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There is presently a good deal of impetus among
proponents of New Wave art to deny sharing any aims with Minimalism. On
the deepest level, this reflects the inter-generational rivalry and distrust
that has characterized the climate of modern art since the nineteenth
century and which overwhelmingly characterizes the New York art world
as well. On a more conscious level, both the New Wave artists and the
people who are promoting them are firmly committed to the denial of history.
The artists are motivated by their uncontrollable anger; the promoters
must deny any true connection between the new art and the past if they
are to maintain the illusion of novelty necessary to market art to an
increasingly speculative entrepreneurial class steeped in the mentality
of planned obsolescence.
But
in order to understand the significance of the current New Wave movement,
it is necessary to correctly identify its antecedents. In fact, New Wave,
Minimalism, and Beat writing are all concerned with the same issue. All
three express America's fascination-repulsion for its shallow cultural
roots and its vulnerability to the impact of techological change.
Initially,
any connection between New Wave and Minimal art seems unlikely since one
of the most obvious manifestations of New Wave is its opposition to what
Jeffrey Deitch calls the "Post-Minimalist Academy.” However,
this Post-Minimalist academy itself represented a “normalization”
of the aims of the original Minimalist group during the stifling days
of the Nixon administration. The political intent of Minimalism was transformed
into the various formal, anthropological, nature- and craft-oriented escapisms
of Post-Minimalism.
However, there is evidence of the connection between the Minimalist and
New Wave sensibilities in the series of essays that Robert Smithson wrote
in the late '60s and early '70s. In his later writings, Smithson also
formulated a strategy for dealing with the problems of normalization and
self-destruction that have plagued the Beat and Minimalist movements and
now threaten the New Wave artists almost as soon as they come forward.
In 1966, Smithson published his first piece, "Entropy and the New
Monuments,” in which he described the then emerging Minimalist artists'
fascination with post-industrial culture, their passion for movies and
movie houses, "printed matter,” science fiction, information
theory, and geology. He claimed that the undeveloped, blunt nature of
the work of these artists was a result of their torpid, "entropic"
state, which echoed the rundown condition of our civilization.
Consider this description of the movie-going practices of Minimalist artists
in "Entropy and the New Monuments:"
Some
artists see an infinite number of movies. [Peter] Hutchinson, for instance,
instead of going to the country to study nature, will go to see a movie
on 42nd Street, like "Horror of Party Beach,” two or three
times and contemplate it for weeks on end. The movies give a ritual
pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of low-budget
mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance. (The "blood
and guts" of horror movies provides for their "organic needs,"
while the "cold steel" of Sci-fi movies provides for their
"inorganic needs." Serious movies are too heavy on "values,"
and so are dismissed by the more perceptive artists. Such artists have
X-ray eyes, and can see through all of that cloddish substance that
passes for "the deep and profound" these days.
Written
fifteen years ago, this description sounds like an exact blueprint for
the approach of a New Wave artist. Peter Hutchinson, like the music group,
The B-52s, is preoccupied with post-industrial beach culture. He even
prefers to see his movies at Times Square, anticipating another symbol
of the current generation. Like the Minimal artists, the New Wavers are
today rejecting the 'cloddish substance" of traditional humanistic
"values" for the perceptions and emotions triggered by pornography
(Jimmy DeSana, Jane Dickson), science fiction (Steve Keister, Ronnie Fischer),
and news images (Ilona Granet, Becky Howland).
Like Minimalists, New Wavers look to media images rather than to a nostalgic
conception of nature to inform them on the substance of reality. But Minimalists
and New Wave artists have reacted differently to these same horrifying
images. While the Minimalists were frozen into a state of decisionless
catatonia (what Smithson refers to as a "perpetual trance" and
an "entropic state") the New Wavers are thrust into a condition
of twitching hysteria (what Ronny Cohen calls "Energism"). This
is the essential difference between the blankmetal-flaked repetition"
of a Judd sculpture and the awkward, scrawled charcoal-on-cardboard drawing
of Becky Howland's Transmission Towers seen in the December Colab
show at Brooke Alexander. (It should be noted that the entropic, catatonic
Minimalists tended to deal in physical recreations of their subject matter
in abstract form, while the hysterical, "energistic" New Wave
artists lean toward making images of specific phenomena.)
Also in "Entropy and the New Monuments" Smithson explains the
kind of visual material that interests the Minimal artist:
Like
the movies and the movie houses, "printed matter" plays an
entropic role: maps, charts, advertisements, artbooks, sciencebooks,
money, architectural plans, math books, graphs, diagrams, newspapers,
comics, booklets and pamphlets from industrial companies. Judd has a
labyrinthine collection of printed matter some of which he "looks
at" rather than reads.
Since
this explanation in 1966, "Printed Matter" (in the form of "artists'
books") has become the exclusive domain of the Post-Minimalist fixation
of phenomenological philosophy and private reality. In the late ‘sixties,
as at present, it provided artists with a means of radically reordering
their perceptions of society. Smithson explains that Donald Judd "might
take a math equation, and, by sight, translate it into a metal a progression
of structured intervals.” This was a means of escaping the outmoded
convention of "relational" compositional. Judd's writing style,
Smithson continues, "has much in common with the terse factual descriptions
one finds in his collection of geology books." The science fiction
interests of artists like Judd helped them break away from received cultural
values and artistic modes.
Printed matter, as Smithson described it, is playing a similar role in
New Wave culture today. In their song, "Don't Worry About the Government,"
the Talking Heads underline their fascination with map consciousness and
advertising slogans. Artist Peter Fend recently presented Future States,
a drawing in which possible future political boundaries were drawn on
a world map. Money, too, has recently been reappearing thematically. In
the Times Square Show, Christof Kohlhofer presented Billion Dollar
Bills. In a recent Colab show, Andrea Callard had a piece entitled
I made this money, what can I buy.
At this point, we can look even further back from 1966 to 1956. This same
concern, this pained awareness of the impact of technological change on
culture, has its source in the work of the Beat generation writers.
Unlike the New Wavers, the Minimalists seem to have been well aware of
their debt to Beat writing. Smithson, for example, readily acknowledged
the Influence that the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg and William
Burroughs, had on his development. Conscious of this heritage, Smithson
referred proudly to his connections with various Beat figures in his autobiographical
interview for the Archives of American Art in 1972." He mentioned
that he was born in Passaic, New Jersey, next door to Paterson where AlIen
Ginsberg was from. He recalled visiting the aged William Carlos Williams
and how Williams “talked a lot about Ginsberg coming out at all
hours of the night.” Influenced by the Beat idea of unencumbered
travel, Smithson hitchhiked around the United States and Mexico between
1956 and 1958. "When I got back On the Road was out, and
all those people were around, you know, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg,
both of whom I met.”
Consider, for example, the imagery of Howl, Ginsberg's protest
against the tortuous structure of post-industrial society. The hell he
describes is lived out in "robot apartments" and "invisible
suburbs," "in empty lots and diner backyards," "in
movie houses rickety rows," on "tenement roofs, and in front
of a “neon blinking traffic light.”
Ginsberg's obsessions with urban life, the terrifying products of science
and industry, and the structure of commerce, all themes of Minimalism
and New Wave, are all present in this stanza from Howl:
(I
saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness)… who
were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
amid the blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron
regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies
of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors,
or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.
William Burroughs is another, even darker precursor of this sensibility.
Smithson read Naked Lunch In Rome in 1961. He commented that
"the imagery…corresponded…to a kind of grotesque massive
accumulation of all kinds of rejective rituals…. Erecting those
kinds of ritual situation fascinated me.” Burroughs’ preoccupation
with violence, sexual fantasy, technological backfire. and third-world
settings also qualify him as an important precursor of New Wave, as we
can see from this typical passage from The Soft Machine (1961):
In
the blue windy morning masturbating a soiled Idiot body of cold scar
tissue - satatonic limestone hands folded over his yen - a friend of
any boy structure cut by a species of mollusk - Street boys of the green
gathered - slow bronze smiles from a land of grass without memory -
cool casual little ghosts of adolescent spasm - mental excrement and
crystal glooms of the fist city - under a purple twilight our clothes
shredded mummy linen on obsidian floors - Panama clung to our bodies
-
"You come with me, Meester?"
Northern lights flicker from his "Yes" - The rope is adjusted
- Writhing in wind black hair, bursts through his flesh - Great canines
tear into his gums with exquisite toothache pleasure - The green cab
boys go all the way on any line.
The Beat and New Wave movements are both emotionally "hot."
Their art is based on intensive affective involvement in experience. For
many of its practitioners, this kind of participation has been deadly.
A pattern of self-destruction emerges: Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Sid
Vicious all died tragically. Dylan was almost killed in a motorcycle accident
in 1966. Burroughs was a junkie.
On the other hand, Minimalism was a "cool" movement. Its practitioners
were detached. They protected themselves with their intellectual distance.
The danger for them was in becoming academic, neutralized. With most of
the leaders of this generation – Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin,
De Maria. Sol LeWitt – that indeed occurred. The failure of these
artists to develop beyond their initial statements is the tragedy of the
Minimalist generation.
Robert Smithson's writings are a link between the Beat generation and
the Minimalists, and between Minimalism and New Wave. Smithson also died
a tragic early death. However, his death was seemingly random and accidental,
devoid of any self-destructive intent.
But in the last two years of his life, Smithson developed a methodology
for negotiating the narrow way between normalization and self-destruction.
In his interviews of 1972, he came very close to codifying this strategy,
based largely on "Marxian" ideas, for confronting the problems
and illusions of Late Capitalism. The three interdependent principles
of his method are Consciousness, Reality, and Dialogue. Smithson insisted
that artists must be conscious of the motivations that guide their work,
of their role in society, and of the role their work plays. ("And
you know a lot of people just don't like to hear this sort of thing. They
prefer the artist to be dumb and unconscious and basically crazy.”)
He insisted that artists must try to describe what they believe to be
the nature of reality and not be seduced into creating escapist "dream
worlds" (either pleasant or haunted). He claimed that artists who
are "dumb enough to think they're on a cloud or something”
actually serve to reinforce reactionary political values by reiterating
social and political illusions in the dream worlds they create. (He said
that art was the opiate of the middle class.)
Lastly, he argued that the only way for the artist to become conscious
and to figure out what is real is to engage in dialogue. His work contained
dialogues between art and environment, artist and art world, art world
and society. He railed against the "Kantian myth" that the art
object is a "thing in itself." Instead he urged an understanding
that the work of artists is dialectical: “Things are not things
in themselves. They are related to other things." He spoke of a dialectical
method that "seeks a world outside of cultural confinement:"
See,
what I'm talking about are relationships. Art has tended to be viewed
in terms of isolation, neutralization, separation, and this is encouraged.
Art is supposed to be on some eternal plane, free from the experiences
of the world, and I'm more interested in those experiences, not as a
refutation of art, but as a part of that experience, or interwoven,
in other words, all these factors come into it.
Already, the New Wave generation has had its casualties. Almost as soon
as it has appeared before the public some of its artists have destroyed
themselves, others have quickly allowed their work to be neutralized.
In order to combat the mounting intensity of these pressures, the artist
must acquire a coherent methodology. To adopt principles like Smithson's
may be the only way the present generation can survive long enough to
bring its work to fruition.
NOTES
1. Jeffrey Deitch, "Report from Times Square," Art in America.
(September 1980).
2. John Berger coined the term “normalization” to describe
the process of political and social retrenchment that took place throughout
the Western world after the “watershed” year of 1968. John
Berger, “Between Two Colmars," About Looking. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980.
3. Robert Smithson. "Entropy and the New Monuments" Artforum
(June 1966). The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York: New York University
Press, 1979.
4. Ibid.
5. Ronny Cohen, "Energism,” Artforum (September 1980).
6. "Entropy and the New Monuments," op. cit.. p. 15.
7. Ibid., p.15.
8. Smithson, “Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of
American Art Smithsonian Institute," ibid.
9. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1956.
10. Ibid.
11. "Interview,” op. cit.
12. William Burroughs, The Soft Machine. New York: Grove Press,
1961.
13. Smithson, "Conversation with Robert Smithson on April 22, 1972.
Edited by Bruce Kurtz,” op. cit. Subsequent quotes from Smithson
are also from this interview.
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