and became popular during the 1890s. Its most inspired proponent (if not its inventor) was the black composer and popular pianist Scott Joplin (1868–1917). Early jazz performers, like “Jelly Roll” Morton (Ferdinand Joseph LaMonthe, 1885–1941), who claimed to have invented jazz, utilized ragtime rhythms in developing the essential features of the new form.

Blues, a formative element in the evolution of jazz, had begun as a vocal rather than an instrumental genre. Native to the United States, but possibly stemming from African

song forms and harmonics, it is an emotive type of individ- ual expression for lamenting one’s troubles, loneliness, and despair. A blues song may recall the wailing cries of plan- tation slaves; it may describe the anguish of separation and loss or the hope for deliverance from oppression. Such clas- sics as W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914) begin with a line that states a simple plaint (“I hate to see the evening sun go down”); the plaint is repeated in a second line, and it is “answered” in a third (“It makes me think I’m on my last go-round”)—a pattern derived perhaps from African call and response chants (see chapter 18). Technically, blues makes use of a special scale known as a “blues scale,” which features (among other things) the flatted forms of E, G, and B within the standard scale.

Both ragtime and blues contributed substantially to the development of jazz as a unique musical idiom. But if jazz manifests any single defining quality, that quality would have to be improvisation—individual and collective. Most jazz performances are based in standard melodies—often familiar popular tunes; the individual performers (and sometimes a group of performers within an ensemble) “improvise” on the base melody. They invent passages while in the process of performing them—a form of “composing as you go”—or they incorporate bits of other (often familiar) melodies into their solos. Most scholars agree that improvisation, either individ- ual or collective, constitutes the single element that most dis- tinguishes jazz from other musical idioms.

Finally, jazz employs a unique variation on standard rhythms that performers and aficionados term “swing.” While it is virtually impossible to define the concept of “swing,” it may best be described as the practice of playing just off the beat—slightly ahead or behind. “Swinging” nor- mally involves achieving a certain rhythmic “groove”—a combination of rhythm and harmony that vitalizes the ensemble and propels the performance forward. (In the words of a 1940s popular song, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”)

The first African-American to establish himself as a major Hollywood filmmaker, Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee (b. 1957) has won international acclaim for films that explore race conflicts in the inner city (Do the Right Thing, 1989), modern black history (Malcolm X, 1992), the black minstrel tradition (Bamboozled, 2000), drug-dealing (25th Hour, 2002), and the black infantrymen, the so-called “buffalo soldiers” of World War II (Miracle at St. Anna, 2008). Lee uses the camera inventively to underline social conflicts, as in his radical close-ups of faces caught in bitter, heated disputes. He favors short, disconnected scenes, the “accidental” effects of the handheld camera, and editing techniques that often leave the narrative themes of his films unresolved but filled with implications. Lee opened the door to a new wave of black filmmakers that includes John Singleton (Boyz in the Hood, 1991) and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991).

Figure 36.6 KARA WALKER, A Work on Progress, 1998. Cut paper and adhesive, 5 ft. 9 in. � 6 ft. 8 in. Installation view at The Walker Art Center, 2007. Walker made use of the popular folk-art tradition of cut- paper silhouettes, which were often used for late eighteenth-century portraits. She recently employed this technique to illustrate the poems of Toni Morrison.

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As a performance art, jazz depends on the interaction of the ensemble’s members as they create an essentially new composition in the very act of performing it. Although syncopated rhythms, the blues motif, harmonic flexibility, and improvisation were not in themselves new, their com- bination—when vitalized by a “swinging” performance— produced an essentially new artform, one that would have a major impact on Western music for years to come.

Armstrong The beginnings of American jazz are found in New Orleans, Louisiana, a melting pot for the rich heritage of Spanish, French, African, Caribbean, Indian, and Black Creole musical traditions. Here, black and white musicians drew on the intricate rhythms of African tribal dance and the European harmonies of traditional marching bands. The street musicians who regularly marched behind funeral or wedding processions, many of whom were neither formally trained nor could read music, might play trumpets, trombones, and clarinets; rhythm was provided by tubas as well as snare and bass drums. These musicians made up the “front line” of the parade; the crowd that danced behind them was called the “second line.”* Parade bands performed perhaps the earliest version of what became jazz. Similar bands also played the popular music of the time in nightclubs and dance halls.

Louis Armstrong (1900–1971), a native of New Orleans began playing the cornet at the age of twelve. By the 1920s he had emerged as the foremost jazz musician of the peri- od. Armstrong’s innovative solos provided the break- through by which solo improvisation became central to jazz performance. His ability to redirect harmonies and to invent reworkings of standard melodies in his solos—all performed with breathtaking virtuosity—elevated the jazz soloist to the foremost role in ensemble performance.

“Satchmo” (“Satchelmouth”) Armstrong was also a jazz

singer with formidable musical gifts. He often embellished jazz with scat singing—an improvised set of nonsense syl- lables. His compelling personality and unfailing good spir- its brought joy to millions and turned jazz into an internationally respected musical form. “Hotter Than That” (1927), a composition by Lillian Hardin (Armstrong’s wife), exemplifies the style termed “hot jazz” (Figure 36.7)—a style that the French in particular elevated to the status of a craze.

The Jazz Age In the 1920s jazz spread north to the urban centers of Chicago, Kansas City, and New York. Armstrong moved to Chicago in 1922. In New York, extraordinary jazz and blues singers like Bessie Smith (1898–1937), known by her fans as the “Empress of the Blues” (see Figure 36.3) and Billie Holiday (1915–1959)—“Lady Day”—drew worldwide acclaim through the phenomena of radio and phonograph records. In the so-called “Jazz Age,” jazz had a major impact on other musical genres. The American composer George Gershwin (1898–1937) incorporated the rhythms of jazz into the mesmerizing Rhapsody in Blue (1924), a concert piece for piano and orchestra. Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), a fully composed opera dealing with the life of poverty-stricken Charleston African-Americans, combined jazz, blues, and spiritual and folk idioms to produce a new style of American musical theater featuring an all-black cast.

Popular music of the 1930s and 1940s was closely tied to the vogue for big band jazz and the danceable rhythms of swing, a big-band jazz style that fed the dance craze of the 1940s. The white swing bands of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman (who later integrated his band—the first bandleader to do so) played a mix of instru- mental swing and popular ballads, while black swing bands like that of William “Count” Basie (1904–1984) leaned more toward blues and a dynamic big-band sound.

* Not to be confused with a variant usage of the term which distinguishes the rhythm section of a band from the “front line” of reed and brass solo instrumentalists.

Figure 36.7 King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, 1923. Honore Dutrey, Warren “Baby” Dodds, Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Lil Hardin, Bill Johnson, and Johnny Dodds.

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Postwar Jazz In the years following World War II, jazz took on some of the complex and sophisticated characteristics of “art music.” The beguiling suite Black, Brown, and Beige (1948) composed by Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) paved the way for concert hall jazz, a form that has enjoyed a revival since the 1990s. Ellington was a prolific musician, unquestionably the foremost composer in the jazz idiom (and arguably in any idiom) that the United States has produced.

On a smaller scale, among groups of five to seven instru- ments, the jazz of the late 1940s and 1950s engaged the unique improvisational talents of individual performers. New forms included “bebop” (or “bop”)—a jazz style char- acterized by frenzied tempos, complex chord progressions, and dense polyrhythms—and “cool” jazz, a more restrained and gentler style associated with the West Coast. “Koko,” performed by the saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920–1955) and the trumpeter John “Dizzy” Gillespie (1917–1993), epitomizes the bebop style of the 1940s: the piece is an improvised version of the popular jazz standard, “Cherokee,” by the British composer, Ray Noble (1903–1978).

Since the jazz renaissance of the 1980s, the New Orleans composer, trumpet prodigy, and teacher Wynton Marsalis (b. 1961) has reconfirmed the role of jazz as America’s classical music. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his jazz oratorio on slavery, Blood on the Field, Marsalis has become the world’s most articulate spokesperson for the jazz genre. Likening jazz to the open exchange of ideas, Marsalis holds, “Jazz is more than the best expression there is of American culture; it is the most democratic of arts.” To this day, jazz remains a unique kind of cham- ber music that combines the best of classical and pop- ular musicianship.

Hip-Hop Like the “blues aesthetic” in the poetry and painting of the Harlem Renaissance, a “jazz aesthetic” featuring spontaneity and improvisation infused the 1970s performance phenomenon known as hip-hop. A product of the inner-city American subculture, hip-hop brings together loud, percussive

music (often electronically “mixed” by disc jockeys), the spoken word, and street-dance, generating a raw vitality that borders on the violent (see chapter 38).

The paintings of the short-lived Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) embrace the free improvisations and bor- rowed “riffs” of modern jazz, even as they infuse the stacca- to rhythms and jarring lyrics of hip-hop. Basquiat’s artworks conflate crude, childlike but familiar images, grim cartoon logos, and scrawled graffiti—an urban folk-art style that vents the rage and joy of inner-city youths (like Basquiat himself). Horn Players (Figure 36.8), executed with portable oil sticks on a blackboardlike surface, pays homage to the jazz giants Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker—the word “ornithology” a witty reference to the latter’s nickname: “Bird”.

African-Americans and Dance The African-American impact on twentieth-century dance rivaled that of music. For centuries, dance served African-Americans as a primary language of religious expression and as a metaphor of physical freedom. By the

Figure 36.8 JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, Horn Players, 1983. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 8 ft. � 6 ft. 3 in. The death’s head at the center of the piece, a favorite motif of the artist, appears in many of his works. It is seen by some to have anticipated Basquiat’s death of an overdose of cocaine and heroin at the age of twenty-eight.

1919 “Bloody Summer” race riots in American cities 1920s America’s Jazz Age

1920–1940 Harlem Renaissance 1954 Supreme Court bans school segregation 1965 Malcolm X assassinated 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated

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late nineteenth century, as all-black theatrical companies and minstrel shows toured the United States, black entertainment styles began to reach white audiences. Popular black dances such as the high-kicking cakewalk became the international fad of the early 1900s, and dances such as the black bottom and lindy hop came to influence both social and theatrical performance.

With the pioneer African-American choreogra- pher Katherine Dunham, introduced in chapter 32, black dance moved beyond the level of stage enter- tainment. After completing her doctorate in anthropology at the university of Chicago in 1939, she traveled to Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, and Haiti to do research, some of which explored the relationship between dance and voodoo practice. An avid student of Caribbean dance, Dunham drew heavily on Afro-Caribbean and African culture in both choreography and the sets and costumes designed by her husband, John Pratt (Figure 36.9). Dunham’s troupe borrowed from Caribbean music the rhythms of the steel band, an instrumental ensemble consisting entirely of steel drums fash- ioned from oil containers. Originating in Trinidad, steel bands provided percussive accompaniment for calypso and other kinds of improvised dance forms. In her book Dances of Haiti, Dunham examines the sociological function of dance—for instance, how communal dance captures the spirit of folk celebrations and how African religious dance interacts with European secular dance.

Dunham’s work inspired others. Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Pearl Primus (1919–1994) used her studies in choreography and anthropology (like Dunham, she earned a doctorate in this field) to become the world’s foremost authority on African dance. Following a trip to Africa in the 1940s, she brought to modern dance the spirit and substance of native tribal rituals. She also choreographed theatrical versions of African-American spirituals and poems, including those of Langston Hughes. In her book African Dance, Primus declared: “The dance is strong magic. . . . It turns the body to liquid steel. It makes it vibrate like a guitar. The body can fly without wings. It can sing without voice.”

The achievements of Dunham and Primus gave African-American dance theater international stature. Since 1950, such outstanding choreographers as Alvin Ailey (1931–1989), Donald McKayle (b. 1930), and Arthur Mitchell (b. 1934) have graced the history of American dance. Ailey’s Revelations (1960), a suite that draws on his Texas roots and his affection for African-American spiritu- als, song-sermons, and gospel music, is an enduring tribute to the cultural history of the American South.

Throughout history, misogyny (the hatred of women) and the perception of the female sex as inferior in intelligence and strength have enforced conditions

of gender inequality. While women make up the majority of the population in many cultures, they have exercised little significant political or economic power. Like many ethnic minorities, women have long been relegated to the position of second-class citizens. In 1900, women were permitted to vote in only one country in the world: New Zealand. By mid-century, women in most First World countries had gained voting rights; nevertheless, their social and economic status has remained far below that of men. As recently as 1985, the World Conference on Women reported that while women represent 50 percent of the world’s population and contribute nearly two-thirds

Figure 36.9 Katherine Dunham in the 1945–1946 production of Tropical Revue. While working on her master’s degree, the “dancing anthropologist” had to choose between dance and an academic career. While she went on to complete the doctorate, she ultimately chose dance, establishing in 1945 her own dance company, with which she toured the world.

1953 biophysicists determine the molecular structure of DNA

1953 Jonas Salk (American) tests an effective polio vaccine

1955 an American endocrinologist produces a successful birth control pill

1982 the fatal immune system disorder AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is diagnosed

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of all working hours, they receive only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one percent of the world’s property. Though female inequality has been a fact of history, it was not until the twentieth century that the quest for female liberation took the form of an internation- al movement.

The Literature of Feminism: Woolf The history of feminism (the principle advocating equal social, political, and economic rights for men and women) reaches back at least to the fourteenth century, when the French poet Christine de Pisan took up the pen in defense of women (see chapter 15). Christine had sporadic follow- ers among Renaissance and Enlightenment humanists. The most notable of these was Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), who published her provocative Vindication of the Rights of Woman in London in 1792 (see chapter 24). During the nineteenth century, Condorcet and Mill wrote reasoned pleas for female equality, as did the female novel- ist George Sand (see chapters 28 and 30). In America, the eloquence of Angelina Grimké (1805–1879) and other suf- fragettes (women advocating equality for women) was instrumental in winning women the right to vote in 1920.

Among the most impassioned advocates of the femi- nist movement was the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Woolf argued that equal opportunity for edu- cation and economic advantage were even more important than the right to vote (British women gained the vote in 1918). In her novels and essays, Woolf proposed that women could become powerful only by achieving financial and psychological independence from men. Freedom, argued Woolf, is the prerequisite for creativity: for a woman to secure her own creative freedom, she must have money and the privacy provided by “a room of her own.” The essay “A Room of One’s Own” voices a response to a clergyman’s remark that no female could have matched the genius of William Shakespeare. In the excerpt below, Woolf envi- sions Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith, in her six- teenth-century setting. She uses this fictional character to raise some challenging questions concerning the psycho- logical aspects of female creativity.

From Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929)

. . . Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what 1 would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek 10 his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very

soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar 20 and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter— indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, 30 however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one 40 summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even 50 seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so— who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where 60 the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

. . . any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to 70

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Q How fragile, according to Woolf, is female creativity?

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London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a 80 woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell,1 George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their 90 writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man), that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. . . .

Postwar Feminism: de Beauvoir The two world wars had a positive effect on the position of women. In the absence of men during wartime, women assumed many male jobs in agriculture and in industry. As Woolf predicted, the newly found financial independence of women gave them a sense of freedom and stimulated their demands for legal and social equality. In the Soviet Union, the communist regime put women to work in industry and on the battlefields. Women’s roles in other regions beyond the West were also changing. In China, where women had been bought and sold for centuries, the People’s Republic in 1949 closed all brothels, forbade arranged marriages, and enforced policies of equal pay for equal work.

Leaders of the feminist movement in the West demand- ed psychological independence as well as job equality; their goals involved raising the consciousness of both sexes. The new woman must shed her passivity and achieve independ- ence through responsible action insisted the French novel- ist, social critic, and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir

(1908–1986). In the classic feminist text The Second Sex, de Beauvoir dethroned the “myth of femininity”—the false and disempowering idea that women possess a unique and preordained “feminine” essence, which condemns them to a role of social and intellectual subordination to men. Reassessing the biological, psychological, and political rea- sons for women’s dependency, she concluded that while Man defines Woman as “the Other” (or second sex), it is women themselves who complacently accept their subordi- nate position. De Beauvoir called on women everywhere “to renounce all advantages conferred upon them by their alliance” with men. She pursued this goal (unsuccessfully, according to some critics) in her own life: her fifty-year liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre constitutes one of the most intriguing partnerships of the century. Although both enjoyed love affairs with other people, they shared a life- long marriage of minds.

In the following brief excerpt from The Second Sex, de Beauvoir explores the nature of female dependency upon men and the “metaphysical risk” of liberty.

From de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)

If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes 1 the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say “We”; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into “others.” But women do not say “We,” except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say “women,” and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for 10 it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.

The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates 20 community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men— fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently 30 fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of

1 Currer Bell was the pseudonym for the British novelist Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855); for Eliot and Sand, see chapter 28.

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Q What circumstances, according to de Beauvoir, work to make the female “the Other”?

Q Is it still “a world that belongs to men”? (line 61).

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exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein,1 and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the 40 basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another. . . .

Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man’s, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognized in the abstract, long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the economic sphere men and 50 women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success than their new competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they monopolize the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to support, for the present enshrines the past—and in the past all history has been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a 60 world that belongs to men— they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal—this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of 70 each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forego liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it—passive, lost, ruined—becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deep- seated tendencies toward complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite 80 resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other. . . .

America’s Feminist Writers During the 1960s, and especially in the United States, the struggle for equality between the sexes assumed a strident tone. Gender discrimination in both education

and employment triggered demands for federal legislation on behalf of women. Even as new types of contraceptives gave women control over their reproductive functions and greater sexual freedoms, the campaign to secure legal and political rights continued, generating protest marches and a spate of consciousness-raising literature. In 1963, Betty Friedan (1921–2006) published The Feminine Mystique, which claimed that American society—and commercial advertising in particular—had brainwashed women to pre- fer the roles of wives and mothers to other positions in life. Friedan was one of the first feminists to attack the theories of Sigmund Freud (see chapter 33), especially Freud’s patri- archal view of women as failed men. She challenged women to question the existing order and to seek careers outside the home. With the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, radical femi- nists called for a restructuring of all Western institutions.

Since the 1960s, there has been a virtual renaissance of poetry and fiction focused on the twin themes of gender equality and the search for female self-identity. As with the literature of black liberation, feminist writing often seethes with repressed rage and anger. Clearly, not all modern lit- erature written by women addresses exclusively female issues—contemporary female writers have dealt with sub- jects as varied as boxing and the plight of the environment. Yet, in much of the postwar literature produced by women, three motifs recur: the victimization of the female, her effort to define her role in a society traditionally dominat- ed by men, and her displacement from her ancient role as goddess and matriarch.

The first generation of feminist poets includes Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Anne Sexton (1928–1975). Plath’s searing verse reflects her sense of dislocation in male-dom- inated society. Much like Plath, Sexton probes problems related to the socialization of women and the search for female identity. Deeply confessional, her verse often reflects upon her own troubled life, which (like Plath’s) ended in suicide—an ironic fulfillment of Woolf’s prophecy concerning the fate of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister. In the autobiographical poem “Self in 1958,” Sexton explores the images that traditionally have defined women: dolls, apparel, kitchens, and, finally, herself as an extension of her mother. Sexton’s poem, which contemplates the female struggle for self-identity in modern society, recalls both Nora’s plight in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (see chapter 30) and Woolf’s observation that women “think through their mothers.”

The African-American poet Sonia Sanchez (b. 1935) deals with the interrelated questions of racism and identity. Sanchez’s poetry is more colloquial than Sexton’s, and (like Baraka’s) it is often fiercely confrontational. In the poem “Woman” Sanchez draws on the literary tradition in which1 German for “co-existence.”

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eminent (and usually male) writers call upon the Classical gods for inspiration: she invokes the spiritual powers of mother earth to infuse her with courage and creative energy.

The poems of Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) are among the most challenging in the feminist canon. They are, to a large extent, impassioned responses to her shifting and often conflicting roles as American, Southerner, Jew, wife, mother, teacher, civil rights activist, feminist, and lesbian. Many of Rich’s poems explore the complexities of person- al and political relationships, especially as they are affect- ed by gender. In the poem “Translations,” she draws attention to the ways in which traditional gender roles polarize the sexes and potentially disempower women.

The youngest of the feminist poets in this group, Rita Dove (b. 1952), is the first African-American woman to have served as poet laureate in the United States (1993–1995). Dove’s six collections of poetry, one of which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1987), reach into the domains of the black feminist experience. In the short poem “Rosa,” from the sequence of poems entitled “On the Bus with Rosa Parks,” Dove pays homage to the heroism of the black woman who, riding a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, refused to give up her seat to a white man. (The inci- dent triggered one of the earliest civil rights protests, a citywide boycott led by Martin Luther King.)

Feminist Poems

Sexton’s “Self in 1958” (1966)

What is reality? 1 I am a plaster doll; I pose with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall upon some shellacked and grinning person, eyes that open, blue, steel, and close. 5 Am I approximately an I. Magnin1 transplant? I have hair, black angel, black-angel-stuffing to comb, nylon legs, luminous arms and some advertised clothes. 10

I live in a doll’s house with four chairs, a counterfeit table, a flat roof and a big front door. Many have come to such a small crossroad. 15 There is an iron bed, (Life enlarges, life takes aim) a cardboard floor, windows that flash open on someone’s city, and little more. 20 Someone plays with me, plants me in the all-electric kitchen, Is this what Mrs. Rombauer2 said? Someone pretends with me— I am walled in solid by their noise— 25 or puts me upon their straight bed.

They think I am me! Their warmth? Their warmth is not a friend! They pry my mouth for their cups of gin and their stale bread. 30

What is reality to this synthetic doll who should smile, who should shift gears, should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder, and have no evidence of ruin or fears? 35 But I would cry, rooted into the wall that was once my mother, if I could remember how and if I had the tears. 40

Sanchez’s “Woman” (1978)

Come ride my birth, earth mother 1 tell me how i have become, became this woman with razor blades between her teeth.

sing me my history O earth mother about tongues multiplying memories 5 about breaths contained in straw. pull me from the throat of mankind where worms eat, O earth mother. come to this Black woman. you. rider of earth pilgrimages. 10 tell me how i have held five bodies in one large cocktail of love and still have the thirst of the beginning sip. tell me. tellLLLLLL me. earth mother for i want to rediscover me. the secret of me 15 the river of me. the morning ease of me. i want my body to carry my words like aqueducts. i want to make the world my diary and speak rivers.

rise up earth mother 20 out of rope-strung-trees dancing a windless dance come phantom mother dance me a breakfast of births let your mouth spill me forth 25 so i creak with your mornings. come old mother, light up my mind with a story bright as the sun.

Rich’s “Translations” (1972)

You show me the poems of some woman 1 my age, or younger translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow enough to let me know 5 she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

2 Irma S. Rombauer, author of the popular cookbook, The Joy of Cooking.1 A fashionable department store.

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Q What aspects of the female experience do each of these poems address?

Q How might these poems “empower” women?

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with Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls baked it like bread in our ovens 10 worn it like lead on our ankles watched it through binoculars as if it were a helicopter bringing food to our famine or the satellite 15 of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman doing things: stirring rice ironing a skirt typing a manuscript till dawn 20

trying to make a call from a phonebooth

The phone rings unanswered in a man’s bedroom

she hears him telling someone else 25 Never mind. She’ll get tired. hears him telling her story to her sister who becomes her enemy and will in her own time light her own way to sorrow 30

ignorant of the fact this way of grief is shared, unnecessary and political

Dove’s “Rosa” (1998)

How she sat there, 1 the time right inside a place so wrong it was ready.

That trim name with its dream of a bench 5 to rest on. Her sensible coat.

Doing nothing was the doing: the clean flame of her gaze carved by a camera flash.

How she stood up 10 when they bent down to retrieve her purse. That courtesy.

Figure 36.10 NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE, Black Venus, 1965–1967. Painted polyester, 9 ft. 2 in. � 35 in. � 24 in.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Black Venus, a hugely proportioned polyester “earth mother,” wears

a large red heart on her belly and flowers on her hips (Figure 36.10). This exuberant

creature is Saint Phalle’s answer to the Western stereotypes of female beauty. She is more closely related

to the ponderous fertility figures of prehistory, such as the Venus of Willendorf

(Figure 36.11), than to the refined, Classical goddesses of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Indeed, she is the feminist reproof to the idealized female figure that dominated mainstream art through the nineteenth century.

Figure 36.11 “Venus” of Willendorf, from Lower Austria, ca. 25,000–20,000 B.C.E.

Limestone, height 43⁄8 in.

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Feminist Art The history of world art includes only a small number of female artists. Addressing this fact, the Australian-born feminist Germaine Greer (b. 1939) explained,

There is . . . no female Leonardo, no female Titian, no female Poussin, but the reason does not lie in the fact that women have wombs, that they can have babies, that their brains are smaller, that they lack vigor, that they are not sensual. The reason is simply that you cannot make great artists out of egos that have been damaged, with wills that are defective, with libidos that have been driven out of reach and energy diverted into neurotic channels.

A sure indication of change, however, is the fact that, since the middle of the twentieth century, the number of women in the visual arts (and in music as well) has been greater than ever before in history. And, as with feminist poetry, much of the painting and sculpture produced by women artists since the 1960s has been driven by feminist concerns. A few representative examples will suffice to make this point.

Bringing a feminist attention to the female body, the internationally acclaimed French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2003) fabricated gigantic sculptures that she called “Nanas.” In 1963 Saint Phalle exhibited a monu- mental 80-foot-long, 20-foot-high, and 30-foot-wide Nana that viewers might enter through a doorway between the figure’s legs. Inside was a cinema with Greta Garbo movies, a telephone, a refreshment bar, and taped voices of roman- tic conversations between a man and a woman.

The militant American feminist Judy Gerowitz (b. 1939), who in 1969 assumed the surname of her native city (hence, Judy Chicago), has been a lifelong advocate of women’s art. Chicago pioneered some of the first art

communities in which women worked together to produce, exhibit, and sell art. Her efforts ignit-

ed the visual arts with the consciousness-raising pol- itics of the feminist movement. Between 1974 and

1979, Chicago directed a project called The Dinner Party, a room-size sculpture consisting of a triangular table

with thirty-nine place settings, each symbolizing a famous woman in myth or history (Figure 36.12). The feminist counterpart of the Last Supper, The Dinner Party pays hom- age to such immortals as Nefertiti, Sappho, Queen Elizabeth I, and Virginia Woolf. To carry out this monu- mental project, Chicago studied the traditionally female arts of embroidery and china painting, inventing at the same time new techniques for combining such dissimilar materials as ceramics and lace. Over 300 men and women contributed to this cooperative enterprise, which brought international attention to the cultural contributions of women in world history.

In searching for a feminist aesthetic, women artists have brought attention to the female body as representative of nature’s procreative forces. The Cuban-born Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) used photography and film to document per- formances inspired by Afro-Caribbean fertility rituals. For the series known as Silhouettes, Mendieta immersed herself in pools of water, sand, and mud, and recorded 200 images of her body or its physical impressions on various earth sur- faces. In the photograph Tree of Life from this series, the artist, encrusted with grass and mud, appears in the dual guises of dryad (a Classical tree nymph) and ancient priest- ess (Figure 36.13). She stated: “My art is the way I establish the bonds that unite me to the universe.”

Figure 36.12 JUDY CHICAGO, The Dinner Party, 1974–1979. Multimedia, 48 � 48 � 48 ft.

With the ambitious combination of ceramics and textiles, Chicago introduced craft techniques into the

arts of the 1970s. Each plate here is an independent artwork; each runner bears embroidery that includes the

name of the honoree and her identifying symbol.

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The career of the American photographer Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) addresses one of the more recent concerns of feminist artists: the fact that the traditional Western image of the female—sweet, sexy, and servile—has been shaped by male needs and values. Such images, say contemporary feminists, reflect the controlling power of the (male) “gaze.” The theory of the “male gaze,” which emerged among feminist critics of the 1960s, holds that the female image, usually conceived by male artists and rendered exclusively from the male perspective, reduces women to the status of objects. Just as Colescott and Saar use art to attack racial stereotypes, so Sherman makes visual assaults on gender stereotypes—those projected by the collective body of “great art” and by the modern-day phenomena of television, “girlie” magazines, and other mass media. Sherman’s large, glossy studio photographs of the 1970s feature the artist herself in poses and attire that call attention to the body as a political or sexual object. In personalized narratives that resemble black-and-white movie stills, she recreates commercial stereotypes that mock the subservient roles that women play: the “little woman,” the femme fatale, the baby doll, the “pin-up,” and the lovesick teenager. Since the 1980s, Sherman has used the newest techniques in color photography to assault—

often in visceral terms—sexual and historical stereotypes of women. She may replace the male image in a world- famous painting with a female image (often Sherman her- self), use artificial body parts to “remake” the traditional nude, or flagrantly recast famous females from Western myth, history, and religion (Figure 36.14).

Well aware of the extent to which commercialism shapes identity, Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) creates photo- graphs that deftly unite word and image to resemble com- mercial billboards. “Your Body is a Battleground,” insists Kruger; by superimposing the message over the divided (positive and negative) image of a female face, the artist calls attention to the controversial issue of abortion in contemporary society (Figure 36.15).

Gender Identity The dual quest for racial and gender equality has also worked to raise public consciousness concerning the ways sex is used as a structuring principle in human culture and society. Distinct from gender, which is a culturally pre- scribed construct of masculine or feminine identity, sex, a biologically determined construct, distinguishes the indi- vidual as either male or female. Assumptions concerning the sexual and social roles of males and females are root- ed in traditions as old as Paleolithic culture and as vener- ated as the Bible. For many, sexual roles are fixed and

Figure 36.13 Ana Mendieta, Tree of Life from the Silvetas series, 1977. Color photographs, 20 � 131⁄4 in. Mendieta integrated the performance traditions of Afro-Caribbean religions in her feminist pieces. After 1980, she distanced herself from the feminist art movement, which she felt was too closely tied to white, middle-class values.

Figure 36.14 CINDY SHERMAN, Untitled #276, 1993. Color photograph, edition of six, 6 ft. 81⁄2 in. � 5 ft. 1 in. framed. Sitting in a curtained space, on a low throne, this flaxen-haired “Cinderella” assumes a vulgar pose. She holds, however, three stems of lilies, a symbol of purity traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary. Sherman underscores the ambiguity of her photographs’ contents by deliberately leaving them untitled.

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unchanging. However, these assumptions, like so many others in the cultural history of the twentieth century, came to be challenged and reassessed.

Gender issues accompanied a demand for equality on the part of those of untraditional sexual orientation— bisexuals, homosexuals (gays and lesbians), and other transgendered individuals. In America homosexuals date the birth of their “liberation” to June 1969, when they openly and violently protested a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. Thereafter, the call for protection against harassment shift- ed to litigated demands for gender equality. While all soci- eties have included a transgendered subculture, it was not until the last decades of the twentieth century that sexual and public issues intersected to produce some highly con- troversial questions. Should homosexuals serve in the armed forces? Should homosexual marriage be legalized? How does homosexuality affect the future of the tradition- al family? Should sexually explicit art receive public fund- ing? The resolution of these and other gender-related questions continues to impact the progress of the humanis- tic tradition.

There are a number of reasons why issues of human sexuality became so visible in the culture of the late twentieth century: increasing sexual permissiveness (the consequence of improved pharmaceutical methods of contraception); the activity of the media (especially TV and film) in broadcasting sexually explicit entertainment; and the appearance of the devastating pandemic called AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), a life- threatening disease resulting from a retrovirus named HIV that attacks the blood cells of the body, thus causing a fail- ure of the autoimmune system. Collectively, these phe- nomena have represented an overwhelming challenge to

traditional concepts of sexuality, sexual behavior, and (more generally) to conventional morality. They have also generated a provocative blurring of sex roles (which has been increasingly exploited in commercial advertising and the popular media). And they continue to complicate the task of distinguishing between forms of expression that have mere shock value and those that represent a substan- tial creative achievement.

The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) are significant in this regard. Mapplethorpe’s fine-grained silver gelatin prints display exquisitely composed images ranging from still life subjects to Classically posed nudes. Although usually lacking explicit narrative, they reflect the artist’s preoccupation with physical and sexual themes: male virility, sadomasochism, androgyny, and sexual iden- tity. A sculptor in his early training, Mapplethorpe pres- ents his subjects as pristine objects, occasionally transforming them into erotic symbols. His photographs depict contemporary sexuality in a manner that is at once detached and impassioned, but they often gain added power as gender-bending parodies of sexual stereotypes— witness the startling union of masculine and feminine cues in the portrait of Lisa Lyon—herself a weight-lifter (Figure 36.16; see also Figure 38.17). Mapplethorpe fulfills the artist’s mission to see things (in his words) “like they haven’t been seen before.”

Themes of human sexuality have also increasingly pre- occupied twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. In her science fiction fantasy The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), American writer Ursula LeGuin (b. 1929) describes a distant planet, home to creatures with the sexual potential of both males and females. The ambisexu- ality of the characters in this fictional utopia calls into question human preconceptions about the defined roles of behavior for men and women. Through the device of science fiction, LeGuin suggests a shift in focus from the narrow view of male–female dualities (or opposites) to larger, more urgent matters of interdependence.

While LeGuin examines bisexuality in imaginary settings, others, and in particular gay artists, have dealt with the experience of homosexuality in their day-to-day lives. Sexual “otherness” and the gay sensibility are themes that appear regularly in the popular entertainment media of television and film. They are also the subject of inquiry among scholars of a new discipline known as “queer representation.”*

By drawing attention to the ways in which matters of sexuality affect society and its institutions, contemporary art asserts that sexuality and power are as closely related as race and power or gender and power. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (written in two parts: Millennium Approaches, 1990, and Perestroika, 1993) pres- ents a radical vision of American society set against the

Figure 36.15 BARBARA KRUGER, Untitled (“Your Body is a Battleground”), 1989. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 9 ft. 4 in. � 9 ft. 4 in.

* See Martin Duberman, ed., Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures. New York: City University of New York Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1997.

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AIDS epidemic and the politics of conservatism. Kushner (b. 1957) urges the old America—“straight,” Protestant, and white—to look with greater objectivity at “the fringe” (the variety of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities), which demands acceptance and its share of power. Kushner’s landmark drama represents the movement for body-conscious politics and socially responsible art that animated the last decade of the twentieth century.

Beyond issues of sexual orientation and the strug- gle against discrimination on the part of the trans- gendered minority, the more immediate issue of the AIDS pandemic left its mark on the late twentieth century. The Aids Memorial Quilt, begun in 1985, engaged 20,000 ordinary individuals, each of whom created a single 3- by 6-foot fabric panel in memory of someone who had died of an HIV-related disease. In 1992, AIDS activists assembled the panels in 16- foot squares and took them from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., to protest governmental inaction with regard to the AIDS crisis. Commemorating the deaths of some 150,000 Americans, the Aids Memorial Quilt covered 15 acres of ground between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. The Names Project continues: in 2004, the quilt panels numbered 44,000, that is, more than double the figure of the original.

One of the most moving monuments to the AIDS crisis is the controversial Still/Here (1994), a per- formance work conceived by the African-American dancer Bill T. Jones (b. 1952). For the piece Jones, who is himself HIV-positive, combined choreogra- phy and vocal music with video imagery derived in part from workshops he conducted with AIDS vic- tims. Still/Here has provoked heated debate concern- ing the artistic value of issue-driven art: does art that showcases sickness and death serve merely to manip- ulate viewers? This is only one of many questions that probe current efforts to wed art to social action.

Figure 36.16 ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, Lisa Lyon, 1982. Silver gelatin print. Mapplethorpe focused on the body as a site of pain and pleasure. Gallery exhibitions of his photographs offering a frank treatment of alternative lifestyles and sexual practices have caused intense public controversy.

One of the most moving responses to the AIDS crisis is Still/Here (1994), a two-act dance-theater work produced by the African- American dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones. Jones conceived the piece in part as a memorial to his partner, Arnie Zane, who died of AIDS in 1988. For the work, Jones combined dance and a vocal score with video imagery derived in part from workshops he conducted with AIDS victims. When it was first performed in 1994, Still/Here provoked heated criticism and debate. Critics questioned the value of art that showcased sickness and death. Others

defended the right as well as the responsibility of the artist to put art at the service of social action and reform. More than ten years later, many regard Still/Here as a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of life-threatening illness. But the work raises important questions. What role should issue-driven art play in contemporary life? If such art takes meaning and authority exclusively from its immediate context, can it be evaluated objectively for its broader aesthetic value?

1918 British women granted the right to vote 1920 American women granted the right to vote 1966 Founding of National Organization for Women (NOW) 1969 Police raid Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City

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apartheid a policy of strict racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against the black population in South Africa

feminism the doctrine advocating equal social, political, and economic rights for women

scat singing a jazz performance

style in which nonsense syllables replace the lyrics of a song

swing the jazz performer’s practice of varying from the standard rhythms by playing just ahead of, or just behind, the beat; also, a big-band jazz style developed in the 1920s and flourishing in the age of large dance bands (1932–1942)

Anticolonialism and Liberation • The quest for liberation from poverty, oppression, and inequality

was a prevailing theme in twentieth-century history. In dozens of countries, movements for decolonization followed World War II.

• At the same time, racial and ethnic minorities fought valiantly to oppose discrimination as practiced by the majority culture. These crusades are yet ongoing among the populations of Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.

• Western intrusion in Muslim lands has provoked protest, as evidenced in the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal.

• Liberation movements in Latin America were supported by the Catholic Church and by such writers as Pablo Neruda, whose poems condemn colonialism and commercial exploitation.

The Quest for Racial Equality • The struggle of African-Americans to achieve freedom from the

evils of racism has a long and dramatic history. From the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth century through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the arts have mirrored that history.

• In the poems of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in the novels of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Alice Walker, the plight and identity of African-Americans in white America have been central themes.

• Visual artist Romare Bearden engaged the world of jazz in collage; Betye Saar, Robert Colescott, and Kara Walker, have tested the stereotypes of American racism by way of parody and satire.

• The impact of black culture in music and dance has been formidable. Blues and jazz giants from Louis Armstrong to Wynton Marsalis have produced a living body of popular music, while choreographers from Katherine Dunham to Alvin Ailey have inspired generations of dancers to draw on their African heritage.

The Quest for Gender Equality • During the postwar era, women throughout the world worked to

gain political, economic, and social equality. • The writings of feminists Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir

influenced women to examine the psychological conditions of their oppression.

• In America, the feminist movement elicited a virtual golden age in literature. The self-conscious poetry of Anne Sexton, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, and Adrienne Rich is representative of this phenomenon.

• In the visual arts, at least two generations of women have redefined traditional concepts of female identity: first, by celebrating womanhood itself, and, more recently, by attacking outworn stereotypes.

• One of the most controversial of the twentieth century’s liberation movements centered on issues of gender identity. Amidst the AIDS pandemic, Robert Mapplethorpe and Tony Kushner brought candor and perceptivity to matters of sexuality and sexual behavior.

CD Two Selection 21 Handy, “St. Louis Blues,” 1914. CD Two Selection 22 Hardin/Armstrong,

“Hotter Than That,” 1927.

CD Two Selection 23 Parker/Gillespie, “Koko,” 1945.

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Figure 37.1 ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Buffalo II, 1964. Oil on canvas with silkscreen, 8 ft. � 6 ft. Rauschenberg used solvent transfer and screen-printing techniques to reproduce images from magazines and newspapers. The central strategy of his work, that of collecting and combining, informed both his prints and his three-dimensional pieces.

“In America, advertising enjoys universal popular adherence and the American way of life is fashioned by it.” Ellul

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Some historians date the end of Modernism from the decade of

the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II, a period that

saw the obliteration of utopian ideals and the rise of cynicism and

doubt. But these sobering realities also formed the background for

the Postmodern shift from an Industrial Age (dominated by

farming and manufacturing) to an Information Age (dominated by

radical changes in the technology of communication and the ways

we receive and process information). The agents of high technol-

ogy, the mass media, and electronic modes of communication

have facilitated this shift. In the fifteenth century, movable type

brought about the print revolution, which transformed an essen-

tially oral culture into one that depended on the book. In our own

time, electronic forms of communication have had an equally

revolutionary effect: they have made more information available

to greater numbers of people at greater speeds than ever before.

And they have delivered much of that information in a visual form.

The information explosion had massive effects on the culture

of the late twentieth century. It encouraged unusual literary styles

modeled on electronic modes of communication. Along with high

technology materials and digital techniques, it contributed to a

wealth of new visual art styles and forms, many of which are

conceptual and interactive. In music and film, digital technology

affected everything from the production of sound to its storage

and distribution. The culture of Postmodernism is challenging not

only because of its diversity of styles and opinions, but because it

embraces the historical past with stark objectivity and skepticism.

Television and computers—the primary vehicles of the information explosion—have altered almost every aspect of life in our time. The wonderchild of electronics and the quintessential example of modern mass media, television transmits sound and light by electromagnetic waves that carry information instantaneously into homes across the face of the earth. The very name “television” comes from the Greek word tele, meaning “far,” and the Latin videre, meaning “to see”; hence “to see far.” Television did not become common to middle-class life in the West until the 1950s, although it had been invented decades before then. By the 1960s, the events of a war in the jungles of Vietnam were being relayed via electronic communications satellite into American living rooms. In 1969, in a live telecast, the world saw the first astronauts walk on the surface of the moon. And in the early 1990s, during the Middle Eastern conflict triggered by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, those with access to television witnessed the first “prime-time

war”—a war that was “processed” by censorship and televi- sion newscasting.

The second major technological phenomenon of the Information Age is the computer. Digital computers— machines that process information in the form of num- bers—were first used widely in the 1950s. By the 1960s, computers consisting of electronic circuits were able to per- form millions of calculations per second. Smaller and more reliable than ever before, computers have come to facilitate a vast range of functions from cellphone communication to rapid prototyping, a digital process that “prints” objects in three dimensions. Computer technology accelerated the process of information production, storage, and retrieval. A single computer chip is capable of storing an entire encyclopedia. Virtually unlimited amounts of information are available in various data banks, united by the World Wide Web, a system of electronically linked texts (or hypertexts) accessed by way of a series of interconnected computer networks known as the Internet.

Since the 1990s, information technology has rapidly proliferated. The world’s first online, nonprofit English- language encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was launched in 2001. Publicly edited and continuously updated, it contained (in 2009) almost three million articles. Equally ambitious are current projects to create a universal literary archive by putting all existing printed matter into an electronic library. The website YouTube invites a polyglot audience to post video “clips,” while the image-hosting website, Flickr, provides a community resource for millions of photos and videos. Online postings—web-logs (“blogs”)—exchange information and personal opinions on everything from cur- rent fashion fads to political policy.

From Book to Screen Book culture and the written language depend on lineari- ty, syntactical order, and precision. By contrast, the culture of the Information Age is increasingly image-oriented (Figure 37.1). By way of screens—television, computer, telephone, or camera—we receive ideas configured as pic- tures and logos, symbols and signs. Visual information (like

1950 commercial color television becomes available 1953 first commercially successful computer introduced 1959 American engineers produce the first microchip

(made from a silicon wafer) 1970 fiber optics technology is perfected to carry

information thousands of times faster than copper cables

1972 first commercial videogame introduced 1975 first personal computer available 1979 first portable music device (the Walkman) produced 1983 first commercial cellular (wireless) phones produced

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music or film) is manipulated by dozens of electronic processes: clipping, combining, distorting, mixing, and remixing. In contrast with the linear medium of print, electronic images are generated in diffuse, discontinuous bundles and rapidly dispatched fragments. The electronic media tend to homogenize images, that is, to make all images uniform and alike. Product and message fall to process and medium. (Or, as communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously observed, “the medium is the message.”) Electronic processing and the rapid diffusion of images via television and the Internet have worked to reduce distinctions between different types of information: the stuff of “popular” culture is often indistinguishable from that of “high” culture. Moreover, the world of the screen has turned information, from protest marches to breakfast cereals, into marketable commodities, transform- ing culture into (what one critic calls) “a vast garage sale.”

The major developments of the last half-century followed from scientific advances that have made possible investiga- tions into outer space—the universe at large—and inner space, the province of our own bodies. Science and tech- no-logy have propelled humankind beyond planet earth and into the cosmos. At the same time, they have provid- ed an unprecedented understanding of the genetic patterns that govern life itself. These phenomena have worked to make the planet smaller, the universe larger, and methods of navigating the two ever more promising.

String Theory Since the middle of the twentieth century, physicists have tried to reconcile the insights of the two great intellectual systems advanced early in the century: Einstein’s theory of relativity, which applies to vast, cosmological space, and quantum physics, which describes the realms of the very small. They seek to establish “a theory of everything,” one that might explain the “fundamental of fundamentals” that governs the organization and complexity of matter. A new (but yet unproven) theory proposes that all matter—from the page of this book to the skin of a peach—consists of tiny loops of vibrating strings. String (or Superstring) Theory, most eloquently explained by the American physicist Brian Greene (b. 1962), describes a multidimensional universe in which loops of strings and oscillating globules of matter unite all of creation into vibrational patterns.* While the workings of such a universe can be simulated on a comput- er, language—other than the language of mathematics—is

1990 the internationally linked computer network (the Internet) becomes accessible to personal computers

1995 + advances in nanotechnology and microprocessing make possible minicomputers, palm TVs, smart bombs, etc.

2000 + wireless networks, broadband, digital TV and satellite radio become mainstream

2001 Apple releases its first generation iPod (portable digital music device)

2007 wireless electronic reading devices become available

The French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) blamed television for creating what he called, a society of “mass man.” He singled out advertising as the most pernicious condition assaulting human dignity. In The Technological Society (1964), Ellul observed,

Advertising [affects] all people; or at least an overwhelming majority. Its goal is to persuade the masses to buy. . . . The inevitable consequence is the creation of the mass man. As advertising of the most varied products is concentrated, a new type of human being, precise and generalized, emerges. We can get a general impression of this new human type by studying America, where human beings tend clearly to become identified with the ideal of advertising. In America, advertising enjoys

universal popular adherence and the American way of life is fashioned by it.

Ellul’s view of advertising as a form of “psychological collectivism” that robs human beings of freedom and self-esteem dates from a time in which commercial advertising was dominated by printed media and television. However, today’s computerized forms of communication, such as Internet websites and web-logs, empower individuals to respond to mass advertising. The newest digital technologies provide a free resource for interactive, individual expression. Nevertheless, in a society whose consumers are targeted regularly by computer software programs that analyze their buying habits, the possibility of techno-structural threats to human dignity remains an issue.

* Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York, Norton, 1999.

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memory and the capacity to learn. Thus, it could be said that intelligence is located not only in the brain but in cells that are distributed throughout the body, and that the traditional separation of mental processes, including emotions, from the body, is no longer valid.” As the gap between mind and body grows narrower, Eastern notions of the symbiosis of matter and spirit have received increased attention in the West. By way of popular literature (such as Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontier of Mind/Body Medicine, 1990), the Indian-born endocrinologist Deepak Chopra (b. 1946) introduced Western audiences to holis- tic models of meditation and body control that have flour- ished in India for 2000 years.

Language Theory While science moves forward optimistically to reveal the underlying natural order, philosophy has entered a phase of radical skepticism that denies the existence of any true or uniform system of thought. Contemporary philosophers have fastened on the idea, first popularized by the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), that all forms of expression, and, indeed, all truths, are dominated by the limits of language as a descriptive tool. Wittgenstein, whose life’s work was an inquiry into the ways in which language represents the world, argued that sentences (or propositions) were “pictures of reality.” His groundbreaking theories on the philosophy of language were published two years after his death under the title Philosophical Investigations.

Following Wittgenstein, philosophers tried to unlock the meaning of the text (that is, any mode of cultural expression) by way of a close analysis of its linguistic struc- ture. Language theorists suggested that one must “decon- struct” or “take apart” discourse in order to “unmask” its many meanings. The leaders of Deconstruction, the French philosophers Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984), were influential in arguing that all human beings are prisoners of the very language they use to

too frail to serve as an explanatory medium. Yet it is in the arts, and possibly in aesthetic theory, that the design of this elegant universe may be approximated. As the Norwegian physicist Niels Bohr observed, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”

Chaos Theory Equally fascinating are the speculations of those who explore the shape and structure of matter itself. The proponents of Chaos Theory find that universal patterns underlie the seemingly random operations of nature. The catalyst for the development of chaos theory was the electronic computer, by which the mathematics of random patterns (applied to such matters as air turbulence and weather predictions) was first calculated. Predictable patterns repeat themselves in physical phenomena ranging from the formation of a snowflake to the rhythms of the human heart. Chaos theorists (not only physicists, but also astronomers, mathematicians, biologists, and computer scientists) observe that while these patterns appear random, unstable, and disorderly, they are actually self-similar in scale, like the zigs and zags of a lightning bolt, or the oscillating motions of electric currents. To Einstein’s famous assertion, “God does not play dice with the universe,” these theorists might respond: “Not only does God play dice; but they are loaded.”

The Human Genome One of the major projects of the late twentieth century was the successful mapping of the human genome. By the year 2000, molecular biologists had been able (with the help of computers) to ascertain the order of nearly three billion units of DNA, thereby locating genes and determining their functions in the human cellular system. Ultimately, this enterprise is expected to revolutionize the practice of medicine, in both the preventive treatment of gene-relat- ed diseases and in the repair and regeneration of tissues. (Already, such gene-related research has diminished the number of AIDS deaths internationally.)

The tools of genetic engineering have also given scien- tists the ability to clone life forms. They also promise the mitigation of what Freud described as one of humankind’s greatest threats: the suffering “from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution.” From sports medicine to psychoanalysis, society has come to perceive human beings as mechanisms that can be improved, if not perfected, by the right diet, drugs, exercise, and a healthy life-style. The 1990s brought exciting breakthroughs in the area of cogni- tive neuroscience, as new imaging technologies showed how brain waves can influence matter. In recent German exper- iments in neural consciousness, patients wearing electrodes on their scalps modulate electrical signals to choose letters from a video screen—thus communicating with nothing but their own brains. These biofeedback experiments are reinforced by neurochemical research: the American biochemist Candace Pert (b. 1946) writes in her ground- breaking book Molecules of Emotion (1997), “We know that the immune system, like the central nervous system, has

481Volume2

1953 DNA discovered 1967 Christian Barnard (South African) performs the first

human heart transplant 1973 American biochemists isolate genes to make

genetic engineering possible 1978 the world’s first test-tube baby is born 1983 the first commercial use of MRI (Magnetic

Resonance Imaging) 1996 Dolly, a cloned sheep, is born in Scotland 2000 scientists complete the mapping of the

human genome 2005 first publicly available personal genetic blueprints 2007 human skin cells are found to be reprogrammable

as stem cells

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think and to describe the world. In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida examined the relationship between speech and writing, and their roles in the effectiveness of commu- nication. In a similar direction, Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) suggests that language is not the ser- vant, but the master, of those who use it; we fail to realize that we are forever submitting to its demands. Philosophers, he asserted, should abandon the search for absolute truths and concentrate on the discovery of mean- ing(s). “Deconstruction” became the popular method of analysis in philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism in the late twentieth century.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was deeply troubled by the limits of both linguistic inquiry and traditional philosophy. Rorty argued that the great thinkers of the postphilosophical age are not the meta- physicians or the linguists but, rather, those artists whose works provide others with insights into achieving Postmodern self-transformation. What Rorty called the “linguistic turn” describes the move (among writers and philosophers) to rethink language as verbal coding.

Postmodernism The term “Postmodernism” came into use shortly before World War II to describe the reaction to or against Modernism, but by the late 1960s it had come to designate the cultural condition of the late twentieth century. Whether defined as a reaction against Modernism or as an entirely new form of Modernism, Postmodernism is a phe- nomenon that occurred principally in the West. As a style, it is marked by a bemused awareness of a historical past whose “reality” has been processed by mass communication and information technology.

Postmodern artists appropriate (or borrow) pre-existing texts and images from history, advertising, and the media. They offer alternatives to the high seriousness and intro- version of Modernist expression, and move instead in the direction of parody (burlesque imitation), whimsy, para- dox, and irony. Their playful amalgam of disparate styles mingles the superficial and the profound. Their seemingly incongruous “layering” of images calls to mind the funda- mentals of Chaos Theory, which advances a geometry of the universe that is “broken up, twisted, tangled, inter- twined.”

In contrast with elitist Modernism, Postmodernism is self-consciously populist, even to the point of inviting the active participation of the beholder. Whereas Modern artists (consider Eliot or Kandinsky) exalt the artist as visionary and rebel, Postmodern artists bring wry skepticism to the creative act. Less preoccupied than the Modernists with formal abstraction and its redeeming power, Postmodernists acknowledge art as an information system and a commodity shaped by the electronic media, its mes- sages, and its modes of communication. The Postmodern stance is more disengaged than authorial, its message often enigmatic. Finally, Postmodernism is pluralistic, that is, it

suggests that meaning is many-faceted and fleeting, rather than absolute and fixed; and that the individual has numer- ous (and often contradictory) identities.

Postmodern Fiction Postmodern writers share the contemporary philosopher’s disdain for rational structure and the Deconstructionist’s fascination with the function of language. They tend to bypass traditional narrative styles in favor of techniques that parody the writer’s craft, mingle past, present, and future events, leave situations unresolved, and freely mix the ordinary and the bizarre. This genre has been called “Metafiction”—fiction about fiction. It takes fragments of information out of their original literary/historical context and juxtaposes them with little or no commentary on their meaning. In a single story, a line from a poem by T. S. Eliot or a Shakespeare play may appear alongside a catchy saying or banal slogan from a television commercial, a phrase from a national anthem, or a shopping list, as if the writer were claiming all information as equally valuable. In Postmodern fiction, characters undergo little or no development, plots often lack logical direction, and events—whether ordinary, perverse, or fantastic—may be described in the detached tone of a newspaper article. Like the television newscast, the language of Postmodern fiction is often diffuse, discon- tinuous, and filled with innuendo and “commentary.” The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) favored clipped sentences framed in the present tense. He created a kind of “videofiction” that seemed aimed at readers whose attention spans have been dwarfed by commercial televi- sion programming. The Italian novelist Italo Calvino (1923–1985) engages the reader in a hunt for meanings that lie in the spaces between the act of writing and the events the words describe. Calvino interrupts the story line of his novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) to confront the reader, thus:

For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man’s land of experience reduced to the lowest kind of denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it—a trap. Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for that matter, are not sure what you would most like to read.

While Vonnegut and Calvino are representative of twenti- eth-century Metafiction, they are by no means the only writers whose prose works have a Postmodern stamp. The Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing (b. 1919) conceived The Golden Notebook (1962) as a series of inter- woven narrative fragments, diary entries, and personal notes. Her voice is that of a middle-aged female writer who struggles with the political and personal traumas of a post- war, Postmodern society.

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Q What insights concerning the powers and perils of language does Paz convey in this poem?

READING 37.2

Q To what does “it” refer at each use here? Can you find any paradoxes or oxymorons in this poem?

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are not signs, they are years. Saying what they say, the names we speak say time: they say us, we are the names of time. 25 To talk is human.

Ashbery’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”1 (1981)

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. 1 Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

This poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. 5 What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days 10 Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know it It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem 15 Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

Magic Realism The term “Magic Realism” originated in the context of the visual arts where it characterized the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Magritte (see chapter 33). As a literary term, it describes a genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting. Magical Realism dominat- ed Latin American fiction from the early 1920s through the literary explosion, the so-called “Boom,” that began in the late 1960s. Two of the most notable of Latin America’s Magic Realists are the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. 1928) and the Chilean author Isabel Allende (b. 1943). Both are brilliant storytellers who interweave Latin America’s legendary history with universal themes of language and love. Allende has credited the influence of film and television for her ability to “think in images.”

It is too soon to determine which of the internationally renowned writers of the last half-century will leave land- marks in the history of culture. The following are likely candidates: Joan Didion (b. 1934), Tom Wolfe (b. 1930), and Don DeLillo (b. 1936). All three American authors employ the events of their time to produce docufiction— a literary genre that gives an original (and fictionalized) narrative context to contemporary events and situations. DeLillo captures the cinematic rush of American life in the compelling novel Underworld, which connects major worldwide phenomena—the atomic bomb, the cold war— to such everyday events as baseball and waste manage- ment. His style, in which the narrative moves back and forth in time, parallels a Postmodern propensity for disor- dering time sequences, readily apparent in contemporary cinema. DeLillo’s concerns for international terrorism, the ecology of the planet, urban violence, and the loss of spir- itual and moral values are shared by many contemporary novelists. Most, however, such as Philip Roth (b. 1933), John Updike (1932–2009), and Margaret Atwood (b. 1939), have maintained a traditional narrative style.

Postmodern Poetry As with Postmodern fiction, so too with poetry; parody and ambivalence dominate. Multiple meanings or the absence of meaning itself are related to language, its ambiguities, and its role in shaping the self. In the poem “To Talk,” the Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz (1914–1999) deals with the idea of language as both self-defining and sacred. More opaque are the poems of the American writer John Ashbery (b. 1927). While his verses are often playful, they are also usually cryptic and inscrutable. In the poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” Ashbery suggests that both language and life are incongruous, contradictory, and intrinsically human.

Paz’s “To Talk” (1987) I read in a poem: 1 to talk is divine. But gods don’t speak: they create and destroy worlds while men do the talking, 5 Gods, without words, play terrifying games.

The spirit descends, untying tongues, but it doesn’t speak words: 10 it speaks flames. Language, lit by a god is a prophecy of flames and a crash of burnt syllables: 15 meaningless ash.

Man’s word is the daughter of death. We talk because we are mortal: words 20

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1 A paradox is a statement that seems contradictory or absurd, but may actually be true. An oxymoron is a combination of contradictory terms, such as “wise fool” or “cruel kindness.”

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Q Based only on the evidence of this sketch, describe the setting, the age of the speaker(s), and his (their) main concerns. Borges considered this piece a parable; what might be the lesson of this parable?

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One of the earliest of the Latin American Magic Realists was the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). In his short stories and essays, Borges combined elements of Magic Realism—its unexpected shifts in time and place and its dreamlike, mythic settings—with a plurality of meanings and points of view common to Postmodernism. He cited among the basic devices of fantastic literature: the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the “double.” The fractured, reflexive self is both subject and object in “Borges and I,” one of a group of parables and prose fragments that made up his most personal book, The Maker (1960).

Borges’ “Borges and I” (1960)

It’s Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause—mechanically now, perhaps—to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile—I live, I allow myself live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification. I willingly admit that he has written a number of sound pages, but those pages will not save me, perhaps because the good in them no longer belongs to any individual, not even to that other men, but rather to language itself, or to tradition. Beyond that, I am doomed—utterly and inevitably— to oblivion, and fleeting moments will be all of me that survives in that other man. Little by little, I have been turning everything over to him, though I know the perverse way he has of distorting and magnifying everything. Spinoza believed that all things wish to go on being what they are—stone wishes eternally to be stone, and tiger, to be tiger. I shall endure in Borges, not in myself (if, indeed, I am anybody at all), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others’, or in the tedious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and I moved on from the mythologies of the slums and outskirts of the city to games

with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now, and I shall have to think up other things. So my life is a point- counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away—and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.

Science Fiction Science fiction has come to be one of our most entertaining genres. At its best, it evokes a sense of awe and a spirit of intellectual curiosity in the face of the unknown. It also is a vehicle by which writers express their concern for the future of the planet. During the twentieth century— a virtual golden age of science fiction—Futurists contem- plated the possibility of life in outer space, the interface between computers and human beings, the consequences of a nuclear disaster, and the potential for a bioengineered new species.

The beginnings of modern science fiction may be traced to the French novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905) and the British writer H. G. Wells (1866–1946). But the more recent flowering of the genre dates from the birth of space exploration—specifically the Soviet Union’s historic launching of an artificial earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in 1957 and the American moon landing of 1969. These events triggered an outpouring of fiction related to space explo- ration. In 1950, Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), one of Britain’s most successful writers, had produced the intrigu- ing science fiction story “The Sentinel,” which in turn became the basis for an extraordinary cinematic conceptu- alization of the space age—2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, science fiction spawned a unique subgenre known as cyberpunk. Influenced by Gravity’s Rainbow (1974), the dense master- piece of Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), cyberpunk deals with futuristic societies, dominated by computers, artificial intel- ligence, illicit drugs, and punk rock music. Pynchon’s novel, an archetypal Postmodernist text, is packed with an ency- clopedic array of references to (and puns on) world history, chemistry, mathematics, religion, film, and popular music.

The Literature of Social Conscience Urban violence, poverty, corporate greed, and the search for spiritual renewal in a commodity-driven world have inspired much of the literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such writing is usually realistic and straightforward in its narrative style. One of the lead- ing voices in this genre is the American writer Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938). Oates deals with the violent underlayer of contemporary urban society. In the story “Ace,” she makes use of a highly concentrated kind of prose fiction that she calls the “miniature narrative.” Its tale of random

1957 the first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) is put in orbit by the Soviet Union

1969 an American astronaut is the first person to walk on the moon

1981 lasers are utilized for the study of matter 1990 the Hubble space telescope confirms the

existence of extrasolar planets and fifty billion galaxies

2004 NASA scientists land rover probe on Mars 2005 International Space Station completed 2007 Computer imaging (CI) used to test spacecraft

before production

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violence—the familiar fare of the daily broadcast televi- sion news—unfolds with cinematic intensity, an effect embellished by powerful present-tense narrative and vivid characterization.

Oates’ “Ace” (1988)

A gang of overgrown boys, aged eighteen to twenty-five, has 1 taken over the northeast corner of our park again this summer. Early evenings they start arriving, hang out until the park closes at midnight. Nothing to do but get high on beer and dope, the police leave them alone as long as they mind their own business, don’t hassle people too much. Now and then there’s fighting but nothing serious—nobody shot or stabbed.

Of course no girl or woman in her right mind would go anywhere near them, if she didn’t have a boyfriend there.

Ace is the leader, a big boy in his twenties with a mean 10 baby-face, pouty mouth, and cheeks so red they look fresh- slapped, sly little steely eyes curling up at the corners like he’s laughing or getting ready to laugh. He’s six foot two weighing maybe two hundred twenty pounds—lifts weights at the gym— but there’s some loose flabby flesh around his middle, straining against his belt. He goes bare-chested in the heat, likes to sweat in the open air, muscles bunched and gleaming, and he can show off his weird tattoos—ace of spades on his right bicep, inky-black octopus on his left. Long shaggy hair the color of dirty sand and he wears a red sweatband for looks. 20

Nobody notices anything special about a car circling the park, lots of traffic on summer nights and nobody’s watching then there’s this popping noise like a firecracker and right away Ace screams and claps his hand to his eye and it’s streaming blood—what the hell? Did somebody shoot him? His buddies just freeze not knowing what to do. There’s a long terrible minute when everybody stands there staring at Ace not knowing what to do—then the boys run and duck for cover, scattering like pigeons. And Ace is left alone standing

there, crouched, his hand to his left eye screaming, Help, Jesus, 30 hey, help, my eye—Standing there crouched at the knee like he’s waiting for a second shot to finish him off.

The bullet must have come at an angle, skimmed the side of Ace’s face, otherwise he’d be flat-out dead lying in the scrubby grass. He’s panicked though, breathing loud through his mouth saying, O Jesus, O Jesus, and after a minute people start yelling, word’s out there’s been a shooting and somebody’s hurt. Ace wheels around like he’s been hit again but it’s only to get away, suddenly he’s walking fast stooped over dripping blood, could be he’s embarrassed, doesn’t want people to 40 see him, red headband and tattoos, and now he’s dripping blood down his big beefy forearm, in a hurry to get home.

Some young girls have started screaming. Nobody knows what has happened for sure and where Ace is headed people clear out of his way. There’s blood running down his chest, soaking into his jeans, splashing onto the sidewalk. His friends are scared following along after him asking where he’s going, is he going to the hospital, but Ace glares up out of his one good eye like a crazy man, saying, Get the fuck away! Don’t touch me! and nobody wants to come near. 50

On the street the cops stop him and there’s a call put in for an ambulance. Ace stands there dazed and shamed and the cops ask him questions as if he’s to blame for what happened, was he in a fight, where’s he coming from, is that a bullet wound?—all the while a crowd’s gathering, excitement in the air you can feel. It’s an August night, late, eighty-nine degrees and no breeze. The crowd is all strangers, Ace’s friends have disappeared. He’d beg the cops to let him go but his heart is beating so hard he can’t get his breath. Starts swaying like a drunk man, his knees so weak the cops have to steady him. 60 They can smell the panic sweat on him, running in rivulets down his sides.

In the ambulance he’s held in place and a black orderly tells him he’s O.K., he’s going to be O.K., goin’ to be at the hospital in two minutes flat. He talks to Ace the way you’d talk to a small

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Directed by one of America’s most brilliant filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) builds on the intriguing hypothesis of most science fiction: that intelligent life exists in outer space. The plot, which loosely follows Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel,” involves the quest to locate a mysterious four-million-year-old crystal monolith that appears to be emitting powerful radio waves in the direction of the planet Jupiter. Outfitted with a state-of-the-art spaceship called Discovery, which is engineered by a supercomputer named HAL-9000, the fictional heroes of the space odyssey set out for Jupiter. Their adventures include a contest of wills between the astronauts and the ruthless and deviant HAL, breathtaking encounters with the perils of outer space, and a shattering revelation of regeneration and rebirth. Kubrick’s 2001 is the modern counterpart of ancient myth and legend. Like Homer’s Odyssey, the film celebrates the adventures of a hero who, as part of a quest, challenges the unknown by force of wit and imagination. The vast, mysterious realm of outer space is the twentieth-century equivalent of Gilgamesh’s untamed wilderness, Odysseus’ wine-dark sea, and Dante’s Christian cosmos. Just as the ancients looked across the lands beyond the

sea to the earth’s outermost reaches, so for moderns extraterrestrial space constitutes the unprobed celestial fringe of the universe. “On the deepest psychological level,” explained Kubrick, “the film’s plot symbolizes the search for God, and it postulates what is little less than a scientific definition of God.”

More recently, the American movie industry produced a compelling science fiction trilogy in which digital wizardry plays a major role. The Matrix (1999), followed by The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), picture a world dominated by an artificial intelligence that uses human beings as sources of energy. The known world—the matrix—is actually a computer simulation, a virtual reality planted inside each human mind. Drawing elements from Classical mythology, the Bible, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Zen Buddhism, and the choreography of gravity-defying martial arts, the film introduced a unique photographic technique (“flow motion”) that employs more than 100 meticulously coordinated still cameras to create extraordinary special effects. The Matrix, which explores ideas of time and space by way of both content and form, has become the single greatest influence on science fiction film of the twenty-first century.

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child, or an animal. They give him some quick first aid trying to stop the bleeding but Ace can’t control himself can’t hold still, he’s crazy with fear, his heart gives a half-dozen kicks then it’s off and going—like a drum tattoo right in his chest. The ambulance is tearing along the street, siren going, Ace says 70 O God O God O God his terrible heartbeat carrying him away.

He’s never been in a hospital in his life—knows he’s going to die there.

Then he’s being hauled out of the ambulance. Stumbling through automatic-eye doors not knowing where he is. Jaws so tight he could grind his teeth away and he can’t get his breath and he’s ashamed how people are looking at him, right there in the lights in the hallway people staring at his face like they’d never seen anything so terrible. He can’t keep up with the attendants, knees buckling and his heart beating so hard 80 hard but they don’t notice, trying to make him walk faster, Come on man they’re saying, you ain’t hurt that bad, Ace just can’t keep up and he’d fall if they weren’t gripping him under the arms then he’s in the emergency room and lying on a table, filmy white curtains yanked closed around him and there’s a doctor, two nurses, What seems to be the trouble here the doctor asks squinting at Ace through his glasses, takes away the bloody gauze and doesn’t flinch at what he sees. He warns Ace to lie still, he sounds tired and annoyed as if Ace is to blame, how did this happen he asks but doesn’t wait for any 90 answer and Ace lies there stiff and shivering with fear clutching at the underside of the table so hard his nails are digging through the tissue-paper covering into the vinyl, he can’t see out of his left eye, nothing there but pain, pain throbbing and pounding everywhere in his head and the nurses—are there two? three?—look down at him with sympathy he thinks, with pity he thinks, they’re attending to him, touching him, nobody has ever touched him so tenderly in all his life Ace thinks and how shamed he is hauled in here like this flat on his back like this bleeding like a stuck pig and 100 sweating bare-chested and his big gut exposed quivering there in the light for everybody to see—

The doctor puts eight stitches in Ace’s forehead, tells him he’s damned lucky he didn’t lose his eye, the bullet missed it by about two inches and it’s going to be swollen and blackened for a while, next time you might not be so lucky he says but Ace doesn’t catch this, his heart’s going so hard. They wrap gauze around his head tight then hook him up to a machine to monitor his heartbeat, the doctor’s whistling under his breath like he’s surprised, lays the flat of his hand against Ace’s 110 chest to feel the weird loud rocking beat. Ace is broken out in sweat but it’s cold clammy sick sweat, he knows he’s going to die. The machine is going bleep-bleep-bleep high-pitched and fast and how fast can it go before his heart bursts?—he sees the nurses looking down at him, one of the nurses just staring at him, Don’t let me die Ace wants to beg but he’d be too ashamed. The doctor is listening to Ace’s heartbeat with his stethoscope, asks does he have any pain in his chest, has he ever had an attack like this before, Ace whispers no but too soft to be heard, all the blood has drained from his face and 120 his skin is dead-white, mouth gone slack like a fish’s and toes like ice where Death is creeping up his feet: he can feel it.

The heart isn’t Ace’s heart but just something inside him

gone angry and mean pounding like a hammer pounding pounding pounding against his ribs making his body rock so he’s panicked suddenly and wants to get loose, tries to push his way off the table—he isn’t thinking but if he could think he’d say he wanted to leave behind what’s happening to him here as if it was only happening in the emergency room, there on that table. But they don’t let him go. There’s an outcry in the place 130 and two orderlies hold him down and he gives up, all the strength drained out of him and he gives up, there’s no need to strap him down the way they do, he’s finished. They hook him up to the heart monitor again and the terrible high-pitched bleeping starts again and he lies there shamed knowing he’s going to die he’s forgotten about the gunshot, his eye, who did it and was it on purpose meant for him and how can he get revenge, he’s forgotten all that covered in sick clammy sweat his nipples puckered and the kinky hairs on his chest wet, even his belly button showing exposed from the struggle and how silly and 140 sad his tattoos must look under these lights where they were never meant to be seen.

One of the nurses sinks a long needle in his arm, and there’s another needle in the soft thin flesh of the back of his hand, takes him by surprise, they’ve got a tube in there, and something coming in hot and stinging dripping into his vein the doctor’s telling him something he can’t follow, This is to bring the heartbeat down the doctor says, just a tachycardia attack and it isn’t fatal try to relax but Ace knows he’s going to die, he can feel Death creeping up his feet up his legs like stepping 150 out into cold water and suddenly he’s so tired he can’t lift his head, couldn’t get up from the table if they unstrapped him. And he dies—it’s that easy. Like slipping off into the water, pushing out, letting the water take you. It’s that easy.

They’re asking Ace if he saw who shot him and Ace says, Naw, didn’t see nobody. They ask does he have any enemies and he says, Naw, no more than anybody else. They ask can he think of anybody who might have wanted to shoot him and he says, embarrassed, looking down at the floor with his one good eye, Naw, can’t think of nobody right now. So they let him go. 160

Next night Ace is back in the park out of pride but there’s a feeling to him he isn’t real or isn’t the same person he’d been. One eye bandaged shut and everything looks flat, people staring at him like he’s a freak, wanting to know What about the eye and Ace shrugs and tells them he’s O.K., the bullet just got his forehead. Everybody wants to speculate who fired the shot, whose car it was, but Ace stands sullen and quiet thinking his own thoughts. Say he’d been standing just a little to one side the bullet would have got him square in the forehead or plowed right into his eye, killed him dead, it’s something to think about 170 and he tries to keep it in mind so he’ll feel good. But he doesn’t feel good. He doesn’t feel like he’d ever felt before. His secret is something that happened to him in the hospital he can’t remember except to know it happened and it happened to him. And he’s in a mean mood his head half-bandaged like a mummy, weird-looking in the dark, picking up on how people look at him and say things behind his back calling him Ace which goes through him like a razor because it’s a punk name and not really his.

Mostly it’s O.K. He hides how he feels. He’s got a sense of 180

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Q How would you describe the character, Ace? Q What aspects of contemporary American

culture does Oates treat?

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humor. He doesn’t mind them clowning around pretending they hear gunshots and got to duck for cover, nobody’s going to remember it for long, except once Ace stops laughing and backhands this guy in the belly, low below the belt, says in his old jeering voice, What do you know?—you don’t know shit.

In the last half-century the visual arts have been over- whelmingly diverse in styles and techniques. Collectively, they are characterized by an indebtedness to mass media and electronic technology, by an emphasis on process and medium, and by Postmodern parody and irony. High-tech materials—fiberglass, Plexiglas, stainless steel, neon, and polyester resin—have become as commonplace in the art world of the last fifty years as marble, clay, and oil paints were in the past 500. Performance and environmental art reach out of the studio and into daily life. The mixed- media experiments of early Modernism have expanded to include film, video, television, and the computer.

The electronic media have revolutionized the visual arts of our time: computer-manipulated photographs, virtual environments, and mixed-media installations are among the unique projects of the Information Age. The electron- ic synthesis of music, video, dance, and performance opens up new kinds of theatrical experience, some of which invite the participation of the audience. In the Information Age, the image, and especially the moving image, has assumed a position of power over the printed word. In fact, the visual image has come to compete—in value and in authority— with all other forms of cultural expression.

Artists of the Information Age have joined popular musicians and world-class athletes in becoming the super- stars of contemporary society. The art of prominent living painters, sculptors, and performance artists may command fortunes comparable to those of former industrial barons. Critics and gallery owners compete with websites to influ- ence the marketing and commercialization of art, so that (for better or for worse) artists have become celebrities and art has become “big business.”

Pop Art Pop Art, the quintessential style of the Information Age, embraced the imagery of consumerism and celebrity culture as mediated by television, film, and magazines. As a style, it departed dramatically from postwar abstraction, giving new life to the Western representational tradition. Its subject matter, however, while rendered in an overtly realistic style, was filtered through the prism of commercial advertising.

The term “Pop Art” was coined in the 1950s by a group of British artists who began to paste advertisements

clipped from American magazines into their artworks. The movement came to fruition in New York a decade later. In the 1960s, 60 percent of America’s population owned television sets. Commercial products, stage and screen personalities, along with the newsworthy events of the day, came to life via an image-driven medium that—more compelling than any printed vehicle—took its viewers hostage in their own living rooms.

The pioneer American Pop Artist Andy Warhol (1931–1987) dryly explained the meaning of the new style: “Pop Art,” he observed, “is about liking things.” Trained as a commercial artist, Warhol took some of his earliest subject matter from the shelves of the supermarket. While he hand-painted his first Brillo boxes, Campbell’s soup cans, and Coca-Cola bottles on canvas, he soon turned to the photo-silkscreen technique of commercial advertising to reproduce the images mechanically (there- after employing studio assistants to replicate them). Warhol’s media-documented silkscreens of social violence, such as the civil rights riots of the 1960s, share the dead- pan objectivity of his Coca-Cola bottles (see Figure 37.2). Warhol worked to depersonalize a subject by enlarging it or reproducing it in monotonous, postage-stamp rows resembling supermarket displays. Rendered by way of impersonal advertising techniques, his iconic portraits of political figures and celebrities (Figure 37.3) challenged traditional distinctions between fine and applied art, even as they endorsed art as a saleable commodity.

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Figure 37.2 ANDY WARHOL, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 101⁄2 in. � 4 ft. 9 in.

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Jasper Johns (b. 1930), an artist whose career has spanned more than half a century, shared Warhol’s interest in commonplace objects. When Willem de Kooning quipped that Johns’ high-powered art dealer could sell any- thing—even two beer cans—Johns created Painted Bronze (1960), a set of bronze-cast, hand-painted cans of ale (Figure 37.4). Johns’ beer cans, like his early paintings of flags and targets, are Neodada tributes to Marcel Duchamp (see Figure 33.6), whom Johns knew personally. Some critics see them as Postmodern parodies of the cherished icons of contemporary culture. But they are also mock- heroic commentaries on the fact that art, like beer, is a marketable commodity.

Among the most witty vehicles of pop parody are the monumental soft vinyl sculptures of Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929)—gigantic versions of such everyday items as clothespins, hot dogs, table fans, typewriter erasers, and toilets. Often enlarged ten to twenty times their natural size, these objects assume a comic vulgarity that forces us to reconsider their presence in our daily lives (Figure 37.5).

The oversized paintings of Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), modeled on comic-book cartoons, bring attention to familiar clichés and stereotypes of popular entertainment. Violence and romance are trivialized in the fictional lives of Lichtenstein’s superheroes and helpless women (Figure 37.6). Like other Pop Artists, Lichtenstein employed commercial techniques, including stencil and airbrush; he imitated the Benday dots used in advertising design to achieve tonal gradation. The resulting canvases, with their slickly finished surfaces and flat, bold shapes, are burlesque versions of mass-media advertisements. Ironically, the commercial world has now “reclaimed” Pop Art: just as Warhol and Lichtenstein appropriated the

Figure 37.3 ANDY WARHOL, Mint Marilyn Monroe, 1962. Oil and silkscreen enamel on canvas, 201⁄2 � 161⁄2 in. Marilyn Monroe, a glamorous blonde film star of the 1950s, died in what was thought to be a drug overdose in 1962. A talent- ed comic actor, she became an iconic figure in American entertainment history.

Andy Warhol pioneered some of the most novel experiments in Postmodern film. Between 1963 and 1968 he produced sixty experimental films. He focused a fixed camera on a single object and let it “roll” until the film ran out—thus bringing to film the (uniquely cinematic) “dead time” between “events,” as John Cage had brought to music the “silence” between moments of sound. In Outer and Inner Space (1965), Warhol experimented with double-screen formats to present multiple versions of his female “star” watching images of herself on televised videotape. Warhol also exploited the “long take”: in the homoerotic film My Hustler (1967) a single thirty-minute shot documents the interaction between two gay men who groom themselves before the bathroom sink.

Figure 37.4 JASPER JOHNS, Painted Bronze (Beer Cans), 1960. Painted bronze, 51⁄2 � 8 � 41⁄4 in.

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images of popular culture, so com- mercial advertising and fashion design freely “quote” from the works of these two artists.

Assemblage Art that combines two- and three- dimensional elements has a history that reaches back to the early twenti- eth century—recall Picasso’s collages and Duchamp’s modified ready- mades. Since the middle of that cen- tury, however, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) monumentalized the art of assemblage in works that incorporate what he wryly referred to as “the excess of the world.” Boldly assembling old car tires, street signs, broken furniture, and other debris, he produced art- works he called “combines.” These creations attack the boundary between painting and sculpture. They work, as did the artist himself, “in the gap between art and life.”

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Figure 37.5 CLAES OLDENBURG, Clothespin, Central Square, Philadelphia, 1976. Cor-ten (steel) and stainless steel, 45 ft. � 12 ft. 3 in. � 4ft. 6in.

Traditional film usually obeys a narrative sequence or presents a story; experimental film, however, like Léger’s Ballet méchanique (see chapter 34) and Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space, explores the artistic potential of the medium itself. Narrative-free films, often called “art films,” depend exclusively on the associational nuances evoked by sequences of imaginatively juxtaposed images. Like Rauschenberg’s silkscreen collages, the experimental films of Bruce Conner (1930–2008) consist of footage assembled from old newsreels, pornographic movies, and Hollywood films. They may achieve additional effect by being “choreographed” to a specific musical score, such as with Conner’s first film, The Movie (1958). As with music, Conner’s films defy explicit meaning; the power to arouse emotions lies with an ingenious cinematic union of image and sound.

Ushering in the new millennium is Cremaster 3 (2002), the final segment in a five-part, ten-hour-long film cycle conceived by Matthew Barney (b. 1967). A ritualistic, non- narrative behemoth that interweaves many disparate subjects, from the construction of the Chrysler Building to the differentiation of male and female sexuality, this complex work makes its impact by way of lush, disquieting, and (often) erotic images. The film is best compared to a fevered dream: powerful, perverse, haunting—and ultimately, inscrutable.

Figure 37.6 ROY LICHTENSTEIN, Torpedo . . . Los!, 1963. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 8 in.� 6 ft. 8 in.

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Rauschenberg was an extraordinary printmaker. For more than fifty years, he experimented with a wide variety of transfer techniques, lithograph, and silkscreen, to pro- duce large-scale prints whose images are drawn from con- temporary magazines and newspapers (see Figure 37.1). His disparate bits and pieces of cultural debris appear thrown together, as if all were equally valuable (or equally useless). But this bewildering array of visual information is assem- bled with an impeccable sensitivity to color, shape, and form. Rauschenberg’s sly juxtaposition of familiar “found” images—like the visual scramble of Postmodern channel- grazing—invites viewers to create their own narratives.

Numerous artists have used assemblage to bring atten- tion to the random and violent aspects of contemporary society. John Chamberlain (b.1927) has created seductive sculptures out of junked automobiles, whose corroded sheet-metal bodies and twisted steel bumpers suggest the transience of high-tech products and the dangers inherent in their misuse (Figure 37.7). Louise Nevelson (1900– 1988) collected wooden boxes, filled them with discarded fragments of found and machine-made objects, and paint- ed them a uniform black, white, or gold. Like decaying altarpieces, these huge structures enshrine the vaguely familiar and haunting refuse of modern materialist culture (Figure 37.8).

Geometric Abstraction Not all contemporary artists have embraced the ironic stance of pop and assemblage art. Some remained loyal to the nonobjective style of geometric abstraction, first initiated

Figure 37.7 JOHN CHAMBERLAIN, Debonaire Apache, 1991. Painted and chromium plated steel, 7 ft. 10 in. � 4 ft. 63⁄4 in. � 4 ft. 21⁄2 in.

Figure 37.8 LOUISE NEVELSON, Royal Tide IV 1960. Wood, with gold spray technique, 86 � 40 � 8 in. Nevelson, who came to the United States from Kiev, Ukraine, at the age of six, did not receive significant critical attention until she was sixty-eight years old.

She selected wood as her creative medium to avoid, as she explained,

the distraction of color.

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in painting by Malevich and Mondrian (see chapter 32). Obedient to the credo of the Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe that “less is more,” these artists have pursued the machinelike purity of elemental forms, occasionally enlarging such forms to colossal sizes.

Early in his career, the American artist Frank Stella (b. 1936) painted huge canvases consisting of brightly colored, hard-edged geometric patterns that look as though they are made with a giant protractor (Figure 37.9). The canvases in the “Protractor” series, which are named individually after the ancient circular cities of Asia Minor, depart from the stan- dard square and rectangular format. Shaped like chevrons, circles, or triangles, they are fastened together to create unique geometric configurations. Stella’s more recent artworks are flamboyant steel and aluminum pieces that capture in three dimensions the intensi- ty of a Jackson Pollock painting. Nevertheless, the artist continues to reject value-oriented art in favor of a style that is neutral and impersonal. “All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole thing without confusion,” explains Stella: “What you see is what you see.”

Op Art The idea that what one sees is determined by how one sees has been central to the work of Hungarian-born Victor Vasarely (1908–1997) and Britain’s Bridget Riley

(b. 1931). Both Vasarely and Riley explore the operation of conflicting visual cues and the elemental effects of colors and shapes on the faculties of the human retina—a style known as Optical Art, or Op Art. In Riley’s Current (Figure 37.10), a series of curved black lines painted on a white surface creates the illusion of vibrating movement and elusive color—look for yellow by staring at the painting for a few minutes.

Figure 37.9 FRANK STELLA, Tahkt-i-Sulayman I, from the “Protractor” series, 1967. Polymer and fluorescent paint on canvas, 10 ft. 1⁄4 in. � 20 ft. 21⁄4 in.

Figure 37.10 BRIDGET RILEY, Current, 1964. Synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 4 ft. 103⁄8 in. � 4 ft. 107⁄8 in.

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Minimal Art While Europeans pioneered optical abstraction, Americans led the way in the development of Minimalism. Minimalist sculptors developed a refined industrial aesthetic that fea- tured elemental forms made of high-tech materials. The geometric components of Minimalist artworks are usually factory-produced and assembled according to the artist’s instructions.

The untitled stainless steel and Plexiglas boxes of Donald Judd (1928–1994) protrude from the wall with mathematical clarity and perfect regularity (Figure 37.11). They resemble a stack of shelves, yet they neither contain nor support anything. The visual rhythms of Judd’s serial

forms create a dialogue between space and volume, between flat, bright enamel colors and dull or reflective metal grays, and between subtly textured and smooth surfaces.

More monumental in scale are the primal forms of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988). Poised on one corner of its steel and aluminum frame, Noguchi’s gigantic Cube (Figure 37.12) shares the purity of form and the mysterious resonance of the Egyptian pyramids and the crystal monolith in the film 2001.

New Realism During the 1970s, there emerged a new approach to figur- al realism that emphasized the stop-action stillness and sharp-focus immediacy of the photograph. New Realism (also called Neorealism, Hyperrealism, and Photorealism) differs from previous realist styles (including Social Realism and Pop Art) in its disavowal of narrative content and its indifference to moral, social, and political issues. Although decidedly representational, it is as impersonal as Minimal art.

Most New Realists do not seek to imitate natural phe- nomena; rather, they recreate an artificially processed view

Figure 37.11 DONALD JUDD, Untitled, 1967. Green lacquer on galvanized iron, each unit 9 in. � 3 ft. 4 in. � 31 in. The space between the elements in this series takes on visual significance. As Judd explained, “Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”

Figure 37.12 ISAMU NOGUCHI, Cube, 1968. Steel subframe with aluminum panels, height 28 ft. Minimal sculptures play an important role as public artworks. This monumental piece playfully relieves the monotonous uniformity of high- rise office buildings in Manhattan’s financial district.

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of reality captured by the photographic image. Richard Estes (b. 1936), for instance, paints urban still lifes based on fragments of the photographs that he himself makes (Figure 37.13). A virtuoso painter, Estes tanta- lizes the eye with details refracted by polished alu- minum surfaces and plate-glass windows.

Chuck Close (b. 1940) transfers a photographic image to canvas after both photograph and canvas have been ruled to resemble graph paper; each square of the photo is numbered to correspond to an equiva- lent square on the canvas. He then fills each square with tiny gradations of color that resemble the pixels of a television screen (Figure 37.14). While his early monochromatic works resemble impersonal “mug shots,” his more recent portraits have the familiar look of televised “talking heads.” They make use of new techniques involving multiple dots of color within each square.

High-tech materials and techniques have made possible the fabrication of New Realist sculptures that are shockingly lifelike. Duane Hanson (1925–1996) used fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin to recreate the appearance of ordinary and often working-class indi- viduals in their everyday occupations (Figure 37.15). He cast his polyester figures from live models, then added wigs, clothing, and accessories. Hanson’s “living dead” are symbolic of modern life at its most prosaic.

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Figure 37.13 (above) RICHARD ESTES, Double Self Portrait, 1976. Oil on canvas, 24 � 36 ft. Ostensibly a view of an urban restaurant, the plate glass façade takes in reflections of the buildings across the street, the sidewalk trees, and Estes himself (along with his photographic equipment).

Figure 37.14 (below) CHUCK CLOSE, Self-Portrait, 1991. Oil on canvas, 100 � 84 in. After suffering a spinal blood clot in 1988, the partially paralyzed artist experimented with applying bits of colored paper and fingerprints to create the individual dots on the canvas.

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Social Conscience Art All art may be said to offer some perspective on the social scene; however, during the late twentieth century, many artists self-consciously assumed an activist, even missionary stance. Not overtly political nor even necessarily critical of the status quo, social conscience art seeks to transform

Figure 37.15 DUANE HANSON, Tourists, 1970. Fiberglass and polyester polychromed, 5 ft. 4 in. � 5 ft. 5 in. � 3 ft. 11 in.

society by awakening its visionary potential. Such art works holistically to reclaim the spiritual authority that art once held in ancient societies. Issue-driven art, like social conscience literature, draws attention to ecological ruin and widespread drug use, to the threat of nuclear terrorism and the plight of marginalized populations, to decay in the quality of urban life and the erosion of moral values.

One of America’s most outspoken social critics, Leon Golub (1922–2004), used figurative imagery based on Classical models to bring attention to state-sponsored aggression and political repression. Opposing both the Postmodern technology of war and the American presence in Vietnam, he painted large-sized canvases showing mer- cenary soldiers conducting acts of physical torture and gang violence (Figure 37.16). Some of the assailants in these paintings stare blatantly at the viewer as they intim- idate or mutilate their victims. Golub’s oversized figures, whose national affiliations are left unidentified, appear against the indeterminate (usually red) background of his canvases, which he scraped and abraded to resemble ancient frescoes. Regarded during his lifetime as an “exis- tential activist,” Golub left visual statements that seem as relevant to former decades as to our own.

The Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. 1930) draws on untraditional methods of modeling to cast hulk- ing, life-sized figures that stage the drama of the human condition (Figure 37.17). Sisal, jute, and resin-stiffened burlap make up the substance of these humanoids, whose scarred and patched surfaces call to mind earth, mud, and the dusty origins of primordial creatures. Abakanowicz installs her headless, sexless forms in groups that evoke a sense of collective anonymity and vulnerability. She brings to these works her experience as a survivor of World War II (and Poland’s repressive communist regime).

Total Art The Information Age has generated creative strategies that reach beyond the studio and the art gallery and into the pub-

lic domain. With total art, process (and conception) is generally more impor- tant than product—the work of art itself. Total art is a kind of communal rit- ual that involves planned (though usually not rehearsed) performance. The beginnings of total art are found in the aleatory enterprises of John Cage (see chapter 35) and in the wild exper- iments of the postwar Japanese Gutai Group (see chapter 35), whose artists/performers engaged their materials by pound- ing the canvas with

Figure 37.16 LEON GOLUB, Interrogation II, 1981. Acrylic on canvas, 10 ft. � 14 ft. Some of the imagery in Golub’s two series, “Mercenaries” and “Interrogation,” was based on newspaper photographs documenting specific incidents of political suppression, intimidation, and torture.

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paint-filled boxing gloves or hurling themselves against wet canvases. In one of the earliest examples of performance art, a work entitled Anthropometry, France’s Yves Klein (1928–1962) employed nude women as “human brushes” (Figure 37.18). Klein’s contemporary Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) made a distinctive comment on twentieth-cen- tury technology with a series of machines he programmed to self-destruct amid a public spectacle of noise, fire, and smoke.

A classic kind of total art, the Happening, was pioneered by the American artist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006). Kaprow, who coined the name for this conceptual genre, called the Happening “a performance that occurs in a given time and space.” Played out on a city street, a beach, or in a private home, the Happening involved a structured series of actions and scripted gestures. While conceived and directed by the artist, it welcomed chance and random elements. During the 1960s, Kaprow wrote and orchestrat- ed more than fifty Happenings, most of which engaged dozens of ordinary people in the dual roles of spectator and performer. Fluids (1967), a Happening staged in Pasadena, California, called for participants to construct a house of ice blocks and then witness the melting process that fol- lowed. Like a ritual or theater piece, the performance was itself the artwork. The only record of its occurrence might be a photograph or videotape.

Obviously, performance art has limited value as a saleable commodity; yet, it has continued to attract artists

The late twentieth century was a golden age of cinematic creativity, an era in which the film medium (in alliance with television) reached a new level of social influence, its impact so great as to shape public opinion. The innovative films of the directors/artists who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s re- established the Hollywood film industry, which had faltered financially prior to the mid 1960s. The new directors, products of film schools rather than the Hollywood studio system, contributed to a reassessment of America’s “master narratives” and dominant fictions: Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), for example, exposed the myth of the Native American as “savage.” Robert Altman, one of America’s finest director/artists, launched a biting satire on the Korean War (and war in general) with the film M*A*S*H* (1970). The image of the passive, male-dependent female was transformed in the film Thelma and Louise (1991), directed by Ridley Scott, and the plight of transgendered individuals was explored in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Filmmakers of the late twentieth century worked to develop signature styles, using cinematic and editing techniques (as sculptors use their media) to create effect and audience response. So, for instance, Altman favored the telephoto zoom lens to probe the faces of his (usually) socially troubled characters; fractured sounds and bits of dialogue overlap or intrude from off-camera. To achieve lifelike spontaneity, Altman often invited his actors to improvise as he filmed. In Nashville (1974), he traded the single cinematic

protagonist for some two dozen characters involved in a presidential election. Postmodern in style, Altman’s films are vast kaleidoscopic scenarios, the products of judiciously assembled fragments. Issue-driven subjects were common fare in the history of late modern American film. But they have rarely been treated as powerfully as in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), a story of the Holocaust adapted from Thomas Keneally’s prize-winning 1982 novel. A virtuoso filmmaker, Spielberg made brilliant use of the techniques of documentary newscasting to create visually shattering effects.

Social conscience film is by no means confined to the United States. In Salaam Bombay! (1988), filmed in the brothel district of Bombay, one of India’s leading filmmakers, Mira Nair, exposed the sordid lives of that country’s illiterate street urchins. China’s internationally celebrated filmmaker and cinematographer Zhang Yimou (b. 1951) lived among the peasants of Shaanxi Province prior to making films about China’s disenfranchised rural population (The Story of Qiu Ju, 1992) and in particular its courageous women, many of whom remain hostage to feudal and patriarchal traditions (Raise the Red Lantern, 1991). An admirer of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa (see chapter 35), Zhang rejected the socialist realism of the communist era in favor of purity of vision and fierce honesty. His films, at least three of which have been banned in China, are noted for their sensuous use of color and their troubling insights into moral and cultural issues.

Figure 37.17 MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ, Crowd 1 (detail), 1986–1987. Burlap and resin, 50 standing life-sized figures, each 5 ft. 67⁄8 in. � 235⁄8 in. � 113⁄4 in. In their denial of individuality and of human difference, these headless and sexless figures have been interpreted as a subtle criticism of Soviet ideology, that is, of communist collectivity; at the same time, they call to mind Ellul’s “mass man.”

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and participants. It has influenced the ways in which the Information Age processes many of its communal events: political demonstrations, rock concerts, and “raves” are “staged” like the rituals of total art.

A somewhat more permanent type of total art involves the remaking or transformation of a specific space. Room- sized installations, popular since the 1970s, invite the viewer into the work of art itself. One such piece, a “walk- in infinity chamber” consisted of mirrors studded with hundreds of miniature lights. Another was filled with men- acing, fur-covered furniture, and yet another retooled the interior of an Airstream trailer with thousands of sparkling black and white beads. To such installations might be added recorded sound and even preconfigured odors.

The most ambitious of all total art genres is the Earthwork, a kind of installation that takes the natural landscape as both its medium and its subject. Also known as Environmental (or site-specific) art, earthworks are usual- ly colossal, heroic, and temporary. Some, like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (see Figure 38.4), have ecological implications; others, however, are aesthetic transformations of large physical spaces or their landmarks.

The site-specific projects of the American husband- and-wife team Christo and Jeanne-Claude (both b. 1935), represent some of the most inventive examples of total art. The two artists have magically transformed rural and urban sites by embellishing or enveloping them with huge amounts of fabric. They have wrapped monumental public structures, such as the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin, and they have reshaped nature, wrap- ping part of the coast of Australia, for instance, and sur- rounding eleven islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay with over six million square feet of pink woven polypropylene fabric. In 2005, they lined the 23-mile-long footpath of Manhattan’s Central Park with 7500 saffron-colored fabric flags—a 16-day-long spectacle called “The Gates.”

One of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s earliest projects, Running Fence (Figure 37.19), involved the construction of a nylon “fence” 241⁄2 miles long and 18 feet high. The nylon panels were hung on cables and steel poles and ran through Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, to the Pacific Ocean. The fence itself, meandering along the California hills like a modern-day version of the Great Wall of China, remained on site for only two weeks. Unlike Smithson, these artists do not seek to remake the natural landscape; rather they modify it temporarily in order to dramatize the difference between the natural world and the increasingly artificial domain of Postmodern society.

Figure 37.19 CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin counties, California, 1972–1976. Nylon panels on cables and steel poles, height 18 ft., length 241⁄2 miles. The installation of the “fence” mobilized the efforts of a large crew of workers and cost the artists over three million dollars. The fascinating history of this landmark piece is documented in films, photographs, and books.

Figure 37.18 YVES KLEIN, Anthropometry ANT49, 1960.

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Total art is generally conceptual, since it is driven by ideas rather than by purely visual or formal concerns. Perhaps the purest kind of conceptual art, then, is that which consists only of words. Since the 1960s, a variety of artists have created artworks that feature definitions, directions, or messages. Barbara Kruger’s billboard-style posters (see Figure 36.15) combine photographic images and words that make cryptic comment on social and political issues.

The superstar of conceptual art is the American sculp- tor Jenny Holzer (b. 1950). Holzer carves paradoxical and often subversive messages in stone or broadcasts them elec- tronically on public billboards. She often transmits her slogans by way of light-emitting diodes, a favorite medium of commercial advertising. In language that is at once banal and acerbic, Holzer informs us that “Lack of charisma can be fatal,” “Myths make reality more intelligi- ble,” “Humanism is obsolete,” “Decency is a relative thing,” and “Ambivalence can ruin your life.” Holzer’s word-art tests the authority of public information, particu- larly as it is dispersed by contemporary digital media. Holzer’s most recent work expands on the project Truth Before Power (2004), which displays large, silkscreened, declassified U. S. government documents, segments of which are obliterated by the censors’ pen. By way of these cryptic images—official memos, records of interrogation, and accounts by military personnel that reflect recent U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East—the artist addresses issues of secrecy, censorship, and the manipulation of infor- mation associated with the politics of war.

Art as Spectacle The most recent trends in the art of the Information Age involve size and spectacle, that is, public performance or theatrical display. Such art, often technically complex, may be conceived by artists but fabricated by studio assistants or professional contractors. In the tradition of Duchamp’s uri- nal (see Figure 33.6), the originality of much of today’s art lies with the artist’s idea, rather than with the physical cre- ation of the artwork. The realization of the idea has become inseparable from art-world marketing and commercial

display. When the bad boy of British art, Damien Hirst (b. 1965), exhibited his first dead animals (a shark, a sheep, and a cow) immersed in huge containers of formaldehyde, along with severed animal limbs and live maggots, the pub- lic found his work shocking (while collectors paid in the millions for each piece).

Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), which consists of a shark preserved in a glass vitrine filled with formaldehyde, is one of a num- ber of the artist’s large-scale ruminations on death and decay (Figure 37.20). This dangerous creature—familiar to us by way of the modern aquarium, as well as via televi- sion and film—is here hauntingly stilled, as remote and yet as palpable as the idea of death.

Public art, that is, art commissioned for outdoor sites, often assumes the nature of spectacle. One popular example of such is Puppy (1992), a 43-foot-high image of a West Highland Terrier conceived by the American artist- impresario Jeff Koons (b. 1955) as a topiary covered with colorful live flowers.

Some contemporary critics link the birth of Postmodernism to the architecture of the 1960s and, specifically, to the demise of the International Style. The American Robert Venturi (b. 1925), who first introduced architectural Postmodernism in his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), countered Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” with the claim “less is a bore.” Venturi rejected the anonymity and austerity of the glass and steel skyscraper (see Figure 35.14) and the con- crete high rise (see Figure 32.26), along with the progres- sive utopianism of Modernists who hoped to transform society through functional form. Instead, he opted for an

Figure 37.20 DAMIEN HIRST, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution. Hirst, who considers himself a conceptual artist, commissioned the fisherman who caught the shark to find a specimen “big enough to eat you.” The original shark was poorly preserved and had to be replaced in 2006.

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architecture that emphasized visual complexity, individu- ality, and outright fun.

In contrast to the machinelike purity of the International Style structure, the Postmodern building is a playful assortment of fragments “quoted” from architectur- al traditions as ill-mated as a fast-food stand and a Hellenistic temple. Postmodern architecture, like Postmodern fiction, engages a colorful mix of fragments in a whimsical and often witty manner. It shares with Deconstructivist literary theorists the will to dismantle and reassemble “the text” in a search for its multiple meanings.

Just as there is (according to Deconstructivism) no single text for the whole of our experience, so there is no unifying pattern or defining style in the design of any single piece of architecture.

One example of this Postmodern aesthetic is the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, designed by Charles Moore (1925–1993). The plaza, which serves as an Italian cultural center, is a burlesque yet elegant combination of motifs borrowed from Pompeii, Palladio, and Italian Baroque architec- ture (Figure 37.21). Its brightly colored colonnad- ed portico—looking every bit like a gaudy stage set—is adorned with fountains, neon lights, and polished aluminum balustrades. Moore’s parodic grab-bag appropriation of the Italian heritage cul- minates in an apron shaped like a map of Italy that floats in the central pool of the piazza.

The Chinese-born American I. M. Pei (b. 1913) wedded Postmodern design to Minimalist principles in his inventive design for the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in Paris (Figure 37.22). Three small steel and Plexiglas pyramids surround a cen- tral pyramid that covers the formal museum entrance. The large pyramid, which rises to a height of 70 feet, consists of 673 glass segments. Striking in

its geometric simplicity, it looks back to Paxton’s modular Crystal Palace (see Figure 30.26), to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome (see Figure 35.18), and to the steel-and- glass Minimalism of the International Style (Figure 32.25). The courtyard itself is a Postmodern triumph: it sets a twentieth-century version of the Great Pyramid at Giza amidst the wings of seventeenth-century Classical Baroque buildings. Futuristic in spirit, Pei’s pyramid com- plex has become a kind of space station for the arts.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, many of the world’s largest cities have been enjoying a “building boom.” A great era of museum construction and expansion appears to be in process. Museums have become sacred spaces, visited by millions not only to see great art, but to

Figure 37.22 I. M. PEI & ASSOCIATES, Louvre Pyramid, Paris, 1988. The angle of the slope of the pyramid that marks the Louvre entrance is almost identical with that of ancient Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza.

Figure 37.21 PEREZ ASSOCIATES WITH CHARLES MOORE, RON FILSON, URBAN INNOVATIONS, INC., Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, 1976–1979.

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enjoy an experience unlike that of other leisure activi- ties. Some of the new art venues compete in their futuristic impact with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (see Figures 35.16 and 35.17). The expanded Milwaukee Museum of Art, designed by the Spanish- born Santiago Calatrava (b. 1951), is a case in point. Dominating the shore of Lake Michigan like the skeleton of a large bleach- boned dinosaur, its signature element is a 90-foot-high glass-enclosed reception hall covered by a movable wing- like sun screen (brise-soleil) made of 72 steel fins that con- trol the temperature and light of the interior (Figure 37.23). A 250-foot-long suspension bridge with angled cables links downtown Milwaukee to the lakefront and the museum. Calatrava, who has designed some extraordinary hotels and bridges throughout the world, brings a new bravura to steel-and-glass building construction.

The architectural giant of our time, Frank Gehry (b. 1930), was born in Toronto, Canada, but lives and works in California. His early buildings reflect an interest in humble construction materials, such as plywood, corru- gated zinc, stainless steel, and chainlink fencing, which he assembled in serial units. Gehry’s structures, in which façades tilt, columns lean, and interior spaces are skewed, reflect his deliberate rejection of the Classical design prin- ciples of symmetry and stability. More recently, in monu- mental projects that combine steel, titanium, glass, and limestone, he has developed a vocabulary of undulating forms and irregular shapes inspired by everyday objects: a fish, a guitar, a bouquet of flowers. Gehry’s latest master- piece is the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California (see Figure 37.24). The 2265-seat hall engages glass curtain-walls and a majestic multileveled lobby; but it is in the breathtaking design of the exterior, with its bil- lowing, light-reflecting stainless steel plates, that the build- ing achieves its singular magnificence. His concert hall, like his highly acclaimed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997), combines the spontaneous vitality of action painting with the heroic stability of Minimalist sculpture.

Gehry’s creative process is intuitive: he designs “in his head,” develops the contours on paper and in models, and then makes use of five aerospace engineers and a sophisti- cated computer to direct the cutting of the actual building parts. In contrast to Gehry, younger architects are design- ing directly on computers, their virtual structures animat- ed by curved, morphed forms. “Digital architecture” is still in its infancy, but it is likely that the buildings of the future will reflect the seductive morphing that Gehry has already anticipated in his sculptural designs.

As with the visual arts and architecture, music since 1960 has been boldly experimental, stylistically diverse, and (with the exception of popular music) largely impersonal. Some late twentieth-century composers pursued the ran- dom style of John Cage, while others moved in the oppo- site direction, writing highly structured music that extends Schoenberg’s serial techniques to pitch, counterpoint, and other aspects of composition.Two further developments are notable: First, in a discipline dominated for centuries by men, women composers and conductors have become increasingly visible—witness the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1938), and Sarah Caldwell (1924–2006), the Metropolitan Opera’s first female conductor.

Second, electronic technology has affected all aspects of music, from composition and performance to distribution. Just as the electronic processes and media democratized the creation and distribution of images, so they have trans- formed the creation and reception of sound. The cheap and ready availability of digitally produced and reproduced music has worked to virtually eliminate the patronage sys- tem. It has also outmoded the avenues of commercial dis- tribution that governed the music world of former decades.

Electronic Music In addition to its practical and commercial functions, elec- tronic technology was responsible for the birth of entirely new types of sound. The history of electronic music began in the late 1950s, when John Cage and other avant-garde composers first employed magnetic tape to record and manipulate sound. By splicing and reversing the taped sounds of various kinds of environmental noise—thunder,

Figure 37.23 SANTIAGO CALATRAVA, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Minnesota, 2003. Calatrava stated that in designing the museum, he “worked to infuse the building with a certain sensitivity to the culture of the lake—the boats, the sails, and the always changing landscape.”

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As architecture has become more sculptural, so sculpture has become more architectural. The Postminimalist works of the American sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1939) share Gehry’s (Figure 37.24) affection for organic design and geometric regularity (Figure 37.25). “There’s an inter- connection between the curvilinearity of Frank’s building[s] and the obvious torquing of my pieces,” says Serra. His monumental steel-rusted ellipses, which often measure more than 13 feet tall and 50 feet long (and can weigh well over 100 tons), reflect the direction in public art that invites the viewer to be a participant rather than simply an observer. Serra expects the spectator to walk through and around the piece in time, that is, to become part of the piece itself.

Figure 37.25 RICHARD SERRA (from front to back), Torqued Ellipse I, 1996; Double Torqued Ellipse, 1998–1999; Double Torqued Ellipse II; Snake, 1996. These torqued sculptures were inspired by Serra’s visit to Borromini’s Church of San Carlo in Rome (see Figures 20.19 and 20.20), whose elliptical spaces intrigued the artist.

Figure 37.24 FRANK GEHRY, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California, 2003.

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that, like the jump-cuts of Postmodern film, capture the fragmentation and tumultuousness of Postmodern life.

While musical instruments can be manipulated by com- puters, computers themselves have become “musical instruments.” Equipped with a miniature keyboard, faders, and foot pedals, the digital computer is not only capable of producing a full range of sounds but is also able to produce and reproduce sounds more subtle and complex than any emitted by human voices or traditional musical instru- ments. For better or for worse, sound generators have now begun to replace musicians in the studio and in staged musical performances.

Two further developments may be mentioned. The hyperinstrument projects of Tod Machover (b. 1953) involve the use of electronically enhanced instruments, as well as “homemade” interactive instruments, that offer both musicians and nonmusicians a new range of perform- ance possibilities. A second direction features the use of the computer itself to compose original music. The American composer Barton McLean (b. 1938), for instance, uses a Lightpen to draw the contours of sound waves on the video screen of a sophisticated computer that “emits” the composition.

Microtonality and Minimal Music The Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923–2006) took an interest in electronic music after meeting Stockhausen and other avant-garde composers in Cologne. While inspired by its unique sounds, he composed few electronic pieces. Nevertheless, in his instrumental works, he recreat- ed some of its unique aural effects. To achieve the textures of electronic music, he made use of microtonality (the use of musical intervals smaller than the semitones of tradition- al European and American music, but common to the music of India and the Near East). Almost completely lack- ing melody and harmony, Ligeti’s technique, which he called “micropolyphony,” produced dense clusters of sound: subtle, shimmering currents that murmur in a continuous, hypnotic flow. His instrumental Atmospheres (1961), and his choral work Lux Eterna (1966), both of which appear on the soundtrack of the film 2001, achieved a new sonority that, as the composer explained, “is so dense that the indi- vidual interwoven instrumental voices are absorbed into the general texture and completely lose their individuality.”

Ligeti’s subtly shifting patterns of sound would become a hallmark of the musical style known as Minimalism. Minimal music, like Minimal art, reduces the vocabulary of expression to elemental or primary components that are repeated with only slight variations. In the “stripped down” compositions of Minimal music, tonality and melody are usually simple, while rhythms and textures, built through minute repetition, are dense and complex.

The most notable of Minimalist composers, Philip Glass (b. 1937) received his early training in the funda- mentals of Western musical composition. In the 1970s, however, after touring Asia and studying with the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar (b. 1920), Glass began writing music that embraced the rhythmic structures of Indian

bird calls, train whistles, and ticking clocks— they intro- duced a musical genre known as musique concrète. This type of music made use of electronic equipment to record and/or modify pre-existing sounds, either natural, instru- mental, or mechanically contrived.

The second kind of electronic music involves the use of special equipment to generate sound itself. “Pure” elec- tronic music differs from musique concrète in its reliance on oscillators, wave generators, and other electronic devices. The pioneer in this type of music was the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007). As musical director of the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Germany, Stockhausen employed electronic devices both by themselves and to manipulate and com- bine pretaped sounds, including music generated by tradi- tional instruments and voices. His compositions—atonal patterns of sounds and silence that lack any controlling frame of reference—renounce all conventional rules of rhythm and harmony. Editing taped sounds as a filmmak- er edits footage, Stockhausen dispensed with a written score and composed directly on tape, thus assuming simultaneously the roles of composer and performer. Like a Kaprow “happening” or a jazz improvisation, a Stockhausen composition is an artform in which process becomes identical with product.

The most revolutionary musical invention of the late 1960s was the computerized synthesizer, an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating and combining signals of different frequencies. This artificial sound generator serves for both the production and manipulation of sound. Stockhausen’s American contem- porary Milton Babbitt (b. 1916) was the first composer to use the RCA Synthesizer to control the texture, timbre, and intensity of electronic sound. While traditional instruments produce only seventy to eighty pitches and a limited range of dynamic intensities, electronic devices like the synthesizer offer a range of frequencies from fifty to 15,000 cycles per second. This capacity provides the potential for almost unlimited variability of pitch. Further, electronic instruments can execute rhythms at speeds and in complex patterns that are beyond the capability of live performers. Because such features defy traditional nota- tion, electronic music is often graphed in acoustical dia- grams that serve as “scores.”

Since the 1970s, portable digital synthesizers have been attached to individual instruments. These allow musicians to manipulate the pitch, duration, and dynamics of sound even as the music is being performed. The synthesizer has facilitated the typically Postmodern technique known as sampling. A sample is a short, “borrowed” segment of recorded sound, which may be stored digitally, manipulat- ed at will (stretched out, played backwards, and so on), then reintroduced into another musical phrase or compo- sition. As one critic points out, what one does with sounds has become more important than what the sounds are. Electronic sampling has generated sounds and strategies

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ragas, progressive jazz, and rock and roll. The musical drama Einstein on the Beach (1976), which Glass produced in collaboration with the designer/director Robert Wilson (b. 1941), was the first opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City to feature electronically amplified instruments.

Like traditional opera, Einstein on the Beach combines instrumental and vocal music, as well as recitation, mime, and dance. But it departs radically from operatic tradition in its lack of a narrative story line and character develop- ment, as well as in its instrumentation. The opera, which is performed with no intermissions over a period of four and a half hours, is not the story of Albert Einstein’s life or work; rather, it is an extended poetic statement honoring the twentieth century’s greatest scientist. The score con- sists of simple melodic lines that are layered and repeated in seemingly endless permutations. Mesmerizing and seductive, Glass’ music recalls the texture of Gregorian chant, the sequenced repetitions of electronic tape loops, and the subtle rhythms of the Indian raga. Harmonic changes occur so slowly that one must, as Glass explains, learn to listen at “a different speed,” a feat that closely resembles an act of meditation.

Historical themes have continued to inspire much of the music of Glass. In 1980, he composed the opera Satyagraha, which celebrates the achievements of India’s pacifist hero Mohandas Gandhi (see chapter 36). Sung in Sanskrit and English, the opera uses a text drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred book of the Hindu religion. For the quincentennial commemoration of the Columbian voyage to the Americas, the composer wrote an imagina- tive modern-day analogue (The Voyage, 1992) that links the idea of great exploration to the theme of inter- planetary travel. Glass’ most recent opera Appomattox (2007) deals with the role of racism in America.

Postmodern Opera In the late twentieth century, opera found inspiration in current events such as international hijacking (John Adams’ Death of Klinghofer), black nationalism (Anthony Davis’ X), gay rights (Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk), and the cult of celebrity—witness Ezra Laderman’s Marilyn (Monroe), John Adams’ Nixon, and Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s Frida (Kahlo). Other composers turned to the classics of literature and art as subject matter for full-length operas: Carlyle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men (1970) is based on John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name; William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge (1999) is an adap- tation of the Arthur Miller play; John Harbison’s Gatsby (1999) was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby; and Tennessee Williams’ classic play A Streetcar Named Desire (1998) received operatic treatment by the American composer Andre Previn.

Few of these operas attained the compositional sophis- tication of the century’s first typically Postmodern opera: The Ghosts of Versailles (1992) composed by John

Corigliano (b. 1938). Scored for orchestra and synthesizer and cast in the style of a comic opera, Ghosts of Versailles takes place in three different (and interlayered) worlds: the eighteenth-century court of Versailles, the scenario of a Mozartean opera, and the realm of the afterlife—a place peopled by the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and her court. The score commingles traditional and contemporary musi- cal styles, alternating pseudo-Mozartean lyricism with modern dissonance in a bold and inventive (although often astonishingly disjunctive) manner. In the spirit of Postmodernism, Corigliano made historical style itself the subject; his multivalent allegory tests the text against past texts by having one of his characters in the opera sudden- ly exclaim, “This is not opera; Wagner is opera.”

The use of video technology is the most striking devel- opment in the staging of twenty-first century operas. Recent performances of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic (2005), which examines the role of Robert Oppenheimer in the genesis of the atom bomb, made use of both elec- tronically amplified instruments and electronic visual effects (see chapter 38). Computerized images, infrared cameras, digital projectors and scrims constitute some of the “spectacle-producing technology” now employed in staging the great operas of past and present.

Rock Music The origins of the musical style called rock lay in the popular culture of the mid 1950s. The words “rocking” and “rolling,” originally used to describe sexual activity, came to identify an uninhibited musical style that drew on a broad combination of popular American and African- American music, including country, swing, gospel, and rhythm and blues. Although no one musician is responsible for the birth of rock, the style gained popularity with such performers as Bill Haley, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley. In the hands of these flamboyant musicians, it came to be characterized by a high dynamic level of sound, fast and hard rhythms, a strong beat, and earthy, colloquial lyrics.

From its inception, rock music was an expression of a youth culture: the rock sound, associated with dancing, sex- ual freedom, and rebellion against restrictive parental and cultural norms, also mirrored the new consumerism of the postwar era. While 1950s rock and roll often featured super- ficial, “bubble gum” lyrics, 1960s rock became more sophis- ticated—the aural counterpart of Western-style Pop Art.

With the success of the Beatles—a British group of the 1960s—rock became an international phenomenon, uniting young people across the globe. The Beatles absorbed the music of Little Richard and also the rhythms and instrumentation of Indian classical music. They made imaginative use of electronic effects, such as feedback and splicing. Their compositions, which reflected the spirit of the Western counterculture, reached a creative peak in the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Although the electric guitar was in use well before the Beatles emerged, it was with this group that the instrument became the hallmark of rock music, and it remains the principal instrument of the rock musician.See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.��

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The Information Explosion • The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a

transformation from an industrially based world-culture to one shaped by mass media, electronic technology, and space travel.

• Television and other electronic phenomena altered basic modes of communication and facilitated global homogeneity, while computer technology made possible the accumulation and transmission of huge amounts of information.

• The shift from book to screen has altered our way of perceiving reality and has had consequences in all of the arts.

New Directions in Science and Philosophy • Late twentieth-century advances in science have moved toward

a greater understanding of both outer space and the inner workings of our bodies.

• Physicists continue to pursue a “theory of everything” that might

During the 1960s, “establishment” America faced the protests of a youthful counterculture that was disenchant- ed with middle-class values, mindless consumerism, and bureaucratic authority. Counterculture “hippies”—the word derives from “hipster,” an admirer of jazz and its sub- culture—exalted a neoromantic lifestyle that called for peaceful coexistence, a return to natural and communal habitation, more relaxed sexual standards, and experimen- tation with mind-altering drugs such as marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). The use of psychedelic drugs among members of the counterculture became asso- ciated with the emergence of a number of British and West Coast acid rock (or hard rock) groups, such as The Who and Jefferson Airplane. The music of these groups often featured earsplitting, electronically amplified sound and sexually provocative lyrics. The decade produced a few superb virtuoso performers, like the guitarist Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970). The 1960s also spawned the folk-rock hero Bob Dylan (b. 1941), whose songs gave voice to the anger and despair of the American counterculture. Dylan’s lyrics, filled with scathing references to modern materialism, hypocrisy, greed, and warfare—specifically, the American involvement in Vietnam—attacked the moral detachment of contemporary authority figures.

While rock music of the 1970s was less concerned with social and political issues, the next two decades brought some changes, including an increase in the number of female performers and the use of rock concerts to benefit social causes. Fundraising concerts engaged an internation- al cast of musicians. Between the 1980s and the present, world music—African and Asian—has come to influence rock. Among the best representatives of this trend is the folk-rock musician Paul Simon (b. 1964), who introduced to Western audiences the sounds of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a South African vocal group. More recently, the influence of the genre in fueling youth-driven anti-com- munist movements in Eastern Europe found expression in the play Rock ’n’ Roll (2006) by Britain’s leading play- wright, Tom Stoppard (b. 1937).

Composed in conjunction with Einstein on the Beach, the choreography of Lucinda Childs (b. 1940)—who also danced in the original production—followed a Minimalist imperative. In line with the hypnotic rhythms of the piece, her choreography featured serial repetitions of ritualized gestures and robotlike motions. Childs reduced the credo of pure dance to a set of patterned movements that were geometric, recurrent, and—for some critics— unspeakably boring.

The role of improvisation in dance—the legacy of Merce Cunningham—has had a more successful recent history. Contemporary companies such as the Sydney (Australia) Dance Company, Pilobolus, and Momix have produced exceptionally inventive repertories that embrace acrobatics, aerobics, gymnastics, vaudeville, and street- dance. Contemporary dance projects combine playful action and vigorous explorations of body movement.

One of the most energetic figures in contemporary choreography is the African-American Rennie Harris (b. 1964). Brought up in a crime-ridden section of North Philadelphia—without the luxury of formal dance train- ing—Harris resolved to bring hip-hop dance to the concert stage. To achieve that goal, he founded his own dance company (Rennie Dance Puremovement) in 1992. His explosive choreography has transformed the violence of street gangs into a multimedia collage that features break- dancing and electronically “souped up” sound. Music of a more traditional kind is essential to the choreography of Seattle-born Mark Morris (b. 1956). Since the establish- ment of his own company in 1980, Morris has choreo- graphed more than 100 dance pieces, all of which take music—from Mozart and Vivaldi to dance hall tunes and rock—as the source of structural clarity. Morris studies the score of the music to devise corresponding action motifs. His music-driven dances, such as his “take-off” on Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, entitled The Hard Nut (1999), bring humor and irony to contemporary dance.

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Glossary

Music Listening Selections

Volume2504

microtonality the use of musical intervals smaller than the semitones of traditional European and American music

musique concrète (French, “concrete music”) a type of electroacoustic music that uses real or “concrete” sounds, such as street noises, human voices, bird calls, and thunder, that are recorded, altered, and assembled on magnetic tape

silkscreen a printmaking technique employing the use of a stenciled image cut and attached to finely meshed silk, through which printing ink is forced so as to transfer the image to paper or cloth; also called “seriography”

synthesizer an integrated system of electronic components designed for the production and control of sound; it may be used in combination with a computer and with most musical instruments

reconcile Einstein’s theory of relativity with the principles of quantum physics. String theorists have proposed a universal model consisting of tiny loops of vibrating strings. Chaos theorists identify common denominators in nature: patterns that may seem random, but are actually self-similar.

• The mapping of the human genome by molecular biologists has led to major advances in medicine and experimentation in genetic engineering.

• Twentieth-century philosophers have generally abandoned the search for absolute truths, and instead, have given attention to the limits of language as a descriptive tool.

Literature in the Information Age • The “Postmodern turn” accompanied the shift away from the

anxious subjectivity and high seriousness of Modernism toward a skeptical and bemused attention to the history of culture and its myriad texts.

• Postmodern writers examine language as verbal coding and as a vehicle for both parody and social reform. They draw on the vast resources of history in works that often fictionalize history. The voice of the author may interrupt the narrative to produce the clipped rhythms of a videofictional style.

• Some contemporary writers bring critical attention to the realities of urban violence and social inequity, while others explore the genres of Magic Realism and science fiction.

The Visual Arts in the Information Age • The visual arts of the Information Age have not assumed any

single, unifying style. Rather, they are diverse and eclectic, reflecting the Postmodern preoccupation with the media-shaped image, with parody and play, and with the contradictory nature of contemporary life. Distinctions between high and low art have become increasingly blurred.

• Andy Warhol was among the pioneers of American Pop Art, which glorified the mass-produced, commercial image. In the “combines” of Robert Rauschenberg, found objects became part of an inventive art of assemblage. Minimalism, championed by Donald Judd, utilized commercial and industrial materials in works that redefined the early twentieth-century credo of absolute abstraction. At the other extreme, Hyperrealists provided a phenomenally detailed slice of life.

• Painters, photographers, and filmmakers addressed social conscience in works that brought attention to the plight of marginalized populations, criminal violence, and political unrest.

• The process of making art overtook the importance of the product with the birth of the Happening and the site-specific installation projects that followed. In the case of Earthworks, the artist moved out of the studio and into the environment.

Architecture in the Information Age • One of the earliest manifestations of Postmodernism was in

architectural design, where architects united a playful assortment of historical styles within a single structure, such as the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans.

• The new millennium has witnessed a trend toward sculptural architecture, most evident in the expansive (computer-aided) designs for museums and theaters conceived by Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry.

Music in the Information Age • The music of the Information Age often deviated from traditional

European modes of harmony and meter to incorporate microtonality, improvisation, and a variety of non-Western forms and instruments.

• The Minimalist compositions of Philip Glass feature hypnotic patterns of repetition inspired by traditional forms of Indian music. Contemporary issues as well as historical themes dominate Postmodern operas, composed in a variety of musical idioms.

• Electronic technology has had a massive effect on all phases of musical culture, from composition to performance and distribution. Such technology facilitated the modification of pre- existing sound (as in “concrete music”), but also made possible the creation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic music.

• Rock music came to popularity as an expression of the youth culture of the 1960s. With the availability of portable digital synthesizers, the techniques of mixing and sampling, and the continuing influence of African and Asian sounds, rock has endured as a popular genre.

Dance in the Information Age • The minimal choreography of Lucinda Childs and the ongoing

work of Merce Cunningham have been complemented by new styles and dance companies that integrate acrobatics, gymnastics, vaudeville, and street-dance, including hip-hop.

• The choreography of Mark Morris, unlike that of Cunningham, is directly inspired by and written for specific works of music.

CD Two Selection 24 Babbitt, Ensembles for Synthesizer, 1951, excerpt.

CD Two Selection 25 Glass, Einstein on the Beach, “Knee Play 1,” 1976.

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Globalism: The Contemporary World ca. 1960–present

Chapter

38

505Volume2

Figure 38.1 CHERI SAMBA, Little Kadogo, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 783⁄4 � 106 in. Cheri Samba (b. 1956), a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, depicts a kadogo (Swahili slang for “child soldier”), who raises his hands in surrender. The hand of an armed adult behind him warns, however, that the killing might very well continue.

“To choose what is best for both the near and distant futures is a hard task, often seemingly contradictory and requiring knowledge and ethical codes which for the most part are still unwritten.” E. O. Wilson

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L O O K I N G A H E A D

The Global Perspective

READING 38.1

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In 1962, the Canadian communications theorist Marshall

McLuhan predicted the electronic transformation of the planet

earth into a “global village.”* In the global village, communication

between geographically remote parts of the world would be

almost instantaneous, and every important new development—

technological, ecological, political, economic, and intellectual—

would affect every villager to some degree. Social and geographic

mobility, receptivity to change, and a sense of collectivity would

be the hallmarks of this new world community. Over the past four

decades, McLuhan’s futuristic vision has become a reality.

The roots of globalism—the promotion of interdependence of

cultures and peoples in all parts of the world—may be found in

the industrial and commercial technologies of the late nineteenth

century. But the single factor that has been most significant in

bringing together all parts of the world is twentieth-century elec-

tronic (and more recently digital) technology. The global communi-

ty of the twenty-first century is challenged by some distinct

problems: the effects of globalism on established religious,

national, and ethnic traditions; the future health of the world

ecosystem; and the continuing threat of terrorism. Globalism and

its effects provide the main themes of this chapter. In the arts, the

focus is on the transformative influence of electronic technology

on traditional and untraditional genres. The multiple and often

contradictory messages and styles in the arts of the global

community make our own time one of the most exciting in the his-

tory of the humanistic tradition.

Globalism has become the new model or paradigm for the contemporary world. While accelerated by electronic tech- nology, it owes much to a broad array of late twentieth- century developments: the success of anticolonial movements (see chapter 36), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and subsequent collapse of Soviet communism, and the end of the cold war (see chapter 36). With the elimi- nation of these obstacles to freedom of communication among the populations of the earth, global cultural integra- tion became a possibility, then a reality. Television was essential in providing immediate images of international events, and effective in promoting Western values and consumer goods. As Western consumer culture took hold across Asia and the Near East, it met a mixed reception

(with some critics objecting to the “McDonaldization” of the world). In India and China, its effects were transforma- tive, while in some parts of the Muslim-occupied Near East, it was to produce virulent anti-Western antipathy (with enormous consequences for world peace).

Globalism itself, however, remains an inevitable con- temporary paradigm. In an international best-selling book entitled The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005), the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman describes a world that has become metaphorically “flat.” With the collapse of most of the age- old barriers—physical, historical, and nationalistic—the global landscape offers a new, level playing field to all who choose to compete in the international marketplace. Interlinked networks of computer services, communication satellites, fiber-optic cables, and work-flow software pro- vide an untrammeled exchange of data and the free flow of goods and ideas. These tools continue to transform the planet into a single world community.

Globalism and Tradition Many parts of continental Africa have had a difficult time meeting the challenge of globalism. Following the end of colonialism and the withdrawal of Western powers from Africa, a void developed between African traditions and the Modernist ways of life introduced by the European presence. Some African states, especially those crippled by poverty and epidemic disease, have faced serious problems arising from this void. Power struggles in some African countries have resulted in the emergence of totalitarian dictatorships, and age-old ethnic conflicts have been reignited, all too often resulting in bloody civil wars (Figure 38.1). Vast parts of Africa are thus caught in the sometimes devastating struggle between the old ways and the new.

Africa’s leading English-language writer, Chinua Achebe (b. 1930), has dealt sensitively with such prob- lems. In the short story “Dead Men’s Path,” he examines the warp between premodern and modern traditions and the ongoing bicultural conflicts that plague many parts of Africa. At the same time, he probes the elusive, more uni- versal tensions between tradition and innovation, between spiritual and secular allegiance, and between faith and reason—tensions that continue to test human values in our time.

Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path” (1972)

Michael Obi’s hopes were fulfilled much earlier than he had 1 expected. He was appointed headmaster of Ndume Central School in January 1949. It had always been an unprogressive school, so the Mission authorities decided to send a young and energetic man to run it. Obi accepted this responsibility with enthusiasm. He had many wonderful ideas and this was an opportunity to put them into practice. He had had sound secondary school education which designated him a “pivotal teacher” in the official records and set him apart from the other headmasters in the mission field. He was outspoken in 10

* The term was coined by the British Modernist Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) in America and Cosmic Man (1948).

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his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and often less-educated ones.

“We shall make a good job of it, shan’t we?” he asked his young wife when they first heard the joyful news of his promotion.

“We shall do our best,” she replied. “We shall have such beautiful gardens and everything will be just modern and delightful. . . .” In their two years of married life she had become completely infected by his passion for “modern methods” and his denigration of “these old and superannuated 20 people in the teaching field who would be better employed as traders in the Onitsha market.” She began to see herself already as the admired wife of the young headmaster, the queen of the school.

The wives of the other teachers would envy her position. She would set the fashion in everything. . . . Then, suddenly, it occurred to her that there might not be other wives. Wavering between hope and fear, she asked her husband, looking anxiously at him.

“All our colleagues are young and unmarried,” he said with 30 enthusiasm which for once she did not share. “Which is a good thing,” he continued.

“Why?” “Why? They will give all their time and energy to the school.” Nancy was downcast. For a few minutes she became

sceptical about the new school; but it was only for a few minutes. Her little personal misfortune could not blind her to her husband’s happy prospects. She looked at him as he sat folded up in a chair. He was stoop-shouldered and looked frail. 40 But he sometimes surprised people with sudden bursts of physical energy. In his present posture, however, all his bodily strength seemed to have retired behind his deep-set eyes, giving them an extraordinary power of penetration. He was only twenty-six, but looked thirty or more. On the whole, he was not unhandsome.

“A penny for your thoughts, Mike,” said Nancy after a while, imitating the woman’s magazine she read.

“I was thinking what a grand opportunity we’ve got at last to show these people how a school should be run.” 50 Ndume School was backward in every sense of the word. Mr. Obi put his whole life into the work, and his wife hers too. He had two aims. A high standard of teaching was insisted upon, and the school compound was to be turned into a place of beauty. Nancy’s dream-gardens came to life with the coming of the rains, and blossomed. Beautiful hibiscus and allamanda hedges in brilliant red and yellow marked out the carefully tended school compound from the rank neighbourhood bushes.

One evening as Obi was admiring his work he was scandalized to see an old woman from the village hobble right 60 across the compound, through a marigold flowerbed and the hedges. On going up there he found faint signs of an almost disused path from the village across the school compound to the bush on the other side.

“It amazes me,” said Obi to one of his teachers who had been three years in the school, “that you people allowed the villagers to make use of this footpath. It is simply incredible.” He shook his head.

“The path,” said the teacher apologetically, “appears to be

very important to them. Although it is hardly used, it connects 70 the village shrine with their place of burial.”

“And what has that got to do with the school?” asked the headmaster.

“Well, I don’t know,” replied the other with a shrug of the shoulders. “But I remember there was a big row some time ago when we attempted to close it.”

“That was some time ago. But it will not be used now,” said Obi as he walked away. “What will the Government Education Officer think of this when he comes to inspect the school next week? The villagers might, for all I know, decide to use the 80 schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection.”

Heavy sticks were planted closely across the path at the two places where it entered and left the school premises. These were further strengthened with barbed wire.

Three days later the village priest of Ani called on the headmaster. He was an old man and walked with a slight stoop. He carried a stout walking-stick which he usually tapped on the floor, by way of emphasis, each time he made a new point in his argument.

“I have heard,” he said after the usual exchange of 90 cordialities, “that our ancestral footpath has recently been closed. . . .”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Obi. “We cannot allow people to make a highway of our school compound.”

“Look here, my son,” said the priest bringing down his walking-stick, “this path was here before you were born and before your father was born. The whole life of this village depends on it. Our dead relatives depart by it and our ancestors visit us by it. But most important, it is the path of children coming in to be born. . . .” 100

Mr. Obi listened with a satisfied smile on his face. “The whole purpose of our school,” he said finally, “is to

eradicate just such beliefs as that. Dead men do not require footpaths. The whole idea is just fantastic. Our duty is to teach your children to laugh at such ideas.”

“What you say may be true,” replied the priest, “but we follow the practices of our fathers. If you re-open the path we shall have nothing to quarrel about. What I always say is: let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” He rose to go.

“I am sorry,” said the young headmaster. “But the school 110 compound cannot be a thoroughfare. It is against our regulations. I would suggest your constructing another path, skirting our premises. We can even get our boys to help in building it. I don’t suppose the ancestors will find the little detour too burdensome.”

“I have no more words to say,” said the old priest, already outside.

Two days later a young woman in the village died in childbed. A diviner was immediately consulted and he prescribed heavy sacrifices to propitiate ancestors insulted by the fence. 120

Obi woke up next morning among the ruins of his work. The beautiful hedges were torn up not just near the path but right round the school, the flowers trampled to death and one of the school buildings pulled down.

. . . That day, the white Supervisor came to inspect the school and wrote a nasty report on the state of the premises

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The sculptures of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b. 1944) reveal the intersection of traditional and contemporary African themes. Between Earth and Heaven (2006) consists of thousands of aluminum seals and screw caps from bottles of wine and liquor (Figure 38.2). The caps are flattened and woven with copper wire to create large, shimmering metal tapestries. El Anatsui recycles discarded objects into compelling artworks whose designs and colors (gold, red, and black) have much in common with the decorative cotton-cloth textiles known as kente (Figure 38.3). The handwoven kente—the name derives from the designs of baskets traditionally woven in the kingdom of Asante (modern Ghana)—belong to a royal textile tradition that reaches back to the eleventh century. Vibrant in color and complex in their patterns, these textiles have come to be associated with a pan-African identity.

Figure 38.2 EL ANATSUI, Between Earth and Heaven, 2006. Aluminum, copper wire, 91 � 126 in. Widely regarded as Africa’s most significant sculptor, El Anatsui teaches at the university of Nigeria.

Figure 38.3 Detail of a Sika Futura (“Gold Dust Aweaneasa”) Asante kente textile, nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Whole textile 5 ft. 101⁄2 in. � 5 ft. 11 in. The individual designs on the cloth are associated with seventeenth-century Asante kings who are said to have laid claim to specific signs and patterns.

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Q How does this story illustrate the conflict between tradition and innovation?

Q What might the path in this story symbolize?

The Global Ecosystem

READING 38.2

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but more seriously about the “tribal-war situation developing between the school and the village, arising in part from the misguided zeal of the new headmaster.”

The future of the environment has become a major global concern. While modern industry brings vast benefits to humankind, it also works to threaten the global ecosystem (the ecological community and its physical environment). Sulphur dioxide emissions in one part of the world affects other parts of the world, causing acid rain that damages forests, lakes, and soil. Industrial pollution poisons the entire planet’s oceans. Leaks in nuclear reactors endanger populations thousands of miles from their sites, and green- house gases (produced in part from the burning of the coal, oil, and natural gas that power the world’s industries), con- tribute to global warming and other changes in the earth’s climate. Although such realities have inspired increasing concern for the viability of the ecosystem, they have only recently attracted the serious attention of world leaders.

A landmark figure in the study of ecological systems is Edward Osborn Wilson (b. 1929). This distinguished sociobiologist is a leading defender of the natural environ- ment. His early work in evolutionary biology examined parallels between ants and other animal societies, includ- ing those of human beings. More recently, he has proposed a new type of interdisciplinary research (which he calls “scientific humanism”) that works to improve the human condition. In The Diversity of Life, Wilson makes a plea for the preservation of biodiversity, the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem. He seeks the development of a sound environmental ethic, shared by both “those who believe that life was put on earth in one divine stroke,” and “those who perceive biodiversity to be the product of blind evolution.” Wilson pleads for a practical ethic that will ensure the healthy future of the planet.

From Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (1992)

Every country has three forms of wealth: material, cultural, 1 and biological. The first two we understand well because they are the substance of our everyday lives. The essence of the biodiversity problem is that biological wealth is taken much less seriously. This is a major strategic error, one that will be increasingly regretted as time passes. Diversity is a potential source for immense untapped material wealth in the form of food, medicine, and amenities. The fauna and flora are also part of a country’s heritage, the product of millions of years of evolution centered on that time and place and hence as 10 much a reason for national concern as the particularities of language and culture.

The biological wealth of the world is passing through a bottleneck destined to last another fifty years or more. The human population has moved past 5.4 billion, is projected to reach 8.5 billion by 2025, and may level off at 10 to 15 billion by midcentury. With such a phenomenal increase in human biomass, with material and energy demands of the developing countries accelerating at an even faster pace, far less room will be left for most of the species of plants and 20 animals in a short period of time.

The human juggernaut creates a problem of epic dimensions: how to pass through the bottleneck and reach midcentury with the least possible loss of biodiversity and the least possible cost to humanity. In theory at least, the minimalization of extinction rates and the minimization of economic costs are compatible: the more that other forms of life are used and saved, the more productive and secure will our own species be. Future generations will reap the benefit of wise decisions taken on behalf of biological diversity by our generation. 30

What is urgently needed is knowledge and a practical ethic based on a time scale longer than we are accustomed to apply. An ideal ethic is a set of rules invented to address problems so complex or stretching so far into the future as to place their solution beyond ordinary discourse. Environmental problems are innately ethical. They require vision reaching simultaneously into the short and long reaches of time. What is good for individuals and societies at this moment might easily sour ten years hence, and what seems ideal over the next several decades could ruin future generations. To choose 40 what is best for both the near and distant futures is a hard

task, often seemingly contradictory and requiring knowledge and ethical codes which for the most part are still unwritten.

If it is granted that biodiversity is at high risk, what is to be done? Even now, with the problem only beginning to come into focus, there is little doubt about what needs to be done. The solution will require cooperation among professions long separated by academic and practical tradition. Biology, anthropology, economics, agriculture, government, and law will have to find a common voice. Their conjunction has 50 already given rise to a new discipline, biodiversity studies,

defined as the systematic study of the full array of organic diversity and the origin of that diversity, together with the methods by which it can be maintained and used for the benefit of humanity. The enterprise of biodiversity studies is thus both scientific, a branch of pure biology, and applied, a branch of biotechnology and the social sciences. It draws from biology at the level of whole organisms and populations in the same way that biomedical studies draw from biology at the level of the cell and molecule. . . . 60

The evidence of swift environmental change calls for an ethic uncoupled from other systems of belief. Those committed by religion to believe that life was put on earth in one divine stroke will recognize that we are destroying the Creation, and those who perceive biodiversity to be the product of blind evolution will agree. Across the other great philosophical divide, it does not matter whether species have independent rights or, conversely, that moral reasoning is uniquely a human 70

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Q How does Dillard picture humankind’s place in the natural world?

Q To what does she attribute modern “faithlessness”?

Q Why does Wilson contend that environmental problems are “innately ethical”?

Q Why does he regard “the stewardship of environment” as a global responsibility?

READING 38.3

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or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

The question from agnosticism is, Who turned on the lights? The question from faith is, Whatever for? . . . .

Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, 30 suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Humanists seized on the expression, but it was hardly news. We knew, looking around, that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to a conclusion. But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his simple machine still hums; but if the thinker’s attention strays for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether. And, as I have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find 40 ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any way simple.

Environmental Art What Wilson calls “the stewardship of environment” has captured the imagination of some contemporary visual artists. Robert Smithson (1938–1973), for instance, pio- neered one of the most important ecological landmarks of the late twentieth century, the piece known as Spiral Jetty (Figure 38.4). Constructed on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, in waters polluted by abandoned oil mines, Spiral Jetty is a giant (1500 foot-long) coil consisting of 6650 tons of local black basalt, limestone, and earth. This snail- like symbol of eternity makes reference to ancient earth- works, such as those found in Neolithic cultures (see Figure 3.10), and to the origins of life in the salty waters of the pri- mordial ocean; but it also calls attention to the way in which nature is constantly transforming the environment and its ecological balance.

When Smithson created Spiral Jetty in 1970, the lake was unusually shallow because of drought. Submerged twice by rising waters, the piece can now be seen again from ground level, its galactic coil partially encrusted with white salt crystals that float in the algae-filled rose-colored shallows. Earthworks like Spiral Jetty are often best appreciated from the air. Tragically, it was in the crash of a small airplane sur- veying a potential site that Smithson was killed.

Green Architecture Architects have always given practical consideration to the environment in which they build. Now, however, in the face of rising fuel prices, global warming, and the degra- dation of the ecosystem due to industrial growth, the job of designing structures that do the least possible damage to

concern. Defenders of both premises seem destined to gravitate toward the same position on conservation.

The stewardship of the environment is a domain on the near side of metaphysics where all reflective persons can surely find common ground. For what, in the final analysis, is morality but the command of conscience seasoned by a rational examination of consequences? And what is a fundamental precept but one that serves all generations? An enduring environmental ethic will aim to preserve not only the health and freedom of our species, but access to the world in which 80 the human spirit was born.

The poets Gary Snyder (b. 1930) and Annie Dillard (b. 1943) share Wilson’s concerns for the natural environ- ment. To essays and poems inspired in part by her love for Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Dillard brings a dimen- sion of awe that has been called “ecospirituality.” A Roman Catholic convert whose outlook is essentially pan- theistic, Dillard tests the objective facts of nature against her mystical appreciation of its wonders. An excerpt from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, exemplifies the voice of the poet whose concerns are at once personal and global.

From Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

. . . . Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The 1 surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecules’ loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate as the shape of the air in time. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fiords, but the forested 10 mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail. “Every religion that does not affirm that God is hidden,” said Pascal flatly, “is not true.”

What is man, that thou are mindful of him? This is where the great modern religions are so unthinkably radical: the love of God! For we can see that we are as many as the leaves of trees. But it could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the 20 world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock-in- trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination

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the environment (a practice known as “green” or “sustainable” design), has become even more imperative. Green buildings— structures that are both friendly to the ecosystem and energy efficient—have been found to save money and preserve the environment. Although the United States launched the Green Building Council in 2000, fewer than 800 certified green buildings were constructed during the following seven years; however, the greening of architecture has become a global movement. It embraces architectural design that makes use of energy-efficient (and renewable) building materials, recycling systems that capture rainwater (for everyday use), solar panels that use sunlight to generate electricity, insulating glass, and other energy-saving devices and techniques.

Of the green buildings that have been constructed in the last ten years, one has already become a landmark: the Swiss Re office building (30 St. Mary Axe), designed in 2003 by the British architect Norman Foster (b. 1935), is London’s first environmentally sustainable skyscraper (Figure 38.5). Natural ventilation, provided by windows that open automatically, passive solar heating, and a double-glazed insulating glass skin (some 260,000 square feet of glass) are some of the features that work to reduce this forty-story building’s energy costs by one-half of normal costs. While Foster’s tower resembles a spaceship, its tall rounded picklelike shape has inspired Londoners to call it “the Gherkin.”

1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring argues that man-made chemicals are damaging the earth’s ecosystem

1974 American scientists demonstrate that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are eroding the earth’s ozone layer

2006 Al Gore publishes An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

Figure 38.4 ROBERT SMITHSON, Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970. Rock, salt crystals, earth algae; coil 1500 ft. The lake itself had been degraded by abandoned oil derricks. Documentary drawings, photographs, and films of Spiral Jetty, along with the recent rehabilitation of the earthwork itself, have heightened public awareness of the fragile balance between nature and culture.

Figure 38.5 NORMAN FOSTER, Swiss Re building (30 St. Mary Axe), London, 2003.

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Globalism and Ethnic Identity

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Ethnic identity—that is, one’s bond to a group that shares the same cultural traditions, culture, and values—is a major theme in the global perspective. A “cluster” of traits (race, language, physical appearance, and religious values) that form one’s self-image, ethnicity also differentiates the self from mass culture. The self-affirming significance of ethnic identity is apparent in the ancient Yoruba proverb: “I am because we are; what I am is what we are.”

Ethnicity manifests itself in language, music, food, and ritual. Efforts to define and maintain ethnic identity have inspired many contemporary writers. In her poems, novels, and short stories, Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948) draws on the Pueblo folklore of her Native American ancestors; the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940) blends fiction and nonfiction in novels that deal with family legends and native Chinese customs. The oral tradition—stories handed down from generation to gener- ation, often by and through women—plays an important part in the works of these authors, even as it does in the formation of ethnic identity.

Ethnicity has also become a theme in the visual arts. We have seen earlier in this chapter evidence of one African artist’s homage to his ethnic identity (see Figure 38.2). Other examples occur in the visual arts, especially photography and film. The latter are the favorite media of

Iranian-born Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), who now lives in New York City. Neshat’s art deals with conflicting ethnic values and lifestyles: Islamic and Western, ancient and modern, male and female. Her photographic series, Women of Allah (1993–1997) explores the role of militant women who fought in the 1979 revolution that overthrew Iran’s ruling dynasty. Neshat makes dramatic use of the chador (the large veil of black cloth that has become an ethnic symbol of Muslim women) to frame her face, which, inter- sected by a rifle, becomes the site of a poem (by the femi- nist writer Forough Farrokhzad, 1935–1967) transcribed in Farsi calligraphy (Figure 38.6).

Latino Culture The process of globalization and the rise of ethnicity have accelerated yet another major phenomenon: immigra- tion—the age-old process of people moving from mother country to other country—has increased dramatically in recent years. Every year, some 100 million people leave (or try to leave) their places of birth in search of political or economic advantage. This mass migration of peoples has resulted in the establishment of large ethnic communities throughout the world. The vast numbers of immigrants who have made the United States their home have had a dramatic impact: demographic changes, in the form of ris- ing numbers of Asians and Latinos—persons from the var- ious Latin American countries—have changed the face of the economy, the urban environment, and the culture. If current trends continue, by the year 2050 Latinos will con- stitute 30 percent of the population in the United States.

In all aspects of life, from literature and art to food and dance styles, there has been a flowering of Latino culture. With The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), the first novel by a Hispanic to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Cuban- American Oscar Hijuelos (b. 1951) brought attention to the impact of Latin American music on American culture, and, more generally, to the role of memory in reclaiming one’s ethnic roots. Younger writers have given voice to per- sonal problems of adjustment in America’s ethnic mosaic and to the ways in which language and customs provide a vital sense of ethnic identity. These are the themes pursued by one of today’s leading Chicana (Mexican-American female) authors, Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954). Cisneros, who describes the struggle of Chicana women in an alien socie- ty, writes in the familiar voice of everyday speech. Of her writing style, she says:

It’s very much of an anti-academic voice—a child’s voice, a girl’s voice, a poor girl’s voice, a spoken voice, the voice of an American Mexican. It’s in this rebellious realm of antipoetics that I tried to create a poetic text with the most unofficial language I could find.

Cisneros dates the birth of her own political consciousness from the moment (in a graduate seminar on Western liter- ature) she recognized her “otherness,” that is, her separate- ness from the dominant culture. A vignette from The House on Mango Street, her classic novel, describes the

Figure 38.6 SHIRIN NESHAT, Rebellious Silence, from “Women of Allah” series, 1994. Gelatin-silver print and ink.

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READING 38.4

Q How does Cisneros bring Mamacita to life? What makes her a sympathetic figure?

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experience of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. It illustrates the shaping role of language and memory in matters of identity.

Cisneros’ “No Speak English” from The House on Mango Street (1984)

Mamacita1 is the big mama of the man across the street,- 1 third-floor front. Rachel says her name ought to be Mamasota,2

but I think that’s mean. The man saved his money to bring her here. He saved and

saved because she was alone with the baby boy in that country. He worked two jobs. He came home late and he left early. Every day.

Then one day Mamacita and the baby boy arrived in a yellow taxi. The taxi door opened like a waiter’s arm. Out stepped a tiny pink shoe, a foot soft as a rabbit’s ear, then 10 the thick ankle, a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume. The man had to pull her, the taxicab driver had to push. Push, pull. Push, pull. Poof!

All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look at, from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn’t take my eyes off her tiny shoes.

Up, up, up the stairs she went with the baby boy in a blue blanket, the man carrying her suitcases, her lavender hatboxes, a dozen boxes of satin high heels. Then we didn’t 20 see her.

Somebody said because she’s too fat, somebody because of the three flights of stairs, but I believe she doesn’t come out because she is afraid to speak English, and maybe this is so since she only knows eight words. She knows to say: He not here for when the landlord comes, No speak English if anybody else comes, and Holy smokes. I don’t know where she learned this, but I heard her say it one time and it surprised me.

My father says when he came to this country he ate 30 hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew. He doesn’t eat hamandeggs anymore.

Whatever her reasons, whether she is fat, or can’t climb the stairs, or is afraid of English, she won’t come down. She sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull.

Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man 40 paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it’s not the same, you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would.

Sometimes the man gets disgusted. He starts screaming and you can hear it all the way down the street.

Ay, she says, she is sad.

Oh, he says. Not again. ¿Cuándo, cuándo, cuándo? 3 she asks. ¡Ay, caray! 4 We are home. This is home. Here I am and

here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ! 50 ¡Ay, Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while

lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country. And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on T.V.

No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can’t believe here ears. 60

No less than in literature, the visual arts document the Latino effort to preserve or exalt ethnic identity: Yolanda López (b. 1942) appropriates a popular Latin American icon of political resistance—the Virgin of Guadalupe (see Figure 20.2). She transforms the Mother of God into the autobiographical image of an exuberant marathon athlete outfitted in track shoes and star-studded cape (redolent of both Our Lady and Wonder Woman, Figure 38.7).

1 ”Little Mama,” also a term of endearment. 2 ”Big Mama.” 3 ”When?” 4 An exclamation, loosely: “Good grief.”

Figure 38.7 YOLANDA M. LÓPEZ, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, part 3 from the “Guadalupe Triptych,” 1978. Oil pastel on paper, 30 � 24 in.

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The popular history of Latino culture also served as inspiration for Luis Jiménez (1940–2007). Born to Mexican parents in El Paso, Texas, Jiménez constructs life- sized, brightly colored fiberglass sculptures. These call attention to Mexican contributions to American culture and to the ongoing problems related to the migration of thousands of Mexicans across the United States/Mexican border. The 10-foot-high, totemlike sculpture called Border Crossing (Cruzando El Rio Bravo) evokes the heroic Mexican view of the crossing as a rite of passage heralding a transformation in status and lifestyle (Figure 38.8).

Ethnic Conflict The exercise of ethnic identity has become a powerful social and political force in the global perspective. Having cast off the rule of foreign powers and totalitarian ideolo- gies, ethnic peoples have sought to reaffirm their primary affiliations—to return to their spiritual roots. “Identity pol- itics,” the exercise of power by means of group solidarity, has—in its more malignant guise—pitted ethnic groups against each other in militant opposition. In Africa, the

Middle East, the Balkans, the Indian subcontinent, and the former Soviet Union, efforts to revive or maintain ethnic identity have coincided with the bitter and often militant quest for solidarity and political autonomy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis who lay claims to the same ancient territories of the Middle East. Hostilities between the Arab (and essentially Muslim) population of Palestine and the Jewish inhabitants of Israel preceded the establishment of an independent Jewish state in 1947. However, these have become more virulent in the past few decades, and the move toward peaceful compromise has only just begun.

The life of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942–2008) was one of displacement and exile. Born to Sunni Muslim parents in a Palestinian village that was destroyed by Israel in 1948, Darwish lived in dozens of cities across the globe. Holding the bizarre status of a “present-absent alien,” however, he remained a refugee from his homeland. Regarded by Palestinians as their poet laureate, this “poet in exile” published some twenty vol- umes of verse. His passion to redeem his lost homeland is expressed in a simple, yet eloquent, style illustrated in the poem “Earth Presses Against Us.”

Darwish’s Israeli counterpart, Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) was born in Germany but moved to Palestine in 1936. Raised as an Orthodox Jew amidst Israel’s turbu- lent struggle to become a state, Amichai began writing poetry in 1948. Israel’s favorite poet takes as his themes the roles of memory, homeland, and religious faith. His poem, “The Resurrection of the Dead,” looks beyond the immedi- acy of ethnic turmoil to consider both the weight of past history and the promise of the future.

The Poems of Darwish and Amichai

Darwish’s “Earth Presses Against Us” (2003)

Earth is pressing against us, trapping us in the final passage. 1 To pass through, we pull off our limbs. Earth is squeezing us. If only we were its wheat, we might die and yet live. If only it were our mother so that she might temper us with mercy. If only we were pictures of rocks held in our dreams like mirrors. We glimpse faces in their final battle for the soul, of those who will be killed by the last living among us. We mourn their children’s feast. 10 We saw the faces of those who would throw our children out of the windows of this last space. A star to burnish our mirrors. Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky? Where should plants sleep after the last breath of air? We write our names with crimson mist! We end the hymn with our flesh. Here we will die. Here, in the final passage. Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees. 20

Figure 38.8 LUIS JIMÉNEZ, Border Crossing (Cruzando El Rio Bravo), 1989. Fiberglass with urethane finish, 10 ft. 7 in. � 4 ft. 6 in. � 4 ft. 6 in. The artist dedicated this piece to his father, who entered the United States legally in 1924.

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Q How does each of these poets deal with history, memory, and hope?

Q Why do you think there is no mention of religion in either poem?

The Challenge of Globalism

READING 38.6

CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World 515

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Amichai’s “The Resurrection of the Dead” (2004)

We are buried below with everything we did, 1 with our tears and our laughs. We have made storerooms of history out of it all, galleries of the past, and treasure houses, buildings and walls and endless stairs of iron and marble in the cellars of time. We will not take anything with us. Even plundering kings, they all left something here. Lovers and conquerors, happy and sad, they all left something here, a sign, a house, 10 like a man who seeks to return to a beloved place and purposely forgets a book, a basket, a pair of glasses, so that he will have an excuse to come back to the beloved place. In the same way we leave things here. In the same way the dead leave us.

(Translated, from the Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier.)

Terrorism Probably the greatest single threat to the global communi- ty is terrorism, the deliberate and systematic use of violence against civilians in order to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals. As a combat tactic, terrorism is not new; however, rapid forms of communication and transporta- tion, and the availability of more virulent weaponry make contemporary terrorism both imminent and politically devastating. Terrorist attacks have taken place all over the world, from Madrid to Mumbai. One of the most ruthless involved a coordinated assault on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. On September 11, 2001, Islamic militants representing the radical Muslim group known as al-Qaeda (“the base”) hijacked four American airliners, flying two of them into the twin towers in Manhattan, and a third into the head- quarters of the U. S. Department of Defense near the nation’s capital. A fourth crashed before it could reach its target: the White House.

Masterminded by al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden (b. 1957), the attack, now called “9-11,” killed more than 3000 civilians. Bin Laden justified the operation as retalia- tion for America’s military presence and eco-political interference in the predominantly Muslim regions of the Middle East. Terrorist assaults on other primarily Western targets throughout the world underline the troubling rift between the ideology of radical Islamists defending strict Qur’anic theocracy and the (largely) Western ideology of democratic capitalism. Eighteen months after 9-11, on sus- picions of an Iraqi stockpile of chemical and biological

weapons, a multinational coalition force invaded Iraq; that military intervention, which led to armed conflict between Shiite and Sunni factions, has complicated the already tense situation in the Middle East. The war on terror cur- rently continues in other regions, such as Afghanistan, where militant Sunni insurgents known as the Taliban threaten to create a new form of Islamic radicalism.

Initially, artists responded to the events of 9-11 by com- memorating the destruction of the World Trade Center and those who died in the assault. One year after the attack, the American composer John Adams (whom we met in chapter 37) premiered his choral eulogy, On the Transmigration of Souls, which was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in music. Numerous photographs and films revisit the event, some of which (picturing those who jumped from the burning towers) are painful and powerful. Literary reflection on the atrocity and its aftermath inspired Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2006) and Laurence Wright’s carefully researched study, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 (2007). However, the reali- ties of international terrorism are addressed more broadly in the poems of two contemporary writers: the Nobel Prize- winning poet Wislawa Szymborska (b. 1923) and the acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney (b. 1939).

Szymborska has lived most of her life in communist- controlled Poland, a country that lost nearly one-fifth of its population during World War II. Her poems, while straightforward and conversational in tone, address person- al and universal subjects and matters of moral urgency. “The Terrorist, He Watches,” written in 1976, is a pre- scient anticipation of our current unease and insecurity.

Seamus Heaney shares with his countryman W. B. Yeats (see chapter 34) the gift of lyric brilliance. Heaney’s ability to translate the small details of everyday experi- ence into transcendent ideas is unsurpassed. While much of his poetry reflects his deep affection for the “bogs and barnyards” of rural life, his most recent volume of poetry, District and Circle, responds to the violence of our time, specifically the 2005 terrorist attacks on the District and Circle lines of London’s subway system. Prompted by the Roman poet Horace, Heaney grapples with sobering, global uncertainties.

Szymborska’s “The Terrorist, He Watches” (1976)

The bomb will explode in the bar at twenty past one. 1 Now it’s only sixteen minutes past. Some will still have time to enter, some to leave.

The terrorist’s already on the other side. 5 That distance protects him from all harm and, well, it’s like the pictures:

A woman in a yellow jacket, she enters. A man in dark glasses, he leaves. Boys in jeans, they’re talking. 10 Sixteen minutes past and four seconds.

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Q What does this poem suggest about the life of the individual in the global village?

READING 38.7

Q How does the poet’s use of ancient mythology contribute to the poem?

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The smaller one, he’s lucky, mounts his scooter, but that taller chap, he walks in.

Seventeen minutes and forty seconds. A girl, she walks by, a green ribbon in her hair. 15 But that bus suddenly hides her. Eighteen minutes past. The girl’s disappeared. Was she stupid enough to go in, or wasn’t she. We shall see when they bring out the bodies. 20

Nineteen minutes past. No one else appears to be going in. On the other hand, a fat bald man leaves. But seems to search his pockets and at ten seconds to twenty past one 25 he returns to look for his wretched gloves.

It’s twenty past one. Time, how it drags. Surely, it’s now. No, not quite. 30 Yes, now. The bomb, it explodes.

Heaney’s “Anything Can Happen” (2005)

After Horace, Odes, I, 34 Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter1

Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,2

the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.3

Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right. Telluric4 ash and fire-spores boil away.

China: Global Ascendance It is widely believed that the People’s Republic of China will be the next great global power. In the last three decades, China has experienced a cultural transformation of enormous proportions. Once a country of rural villages, this vast nation now claims more than 150 cities with a population of one million or more people in each. Still governed by a communist regime, its rapid advances in industry, technology, and the arts have made it a formida- ble presence on the global stage.

China’s ascendance has not been unmarred by internal strife. Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 (see chapter 34), communist officials tightened control over all forms of artistic expression. Nevertheless, young Chinese artists and writers continued to work, either in exile or at their own peril. In June 1989, at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, thousands of student activists demon- strated in support of democratic reform. With Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony blaring from loudspeakers, demonstra- tors raised a plaster figure of the goddess of democracy modeled on the Statue of Liberty. The official response to this overt display of freedom resulted in the massacre of some protesters and the imprisonment of others. Since Tiananmen Square, literary publication has remained under the watchful eye of the state, but efforts to control music and the visual arts have been relaxed. A large body of Chinese literature, much of it written by women, has examined the traumatic years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The enormous popularity of Western classical music in China has created a talent pool of highly trained performers. Outstanding filmmakers, such as Jia Zhang-ke and Zhang Yimou (see chapter 37) have received worldwide attention. Even more dramatic is the upsurge in painting and sculpture, where the Chinese have broken into the world art market with works that depart radically from Chinese tradition (and command huge prices in the Western art market).

In the past three decades, artists—most of them rigor- ously trained in China’s Central Academy—have had the opportunity to explore the major styles and techniques of their Western contemporaries, a phenomenon made possi- ble by international travel and mass electronic communi- cation. In the early 1990s, there emerged two overlapping (and still flourishing) styles. The first, political pop, seizes on Western icons and images to glamorize or discredit various aspects of Chinese life. The second, cynical realism, engages commercial painting techniques to satirize social and polit- ical issues. Both of these styles are evident in the “Great Criticism” series by Wang Guangyi (b. 1956).

In one painting from the series (Figure 38.9), bright col- ors and broad, simplified shapes, reminiscent of the com- munist-approved posters of the 1920s (see Figure 34.5), serve a sly and subversive end. Three Maoist workers, armed with the red flag of China, whose mast is an over- sized pen, advance boldly into the arena of commercial combat, their mission approved by the official government stamps stenciled on the surface of the canvas. Here, collec- tivist socialism engages capitalist consumerism, represented

1 Roman sky god. 2 River in the underworld crossed by the souls of the dead. 3 Mythic Titan condemned to support the heavens on his shoulders. 4 Terrestrial.

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by such populist commodities as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s hamburgers, and Marlboro cigarettes.

More recently, the Chinese art scene has exploded with elaborately choreographed installations and mixed-media sculptures. The Chinese-born Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957) moved to Manhattan in 1995, bringing with him the age- old traditions of his homeland. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute, Cai creates public works that capture the disquieting nature of contemporary life. Many of his works explore the properties of gunpowder—an

explosive invented by the Chinese for firework displays.

Cai’s most ambitious work is a four-part instal- lation called Inopportune. The first stage of the piece features a brilliant array of colored lights pulsing from long transparent rods that burst from nine identical Ford sedans (Figure 38.10). The cars, suspended in midair along a 300-foot gallery, call to mind a sequence of images unfurling in a Chinese scroll, or a series of frozen film frames. Stage Two, installed in an adjacent gallery, con- sists of nine prefabricated life-sized tigers pierced by hundreds of bamboo arrows—a reference to a popular thirteenth-century Chinese tale glorify- ing a hero who saves his village from a man-eat- ing tiger. Stage Three is a startling ninety-second film loop (projected on a huge screen); here, a phantom car (filled with fireworks) bursts silently into flames, then floats in a dreamlike manner through Manhattan’s bustling, nocturnal Times Square. The fourth and final part of the installa- tion is a two-dimensional wall-hanging on which one sees nine exploding cars as “painted” by ignit- ed gunpowder. In this project Cai has mixed an assortment of traditions, symbols, and images to

capture the violence of contemporary urban life. He claims that he uses the tools and materials of destruction and ter- ror for healing purposes—the Chinese character for “gun- powder” translates literally as “fire medicine,” which was once thought to cure the ailing body.

The building boom that China has enjoyed in the last decade was markedly accelerated by Beijing’s role as the site of the 2008 Olympics. Representative of the global perspective, the architectural projects for the Olympics involved multinational participation and cooperation: the extraordinary Beijing airport—now the largest in the world—was the brainchild of the British architect, Norman Foster (discussed earlier in this chapter); the National Stadium (nicknamed the “Bird’s Nest” to describe its interwoven steel latticework) was designed byFigure 38.10 CAI GUO-QIANG, Inopportune, Stage 1, 2005. Mixed media.

Figure 38.9 WANG GUANGYI, Coca-Cola, from the “Great Criticism” series, 1993. Enamel paint on canvas, 4 ft. 11 in. � 3 ft. 11 in.

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the Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron; and the Aquatic Center (known as the “Water Cube”) was designed and built by a consortium of Australian architects and Chinese engineers (Figure 38.11). The Water Cube, a rectangular structure that covers almost 8 acres, consists of a steel frame and an exterior of blue-gray translucent plas- tic somewhat similar to Teflon. Its pillow-shaped modules, inspired by the bubbles in foam, weigh only one percent as much as glass and reduce energy costs by a third. Reviewing the buildings of China’s Olympic Park on a visit to Beijing, America’s leading architectural critic Paul Goldberger found them “unimpeachably brilliant,” and “as innovative as any architecture on the planet, marvels of the imagination and engineering that few countries would have the nerve or the money to attempt.”

The spirit of global collectivity is readily apparent in the arts. All forms of expression, from architecture to music and dance, reflect the abundance and exchange of elec- tronically transmitted information, and the ease with which we (and our cultural baggage) travel. The migration of artists from one part of the world to another, and the media of television, film, and computers, link studio to stage and artist to artist. Megasurveys of the visual arts held

regularly in Venice, Shanghai, Miami, and elsewhere attract large audiences, invite the exchange of ideas, and stimulate a vigorous commercial art market. Individual art- works are often hybrid projects incorporating a number of mediums and genres. Virtual environments and mixed- media installations have become more common than tra- ditional painting and sculpture. While the arts of the global village are characterized by stylistic diversity and a plurality of ideas and techniques, they are nevertheless united by the wonders of digital technology.

Video Art In the 1950s, the Korean artist and musician Nam June Paik (1932–2007) predicted that the television cathode ray would replace the canvas as the medium of the future. The now acclaimed “father of video art” was not far from the mark, for art that employs one or another form of electron- ic technology has come to dominate the global art world. Video art had its beginnings in the 1960s. Influenced by the visionary work of John Cage, Paik initiated the genre with performance pieces and electronic installations. Some were among the first interactive experiments in sound and image. With the help of an electronic engineer, he designed and built one of the first videosynthesizers—a device that makes it possible to alter the shape and color of a video image.

Figure 38.11 The National Aquatics Center, Beijing.

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In the 1990s, Paik assembled television sets, circuit boards, and other electronic apparatus to produce whimsi- cal robots. More ambitious in size and conception, howev- er, are the artist’s multiscreen television installations. Megatron (1995), for instance, consists of 215 monitors programmed with a rapid-fire assortment of animated and live-video images drawn from East and West. The Seoul Olympic Games and Korean drummers, rock concert clips, girlie magazine nudes, and quick-cuts of Paik’s favorite artists alternate with the national flags of various countries and other global logos (Figure 38.12). The animated con- tour of a bird flying gracefully across a wall of screens brings magical unity to this ocular blitz, while a two-channel audio track adds booming syncopated sound to the visual rhythms. Paik’s wall of video monitors dazzles viewers with a kaleidoscopic barrage of images whose fast-paced editing imitates mainstream television and film.

In contrast with the frenzied dazzle of Paik’s video proj- ects, the art of Bill Viola (b. 1951) is profoundly subtle. Viola uses rear-projected video screens to deliver personal narratives in the form of large, slow-moving, mesmeriz- ing images. Mortality, identity, and consciousness, Viola’s central themes, draw inspiration from Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and Sufi poetry. In Stations (a refer- ence to the Stations of the Cross, Christ’s journey to Calvary), a computer-controlled, five-channel video/sound installation projects the image of a male body (immersed in water) onto three vertical slabs of granite; the image is reflected onto mirrored slabs placed on the floor (Figure 38.13). Viola wants the viewer to experience the piece “insofar as possible, as a mental image” evoking the human journey from birth to death.

Viola’s art is contemplative and deeply embedded in the exploration of conceptual reality. It makes reference to the current “crisis of representation and identity” in which new media technologies leave viewers unsure as to whether an optical image is real or fabricated. According to Viola, “representing information” will be the main issue in the arts of the future. Video and sound installations, which

became a major form of late twentieth-century expression, are closely related to the film experience. Both immerse the viewer in the moving image; but, as with Viola’s work, video art concentrates experience in a way that film— especially film as entertainment—does not usually achieve.

Since the 1970s, video installations have moved in the direction of political theater. More elaborate in their stag- ing and often interactive, they make use of holograms, laser beams, digital images, and computer-generated special effects, all of which may be projected onto screens and walls to the accompaniment of electronically recorded sounds. Some, like Mary Lucier’s (b. 1944) sound and video installation that recreates the disastrous effects of the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, North Dakota, are dramatic ruminations on personal and communal experience.

Computers and the Visual Arts Digital computers have put at our disposal the entire histo- ry of art. The Internet gives access to the contents of more than 5000 museums; and millions of photographic images are available on a variety of websites. In addition to its function in storing and distributing images, however, digi- tal computers have transformed the manner in which art is made and experienced. Computer technology is now a standard part of architectural design and engineering (see chapter 37). It makes possible the execution of otherwise unachievable three-dimensional curves in fiberglass (and other media) sculpture and three-dimensional forms. More broadly, it is basic to all forms of digital art.

Digital art is art in which the computer is employed as a primary tool, medium, or creative partner. The vast array of digital artforms includes (to name only a few) two-dimen- sional imaging, virtual reality, performance, animation,

Figure 38.12 NAM JUNE PAIK, Megatron, 1995. 215 monitors, 8-channel color video and 2-channel sound, left side 11 ft. 101⁄2 in. � 22 ft. 6 in. � 231⁄2 in.; right side 10 ft. 8 in. � 10 ft. 8 in. � 231⁄2 in. Images flow by on these monitors as if seen from a rapidly passing car. Paik was the first to use the phrase “electronic superhighway” to describe the fast-pace media resources that link different parts of the planet.

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game art, and Internet art. Digital imaging, the process by which computers manipulate old images or generate new ones, has revolutionized the world of film, television, video, holography, and photography. Such imaging is of two vari- eties: one involves the digital manipulation of photograph- ic resources to create new images. The other makes use of purely digital means (a geometric model or mathematical formula) to create an entirely new image. In the latter method, the artist gives the computer a set of instructions by means of which the image is digitally produced.

Representative of the first type of computer imaging are the panoramic photographs of the German artist Andreas Gursky (b. 1957). Gursky’s huge photographs (often more than 15 feet in width) are the products of his world travels. His tours through Europe, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States, have generated a global portrait of contemporary life: its rock concerts (Figure 38.14), garbage dumps, stock exchanges, supermarkets, factories, prisons, and luxury hotels. Gursky’s photographs are far from documentary, however; they are stitched together from transparencies of his own photographs, which under- go many rounds of editing, scanning, and proofing. By way of digital processes, Gursky creates realistically detailed images in which (ironically) individuality is lost. His works convey the anonymity of “mass man,” or what the artist himself calls the “aggregate state” of nature and the world.

An example of the second type of digital imaging is found in the works of American artist Karl Sims (b. 1962). Sims has devised special computer-graphics techniques that generate abstract, three-dimensional simulations of genetic organisms (Figure 38.15), and natural phenomena such as fog, smoke, and rain. According to Sims, a gradu- ate of the MIT Media Lab and a student of biotechnology, his computer graphics “unite several concepts: chaos, com- plexity, evolution, self-propagating entities, and the nature of life itself.”

The use of the computer in making art is no longer exclusive to artists, however. Interactive art programs, avail- able both in the art gallery and on the home computer screen, invite the viewer to become a partner in the cre- ative act. In Piano (1995) designed by the Japanese media

artist Toshio Iwai (b. 1962), the spectator creates a musical “score” by manipulating a trackball that triggers star- shaped points of light that travel along a scroll until they “strike” a piano keyboard; both visual and aural patterns are generated by the spectator—within limits pre- determined by Iwai. With Electronic Eve (1997), an interac- tive project conceived by Jenny Marketou (b. 1944), “image consumers” create their own multimedia environment by selecting (through direct touch on the computer screen) from a database of video sequences, still images, computer graphics, texts, and sounds. Other electronic installations invite the audience to turn words (the sounds of speech) into colored shapes and images. The World Wide Web pro- vides a virtual theater in which one may assume an on-line identity—or more than one identity—in cyberspace.

Perhaps the most intriguing computer-driven form of interactive art is virtual reality, a technology that allows the user to interact with a computer-simulated environ- ment. By means of a series of special digital devices, artifi- cial environments are flashed onto a huge screen or onto the inside of a helmet. Like a giant video game, virtual reality combines visual illusion, sound, and spoken texts. A synthe- sis of all retrievable informational forms, such interactive hypermedia genres offer an image-saturated playground for the mind.

Computers and Performance Performance art has been transformed by digital technology. The American experimental artist Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) began her career with theatrical performances that appropriated images from classic films, newsreels, and other video resources; these were “mixed” with recorded and live music. In the 1990s, Anderson began to use a 6-foot-long “talking-stick”, a batonlike MIDI (Magnetic Instrument Digital Interface) controller that accesses and replicates sounds. For artists like Anderson, the computer is a “meta- medium” that transforms vocal and visual experience.

The age of digital communication finds a playful advo- cate in the work of the Japanese artist Noriko Yamaguchi (b. 1983). Wearing headphones and a body suit made of cell- phone (“keitai”) keypads, the artist becomes a human mobile

Figure 38.13 BILL VIOLA, Stations (detail), 1994. Video/sound installation with five granite slabs, five projections, and five projection screens.

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Figure 38.15 Karl Sims, Galapagos, 1997. Interactive media. This interactive artwork is part of a twelve-screen media installation that invites viewers to participate in the evolution of animated forms. Inspired by the theory of natural selection advanced by Darwin after he visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835, Sims invented a program whereby virtual “genetic” organisms appear to mutate and reproduce within the environment of the computer.

Figure 38.14 Andreas Gursky, Madonna I, 2001. Cibachrome, edition 1 of 6, 9 ft. � 6 ft. 6 in. Gursky’s photos, printed at colossal size, are digitally manipulated “records” of such public events as open-air raves and rock concerts. Some critics see in these images the loss of individuality in a globalized society. In this aerial view, Madonna appears at the lower left.

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Contemporary Japanese artists have been particularly successful in using computer technology to generate photographic and video projects. Yasumasa Morimura (b. 1945) transforms Western masterpieces into camp spoofs in which he impersonates one or more of the central characters. In Portrait (Futago), Morimura turns Manet’s Olympia (Figure 38.16) into a drag queen decked out in a blond wig and rhinestone-trimmed slippers (Figure 38.17). Using himself as the model for both the nude courtesan and the maid, he revisualizes a landmark in the history of art. By “updating” Manet’s Olympia (itself an “update” of a painting by Titian), Morimura also questions the authority of these historical icons, even as he makes sly reference to the postwar Japanese practice of copying Western culture. Portrait is a computer- manipulated color photograph produced from a studio setup— a combination of Postmodern techniques borrowed from fashion advertising. Here, and in his more recent photographs in which he impersonates contemporary icons and film divas (Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and Liza Minnelli) Morimura pointedly tests classic stereotypes of identity and gender.

Figure 38.16 EDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 31⁄4 in. � 6 ft. 23⁄4 in.

Figure 38.17 YASUMASA MORIMURA, Portrait (Futago), 1988. Color photograph, clear medium, 821⁄2 � 118 in.

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Digital technology has transformed the world of filmmaking. New technologies, such as high definition (HD) video, which gives visual images greater immediacy, have begun to replace film itself. The ease with which digital video can be produced, reproduced from film, and downloaded via computers has raised major issues concerning copyrights, but it has also made the archive of motion pictures readily available to a worldwide audience. In response to the new technology, new film centers are developing throughout the world. The website YouTube, which welcomes video postings, has become a forum for young and independent filmmakers, espe- cially in the production of short and documentary films.

Computers have also revolutionized the way films are made: Computer-Generated Imaging (CGI) of realistic settings makes it unnecessary for filmmakers to use large-scale sets and locations. Special effects, achieved by way of computers, are used to juxta- pose images in ways that distort reality. Like docufiction, films ren- der believable what in actuality may be untrue. The 1994 film Forrest Gump, for instance, shows its antihero shaking hands with the long-dead president John F. Kennedy.

Digital technology also makes possible entirely new and hyper- real images, such as Steven Spielberg’s dinosaurs (Jurassic Park, 1993), James Cameron’s liquid-metal cyborgs (Terminator 2, 1991), and Larry and Andy Wachowski’s science fiction trilogy Matrix (1999–2003). Terminator was the first film to feature the computer-

generated shape-shifting technique called “morphing.” Matrix introduced a unique photographic technique (“flow motion”) that uses more than 100 meticulously coordinated still cameras to cre- ate extraordinary special effects. Just as CGI can create realistic settings, so it can replace human actors with computer-generated characters. The use of digital actors (as in the fantasy epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, 2001–2003) blurs the border between the traditional live action film and CGI animation. While digital artistry may not put live-action filmmaking in jeopardy, it provokes ques- tions concerning differences between the original and the replica, the real and the virtual, truth and illusion.

Finally, film animation has undergone major changes since the early twentieth century, when still drawings and stop-motion tech- niques prevailed. The first feature-length, entirely computer-ani- mated film, Toy Story, appeared in 1995. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, more sophisticated software for digital imag- ing, including three-dimensional graphics, has facilitated a greater range of color, movement, and special effects. In 2001, Hayao Miyazaki’s award-winning Spirited Away brought Japanese animé to world attention. While animated films may be landmarks in cine- matic technique, they generally provide little nourishment for the mind; however, the Disney/Pixar animated science fiction film WALL-E (2008), the story of a whimsical little robot who cleans up the garbage-ridden planet earth, may be a salutary exception.

phone—the telecommunications device that (in most parts of the world) also functions as a television, credit card, video play- er, portable music device, digital camera, and more (Figure 38.18). Wires connect Keitai Girl to other receivers in cyber- space. Her futuristic armor is part of a performance involving interactive lasers, fast, upbeat music, and a popular Japanese dance style known as Para-Para—a type of line dancing.

Music and the Global Perspective The global perspective may be most apparent in contemporary music, in which Western traditions of harmony and form have been energized by the modes, rhythms, textures, and inflections of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Inspired by ancient and non-Western oral and instrumental forms of improvisation, much of today’s music relies less on the formal score and more on the ear. Some contemporary composers create musical tapes- tries that utilize conventional Western instruments along with ancient musical ones (such as the Chinese flute or the balafon, an African version of the xylophone), producing textures that may be manipulated by electronic means. These innovations are evident in the compositions of Tan Dun (b. 1957), a Chinese- born composer who has lived in the United States since 1986. Tan’s works, ranging from string quartets and operas to multime- dia pieces and film scores, represent a spirit of cultural pluralism that blends Chinese opera, folk songs, and instruments with traditional Western techniques and traditions ranging from medieval chant and romantic harmonies to audacious aural

Figure 38.18 NORIKO YAMAGUCHI, Keitai Girl, 2003.

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experiments (in the style of John Cage) using the sounds of water, torn paper, and bird calls.

Tan Dun’s powerful opera, The First Emperor (2006), marries the singing style of Beijing opera and the use of Chinese instruments to Western performance style and a standard Western orchestra. Directed by the noted film- maker Zhang Yimou (see chapter 37), the opera tells the story of the visionary and brutal Qin Shi Huang Di, China’s first imperial Son of Heaven. Filled with haunting, lyrical music, the work is more than a bridge between East and West; it portends a new direction. As Tan Dun pre- dicts: “Opera will no longer be a Western form, as it is no longer an Italian form.”

One of the most notable experiments in contemporary intercultural music is the Silk Road Project, which involves the exchange of Western musical traditions with those of the ancient Silk Road, the vast skein of trade routes that linked East Asia to Europe (see chapter 7). Begun in 1998, this extended effort to connect East and West was the brainchild of the renowned Japanese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma (b. 1955). Ma aimed to revitalize the spirit of cultural exchange once facilitated by the Silk Road, which he has called “the Internet of Antiquity.” In the current age of cultural pluralism, musicians from across Central Asia have joined with American virtuosos (selected by Ma) to produce works that integrate radically different compositional forms, instruments, and performance styles.

Cultural interdependence and the willful (and often electronically synthesized) fusion of different musical traditions have transformed contemporary music. The influence of Arabic chant, Indian ragas, and Latino rhythms is evident in jazz; rock and country blues give gospel music a new sound; Cuban brass punctuates con- temporary rock; and shimmering Asian drones propel New Age music. The global character of contemporary music is also evident in popular genres that engage issue-driven lyrics. The Jamaican musician Bob Marley (1945–1981) brought to the international scene the socially conscious music known as reggae—an eclectic style that draws on a wide variety of black Jamaican musical forms, includ- ing African religious music and Christian revival songs. Hip-hop, which combines loud, percussive music (often electronically mixed and manipulated by disc jockeys), jar- ring lyrics, and break-dancing (an acrobatic dance style) has moved from its inner-city origins to assume an interna- tional scope. This “mutating hybrid” makes use of various musical traditions: modern (disco, salsa, reggae, rock) and ancient (African call and response). Rap—the vocal dimen- sion of hip-hop—launches a fusillade of raw and socially provocative words chanted in rhymed couplets over an intense rhythmic beat.

While some critics lament that Western music has bifurcated into two cultures—art music and popular music—the fact is that these two traditions are becoming more alike, or, more precisely, they share various features of

a global musical menu. One example of this phenomenon is the orchestral suite Portraits in Blue (1995) by the American jazz pianist Marcus Roberts (b. 1963). Composed in what Roberts calls “semi-classical form,” the composition is a “personal listening mix” that conflates Beethoven, John Coltrane, Chopin, Little Richard, Billie Holiday, and George Gershwin. In the genre of free jazz, such musicians as John Zorn (b. 1953) borrow harmonic and rhythmic devices from the domains of bluegrass, klezmer (Jewish folk music), and punk rock. The new- music group known as Bang on a Can offers an eclectic mix of sounds that blur the boundary between classical and popular music. Part rock band and part amplified chamber group, its classically trained performers work in close collaboration with leading composers, jazz musicians, and pop artists. Such fusions of East and West, urban and folk, popular and classical styles, constitute the musical mosaic of the new millennium.

Dance and the Global Perspective Contemporary choreographers have been drawn increas- ingly to social issues and historical events: witness Charles Atlas’ Delusional (1994), a meditation on death and decay in Bosnia, and Paul Taylor’s 1999 spoof of the Ku Klux Klan (Oh, You Kid). The company known as Urban Bush Women, founded in 1984, uses dance to bring to light the histories of disenfranchised people. In their fiercely ener- getic performances, this Brooklyn-based ensemble of African, Caribbean, and black American women call on the spiritual traditions of the African diaspora.

The choreographer Ea Sola (b. 1970) fled her homeland at the height of the Vietnam War. Returning to Vietnam after fifteen years, she studied its traditional dance and music, both of which are present in her choreographed rec- ollection of war, Sécheresse et Pluie (Drought and Rain, 1995). This work, as well as others by contemporary cho- reographers, reflects the influence of butoh, a Japanese dance form that features simple, symbolic movements per- formed in a mesmerizingly slow and hypnotic manner. Ankoko butoh, meaning “dance of utter darkness,” grew out of ancient forms of Asian theater. Two other traditions have influenced contemporary choreography: Indian clas- sical dance and German Tanztheater (“dance theater”), an expressionistic style that features everyday actions, speech, and theatrical props (including, occasionally, live animals).

1947 Israel becomes an independent state 1954–1975 Vietnam War 1966–1976 Mao’s Cultural Revolution

1989 Berlin Wall falls 1989 Massacre in Tiananmen Square 2001 al-Qaeda terrorists attack the United States 2003 United States and coalition forces invade Iraq 2005 Terrorists attack London’s subway systemSee Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.��

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biodiversity the preservation of all life forms in the ecosystem

ecosystem the ecological community and its physical environment

virtual reality the digital simulation of artificial environments

The Global Perspective • Globalism—the interdependence of cultures and peoples in all

parts of the world—is the new model for contemporary society. • Digital technology links all parts of the world, and electronic

networks facilitate the dissemination of values and goods. The sense of collectivity in the integrated landscape of the global village has become a hallmark of a new world community.

• In this post-colonial era, efforts to reconcile Modernist modes of life with waning ancient traditions have challenged many regions, none more dramatically than Africa.

• The novels and short stories of Chinua Achebe deal with the warp between premodern and modern conditions in parts of Africa. Similarly, Africa’s visual artists draw on past traditions in creative projects that often involve modern media.

The Global Ecosystem • While environmental issues are not new, it is only recently that

world leaders have begun to come together to address the ailing health of the global ecosystem.

• E. O. Wilson, an early advocate for the preservation of the environment, has advanced “scientific humanism,” an interdisciplinary discipline that values biodiversity and a sound environmental ethic.

• Annie Dillard is one of many writers whose works express concern for the natural environment. In the visual arts, earthworks and “green” architectural designs bring attention to the importance of a healthy ecosystem. The energy-efficient buildings of Norman Foster are models of environmentally sustainable projects that are both beautiful and practical.

Globalism and Ethnic Identity • Ethnic identity has become a dominant theme in the

global community. • While immigration contributes to the blending of different ethnic

populations, it has inspired efforts to maintain distinctive ethnic values and traditions. In the United States, large numbers of Latin Americans have introduced into American culture a unique array of culinary, musical, and dance styles. The growing number of female writers and artists who deal with ethnic identity is represented by the Mexican-American novelist, Sandra Cisneros.

• Matters related to one’s homeland and ethnic roots have provoked strife in many parts of the world, as illustrated by the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel. The role of memory in the painful progress toward peaceful coexistence is voiced in the poems of Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish.

The Challenge of Globalism • Challenging the future of the global village, terrorism reflects an

extremist response to ideological and political differences. The devastating attack of the radical Muslim group al-Qaeda on the United States on September 11, 2001, provoked a variety of creative and commemorative responses in literature, the visual arts, and music.

• The poets Wislawa Szymborska and Seamus Heaney have both addressed the threat of terrorism in the global community.

• In the last three decades, China has emerged as a major world power. As state officials have loosened controls over artistic expression, China’s academically trained painters and sculptors have taken the world by storm with a variety of original projects.

The Arts in the Global Village • The visual arts of contemporary times are no longer limited to

one medium or genre; they are often hybridized and are increasingly dependent on digital technology.

• Video plays a key role in the performance pieces and installation art of Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, which make use of images in ways that “represent information.”

• Computers and digital innovations have allowed us to access all areas of the world without having to travel. They have become essential to creative projects in film, photography, and performance art, to the development of new techniques, such as animation and virtual reality, and to the emergence of new kinds of visual simulation.

• Western music and dance have responded to the influence of the cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Sharing the features of a global musical menu, distinctions between popular and art (classical) music are becoming less pronounced. The compositions of the Chinese composer Tan Dun and the efforts of the Silk Road Project are representative of the successful integration of widely diverse musical traditions.

CD Two Selection 26 Kalhor, Gallop of a Thousand Horses, The Silk Road Project, 2005

BK6_001-173.indd 173BK6_001-173.indd 173 05/12/2009 6:58 AM05/12/2009 6:58 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

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