Kubernesis

~ “Charles [Eames] was on the board of the the Ringling Brothers [Clown] College and often referred to the circus as an example of what design and art should be.”

–Beatriz Colomina, “Surrounded by Screens: The Eames’s Media House”

Highly influential New York artist Cindy Sherman made taking selfies an art form before the word even existed. Throughout her career she has experimented with costume, prosthetics, makeup and digital photography to create highly exaggerated and ofttimes grotesque character studies. A new exhibition at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane includes more than 50 large-scale works by Sherman. The images draw from her series Clowns (2003–04), made in the aftermath of the 2001 US terrorist attacks; Society portraits (2008), and work made in conjunction with fashion houses Balenciaga and Chanel

“There was a point where artists who made photographs and photographers were like really two separate tribes completely,” the artist Laurie Simmons said this week, minutes before she was honored at the International Center of Photography’s sixth Spotlights luncheon on Tuesday. Art, feminism, gender roles, fashion, and pop culture all changed dramatically during Simmons’s career, which spans over four decades.

Lots of cool photos to accompany Colomina’s “Split Wall.” Fascinating stuff!

“The look is directed . . . in such deliberate manner as to suggest the reading of these houses as frames for a view.”

— Beatriz Colomina, “Split Wall”

“But with all the interrogation of the word feminine, one sometimes forgets that in France in the late 1960s, it was the word écriture (writing) that was the common denominator for a wide range of explosive practices and publications.

—Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, “Introduction to Hélène Cixous”

“My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor etc…. For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. Stories merge and spaces relate to each other. Every space requires a different height: the dining room is surely higher than the pantry, thus the ceilings are set at different levels. To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course. Coming back to your question, it is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realize in Dr Müller’s house.”

–Adolf Loos, Shorthand record of a conversation in Plzeň (Pilsen), 1930

Amelia,

I’m glad that you actually enjoyed the Michael Fried essay, indeed found it to be one of your favorites. Most students enjoy this the least of anything I assign. So, good for you! As I’ve said, I don’t know that I agree with all Fried says, but like T.S. Eliot, he does, for all his conservatism of taste, clearly identify a radical shift in the history of human sensibility. He feels certain, in 1967, that we are quickly crossing over into a whole new era in which the old values will be liquidated and replaced by new forms; or, rather, non-forms, mere brutes shapes. From the crossing, Fried believes, there may well be no return.

It’s important to keep in mind that when we say ‘spiritual values’ in Fried, we most emphatically do not mean religious doctrines or the Spirit of God. I’m quite certain Fried is an atheist. We’re talking instead about the ‘human spirit’, the feeling of ennoblement which great art and literature, or great pieces of music or dance, can awaken within us. The experience of such artworks liberates us, if only momentarily, from a world brute things; wood which is merely wood, stone which is merely stone, noise with is merely noise – none of these materials animated by any sense of life. Notice, for instance, that in Robert Smithson’s “Non-Site: Line of Wreckage”, any remaining sense of living verticality, of human upright posture, of the ‘statuesque’, is achieved not through an act of sculpting, but simply by stacking rocks into a bin. Take away the visible mechanical support, and the rocks would immediately collapse into a shapeless pile. Smithson in fact ‘lets things slide’ this exact way in later works, ‘achieves’ (if that word even applies anymore) this effect of collapse even more emphatically in pieces such as ‘Glue Pour‘ and ‘A Heap of Language’.

Fried believes, in 1967, that it’s still possible, desirable, event urgently necessary that we keep up the fight to bring into the world artworks that suggest some sense of ‘life’ – if only as a pure effect. Meanwhile, Minimalists and Pop Artists, according to Fried, would prefer to occupy a world that is mere empty space and extended matter, without any emotional depth, without any sense that the physical entities with which we interact are anything greater than the sum of their parts. Rather than the larger, more compelling wholes which we see in traditional art, the new non-art will be nothing other than an arrangement of pieces. To look at it another way, the organic is here being replaced by the mechanical. Instead of life forms, we have clocks and sundials. This is what Fried means by ‘literalism’. The word ‘minimalism’ suggest that the best way to achieve this state devoid of all transcendence is through the manufacture of objects so simple they have no parts at all hence no composition. Meanwhile, Pop Art embraces the inorganic and ‘soulless’ through 1) rejecting the creation of new images in favor of the mere theft of already existing ones, 2) the deliberate use of machines rather than human bodies to create art. Who cares about live dancers when you can have robots? Who cares about writing and reading poems when you can simply print receipts? Why bother to dream up new images when there is Silly Putty? And why would anybody bother to learn to paint or draw when there is Spirograph?

This is where Fried’s use of the terms ‘anthropological’ comes into play. Like “presence’ (either ‘real’ or brute), he uses anthropological to mean two very different things. In the good sense (for Fried) anthropological refers to artworks which seem to want to communicate something, which seem to ‘mean’. We may not know exactly what they mean, but they nevertheless seem to ‘gesture’, like ghosts trying to speak, though only “oooooooooo” comes out of their mouth. Anthropological, in the bad sense (again, for Fried) refers not to a world of pure formal gestures (such as dance), but rather a world of mere physical traces, one in which pregnant gesturing is replaced by mere mark-making, fluttering hands are replaced my inert footprints left in the dirt, anonymous smudges left on the wall, rocks propped up for some unaccountable reason 20,000 years ago. To put it in the technical language of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, icons and symbols are being replaces by indexes. To put it in more common language, art is being replaced by road signs.

Choreographer Lar Lubovitch is a longtime devotee of jazz music. He pays tribute to a visual and music artist in “Coltrane’s Favorite Things, ” which premiered in New York City in February 2010. Lubovitch choreographed the piece to Coltrane’s live recording of “My Favorite Things.” The dance is performed against a backdrop reproduction of Jackson Pollock‘s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30).”

True, both paintings and road signs have the power to stop us, move us, or make us yield. But are the two modes of address really the same thing? Fried and his enemies will both say no. Fried, if it still matters to anyone in 2020, will doggedly defend paintings to the death, while both Minimalism (Robert Morris) and Pop (Andy Warhol) will blithely choose a STOP sign or crosswalk stripes over the Mona Lisa or a William de Kooning any day. Putting it this way goes a good distance toward explicating the notorious anecdote about the day Tony Smith took a late night joyride on the New Jersey turnpike and decided it was better than anything he had experienced in a museum. That was the night the Artist in him died and became the mere caster of ‘Die’s.

In sum, for Friend, 1967 marks the point at which the progress or adventure of the Human Spirit is abandoned and replaced by mere traffic lanes and barriers. Or, in the case of Pop Art, 1967 marks the point at which the feeling of love and longing are abandoned and replaced by the interest of money. As you inquired about persons poised on the border between these two realms, there are a few key liminal figures, artists on the frontline of the battle between these two radically opposed views of human experience and expression. Most impressive to Fried, as I’ve said before, are the American painter Frank Stella and the British sculptor Another Caro, as both these artists struggle to begin with brute shapes and then ‘suspend’ (the fancy Hegelian term is ‘aufheben’) them; which is to say, to destroy them or cancel their status as mere objects, while simultaneous preserving them and exalting them as Art. Hence, the title of Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood”, which should be read Art versus Objecthood.

In sum, for Friend, 1967 marks the point at which the progress or adventure of the Human Spirit is abandoned and replaced by mere traffic lanes and barriers. Or, in the case of Pop Art, 1967 marks the point at which the feeling of love and longing are abandoned and replaced by the interest of money. As you inquired about persons poised on the border between these two realms, there are a few key liminal figures, artists on the frontline of the battle between these two radically opposed views of human experience and expression. Most impressive to Fried, as I’ve said before, are the American painter Frank Stella and the British sculptor Another Caro, as both these artists struggle to begin with brute shapes and then ‘suspend’ (the fancy Hegelian term is ‘aufheben’) them; which is to say, to destroy them or cancel their status as mere objects, while simultaneous preserving them and exalting them as Art. Hence, the title of Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood”, which should be read Art versus Objecthood.

You can see examples of this sort of work not only in my earlier post comparing and contrasting two very different Renaissance depictions of Christ (Ruben’s, warm and freshly resurrected, vs. Grunewald’s, cold and dead as a leftover pork chop), but also by comparing two different kinds of ‘drapery’ (Morris Lewis’s, lovingly painted and seemingly shimmering with light, vs. Robert Morris’s, merely dip dyed and nailed to the wall to hang in shreds). I will provide images of other artists Fried considered to be major players in this war to preserve Art. While their results may not be as successful as those of Stella and Caro, what matters to Fried most is not their success or failure, but simply their determination not to surrender in the fight.

Jules Olitski

Larry Poons

Anne Truitt

Kenneth Noland

“The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.”

–Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in The Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

Virtual Futures presents Anna Feigenbaum in conversation on her new book, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today.

Anna Feigenbaum shares the story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets. Originally designed to force people out from behind barricades and trenches, tear gas causes burning of the eyes and skin, tearing, and gagging. Chemical weapons are now banned from war zones. But today, tear gas has become the most commonly used form of “less-lethal” police force.

“In addition to looking at entanglement of colonialism and the history of capitalism we also have to look at the rise of Public Relations. And it’s not a coincidence in the 1920s during the Edward Bernays rise of Public Relations. The first marketing of tear gas is happening this kind of Bernays-style PR stunts.”

–Ana Feigenbaum

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/11/26/mexico-tear-gas-investigation-trump-border-protection-miguel-marquez-dnt-ebof-vpx.cnn

Walter Benjamin’s famous essay discusses the conditions and effects of cultural objects losing their ‘aura’ or sacred status. But is it possible for nature to undergo a similar process of devaluation through the ever increasing ease of access to it?

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us.

How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it’s called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it.

Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner’s new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and “leaving things be.” He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree “a resource” and wilderness “a management unit.”

Here’s a reply I wrote to one of your peers, who asked me a few excellent questions yesterday. Perhaps some of you will find my spontaneous thought on this extremely influential thinker to be interesting and helpful.

Joe,

I’m super impressed that you chose to read this essay, even though it was not officially assigned, as was the case in semesters past. Your endeavor speaks very well of you. I admire your hard work and thoughtful remarks. They will certainly count positively toward your overall grade. In the short term, having read this essay will do much to prepare you to read Beatriz Colomina, who is our next author.

Benjamin’s essay can be a bit confusing. Even persons very experienced in these matters are not always in full agreement over Benjamin’s contentions. Im these matters, I often find myself disagreeing very powerfully with persons who are much smarter and better informed than I. So take my opinions for what they’re worth.

In any case, Benjamin, from the very beginning, announces that art, since the rise of the modern machine age, has undergone a number of changes. These are not incidental modifications, but they are radical transformations that cut right to the very heart of human experience. They reveal that we now live in a reality the likes of which earlier societies had no notion. Benjamin is clear in his belief that the first works of art had a religious and ritual function. Each work of art was utterly unique and existed only in a single place. Persons wanting to experience such works of art – which originally was for devotional purposes – had to go on a literal pilgrimage. Further, such works generally could be viewed only one person at a time. This is what Benjamin means by ‘aura’ (which derives from the Latin word for gold). The work of art was special, singular, valuable, irreplaceable. The Sistine Chapel ceiling didn’t come to you, but you had to travel to the Vatican to see it.

With the rise of mechanical reproduction – of which Benjamin gives a quick survey – the poles are reversed. As art can now easily be copied and distributed through mechanical means, it is now possible to have the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or Michaelangelo’s David, in your own home, and on demand. And all you have to do is pay a few dollars and flip a switch. The work of art, under these conditions, loses its singular qualities, its aura. Further, artworks no longer need to be viewed by isolated individuals, one at a time, but they can be viewed simultaneously by a mass of persons.

Nothing embodies the new conditions of production and consumption more completely than the latest form of art, cinema. Cinema is not just the newest form of art, but it is also the most complex and expensive form of art. Entire factories, with diversified teams of employees, come together in a coordinated effort to produce a movie. And the material resources upon which they draw to make a movie come from every corner of the globe. Indeed, the only other human creation whose production involves such an enormous coordinated effort is war. Already politics begins to enter into the picture.

In addition to mass production, films also involve mass consumption. As I said, we watch them not in isolation but rather as members of a large audience. What Benjamin suggests is that the process of movie making – which involves scripting, set and costume design, lighting, filming, editing, and a thousand other tasks, as the credits of at the end of any movie will indicate – not only assembles an artificial reality of a sort that could never be achieved on stage, but it also assembles a mass of viewers which could never be created through any other means. Filmmakers are not just making movies, but they are actually creating mass consciousness. This means not just that movies fill our heads with thoughts which would not occupy them otherwise, but they also create a kind of conscious, a massive ‘herd mentality’ through which an entire population can be made to think, feel, and act alike.

This group think is especially alarming to Benjamin, because he realizes that it can and will be used to political ends. Not only can films create the larger-than-life media image of political leaders, but they they can also create a mass of millions of persons willing to follow that leader to war. These are things Benjamin holds generally to be true. But in particular he has in mind major events occurring in his own day. Hitler had recently come to power in German, and a major contribution to Hitler’s rise were the political rallies regularly organized to display him and promote his ideas. These were popular and successful events, but they were nothing in comparison to what could be achieved through the power of cinema.

The year just prior to Benjamin’s essay saw the production and distribution of a major film by director Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of The Will. For all her questionable motives, Riefenstahl was unquestionably brilliantly innovative and hugely ambitious young woman who used all the means made available to her to create a work of art the likes of which the world had never seen. Looking back at her work now, it is easy to be horrified. But it’s also hard not to be simultaneously impressed by the way Riefenstahl turned a bunch of loosely organized public speeches into Olympian events – she actually makes a remarkable documentary film of the Berlin Olympics – but also by the way she manages to turn a dumpy and homely little man with an odd mustache into the greatest movie star of the day. It was a tremendous feat that actually won Reifenstahl an award at Cannes for ‘best propaganda film of the year’ – though nobody would offer that type of award these days. Who knows what will be the case in the coming years.

Anyway, Benjamin is rightly alarmed by these happenings and writes his essay to reveal the awesome and dangerous power of film. But he also admits that because filmmaking is a highly technical process, one can learn, if not to make films for oneself, then at least to ‘read’ film so as not to be deceived and indoctrinated by it. Indeed, it’s possible, and Benjamin insists absolutely necessary, to make experimental films which resist indoctrinating the masses and actually educate people so that they can see that the world we take for reality is in fact the product of the media industry. There are numerous examples of such experimental, pedagogical cinema to which I might refer you, but the director whose work I hoped to show you in class was the Soviet filmmaker Ziga Vertov, whose Man With a Movie Camera expressly sets out to teach its audience how films are made, to reveal all the hidden labor behind the finished product.

This should explain Benjamin’s concluding remarks. Thinking of the intimate relationship between movies and war – something we still see today – Benjamin remarks that never before has it been possible for humanity to look at the destruction of the world, at the destruction of itself – from the perspective of the very gods – and perceive it to be the greatest show on earth. In the light of this possibility, it becomes imperative for Benjamin that we begin think of art always in political terms. As politics has become the dominant form of art, it now becomes urgently necessary to reverse the equation and expose the political motives underlying any art. The motives may be hidden, but Benjamin insists they are always there.

In addition to launching an entire new academic discipling known as Media Studies, Benjamin’s work marks a decisive turn of art and criticism toward the political. It becomes the role of the critic now to point out the underlying political motives associated with all art, however hidden those motives may be. Most every art critic following Michael Fried will have read Benjamin and the greatest care, and taken his ideas very seriously. If Fried believes that art should be the last sanctuary which remains free of all personal interest and above all politics, any serious critic coming after Fried reject this utopian ideal and instead follow Benjamin’s recommendations, rejecting any notion of art as value-free and existing for its own sake. Everything we read for the rest of the semester will proceed along these lines.

Ok, that’s it for now. I just the just genuinely explanatory and interesting. Thanks so much, as always, for your participation!

I hope you can see that this art, though well wrought and highly interesting, hardly has the sublime and heroic (male) ambitions of the work we’ve seen from the like of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, or other New York School painters. Far more than the sublime or even the beautiful, it’s interested in the human. Paintings of humans, for humans, by a human. Geniuses need not apply.

Frantz Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect, sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time, and many others. His impact was immediate upon arrival in Algeria, where in 1953 he was appointed to a position in psychiatry at Bilda-Joinville Hospital. His participation in the Algerian revolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations of blackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture and society. Fanon published in academic journals and revolutionary newspapers, translating his radical vision of anti-colonial struggle and decolonization for a variety of audiences and geographies, whether as a young academic in Paris, a member of the Algeria National Liberation Front (FLN), Ambassador to Ghana for the Algerian provisional government, or revolutionary participant at conferences across Africa. Following a diagnosis and short battle with leukemia, Fanon was transported to Bethesda, Maryland (arranged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) for treatment and died at the National Institute for Health facility on December 6, 1961.

Prescient Tense

By Peter Rainer
News York Magazine
January 12, 2004

The most electrifyingly timely movie playing in New York was made in 1965. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is famous, but for some time it’s been available only in washed-out prints with poorly translated, white-on-white subtitles. The newly translated and subtitled 35-millimeter print at Film Forum is presumably the version that was privately screened in August for military personnel by the Pentagon as a field guide to fighting terrorism. Former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski volunteered this blurb: “If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers.” I wonder if these politicos are aware that Pontecorvo’s epic was once used by the Black Panthers as a training film? In fact, not much in the current Iraq situation is historically comparable to the late-fifties Algerian struggle for independence dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, but its anatomy of terror remains unsurpassed—and, woefully, ever fresh.

(read more)

It’s hard to overestimate he significance of photography in the work (and life) of critic Susan Sontag, perhaps one of the 20th century’s most photographed women. (Sontag spent the final years of her life in a long-term relationship with noted celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz, who documented her demise from cancer.) To elucidate this subject it might be valid to refer to the work of French art historian, novelist and statesman André Malraux – a figure whose ideas we’ll soon see critiqued in the comparatively recent writings of art historian Douglas Crimp.

One of Malraux’s very first texts, a 1922 preface to an exhibition catalog, already presents this notion of art as a vast semiotic system, a multiple chorus of meaning. In it Malraux had written: “We can feel only by comparison. He who knows Andromaque or Phedre will gain a better idea of the French genius by reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream than by reading all the other tragedies by Racine.

– Rosalind E. Krauss

In particular, one thinks of Malraux’s concept of the “Museum without Walls”. Taking the form of an enormous book, Voices of Silence, this museum was more properly to be understood as a strictly ideal space in which art works from multiple cultures and historical periods would be reduced to weightless and isolated photographic images, thus allowing for a free-association and comparison of a vast catalog of works in various media. Not that it makes strict sense, but my impression is that Wimsatt & Beardsley’s criticism is essentially an similar attempt to reduce all poems to pure data, disembodied word images.

Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara

If you think about it, photography, which reduces all of life and culture to documents, presents itself as the most anonymous, intentionless and affectless medium – that medium which, even more than language was for Shelley, is no medium at all, and consequently the very best medium to function as the “universal” medium through which to convert a host of culturally specific works of art into to a large-scale display of “global” culture. Photography converts the work of art into a sign, and the sign, like the commodity in Marx, obeys the law of universal equivalency and exchangeability. Or so Jean Baudrillard taught in his For A Critique of The Political Economy of The Sign.

A long overdue corrective, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 shifts the historical gaze of “American” art. Rather than situating Europe as the sole center of Modernism, the exhibition positions Mexican Modern artists as the school many US artists were following, not least for their influence in the country’s socio-political realm. Themes which centered Indigeneity, celebrations of the rural landscape, and visions of Mexican identity that deemphasized European heritage, all the while denouncing the violence of nationalism, were among those that most influenced US artists. 

The curatorial thesis accounts for the transit and direct exchanges of artists working in both countries. José Clemente Orozco for instance, was the first of the muralists to visit the US in 1927, and produced murals in California and New York. His work had a significant impact on that of artists including Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and Jackson Pollock. Through strategic juxtapositions, we see the trace of Orozco’s broad and long brushstrokes in Lawrence’s pointed ones, and in Charles White’s geometrical compositions. A particularly extraordinary pairing is of Orozco’s paintings with Lawrence’s Migration Series, revealing the social awareness of both artists in their subject matter.

In the autumn of 1945, two artists – not young, but not quite middle-aged, either – moved from New York to a village called Springs, near East Hampton on Long Island. These newlyweds had no money. It would be a while before they could make the small clapboard farmhouse that was to be their new home any less freezing in winter, let alone install an indoor bathroom. But this isolated spot, with its ramshackle outbuildings and its view of the Accabonac Creek, was for them a bit of heaven – in the beginning, at least. Together, they cooked and gardened. Together, they went digging for clams, travelling to the beach on their bicycles (they did not own a car). Above all, they worked: he in their barn, she in an upstairs bedroom. Life was, for them both, mostly about painting. Their allegiance to it was fierce: as intense as their loyalty to each other, from which it could never fully be separated.

One of these artists, Jackson Pollock, would one day become very famous – the hard-living central figure of American abstract expressionism, known the world over for his drip paintings, made by allowing the paint to drop from his brush or a can on to a canvas laid on the floor – and, thanks to this, the house is now a US historic landmark, open to the public. … But it’s not Pollock I’m interested in today. I’m looking for traces of his extraordinary and prodigiously talented wife, Lee Krasner, a major retrospective of whose work will open at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, later this month.

Back in 1959, Texan alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman went to New York’s Five Spot venue armed with just a plastic saxophone and proceeded to wreak havoc with a radical new sound that rejected orthodox notions of melody, harmony, and structure – the supposed bedrocks of conventional western music. He called it free jazz, and even the normally insouciant Miles Davis was perturbed by it. As he wrote, in his customary pithy way, in his book, Miles: The Autobiography: “He just came and f__ke up everybody.” Some saw Coleman as a visionary – classica lconductor Leonard Bernstein proclaimed him a genius – while others, among them trumpeter Roy Eldridge, were less enthusiastic and thought the saxophonist was a charlatan. “I think he’s jiving, baby,” Eldridge said.

Back then, admitting that you were partial to free jazz came with a high price – depending on who was “outing” you, you could face ridicule, hostility and even the prospect of being ostracised. 

The Abstract Expressionists emerged from obscurity in the late 1940s to establish New York as the centre of the art world – but some say they became pawns of US spies in the Cold War.

“Societies, like Soviet Russia, without any outrageous modern art of their own, seem to us to be only half alive.”

— Leo Steinberg

Willem de Kooning
Woman, 1949
Oil on canvas with enamel and charcoal
152 x 121 cm
private collection

Modern Art as CIA ‘Weapon’

Revealed: How The Spy Agency Used Unwitting Artists
Such as Pollock and de Kooning in A Cultural Cold War
The Indepentent
By Frances Stonor Saunders
Sunday, 22 October 1995

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art – President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex- com- munists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
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Philip Guston
Painting, 1954
Oil on canvas
63 1/4 x 60 1/8 inches
Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Franz Kline
Orange and Black Wall, 1959
Oil on Canvas
66 3/4 x 144 1/2 inches
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

“One of the most extraordinary, beautiful,
and original works of art that I know of.”
– Susan Sontag

The seeds of Butoh were planted in the experimental atmosphere of the late 1950s, when Tatsumi Hijikata and co-founder Kazuo Ohno began to question the nature of dance itself. Butoh was born out the turmoil and chaos resulting in a loss of identity following WWII that propelled them to reexamine their own culture and to create an indigenous modern genre of dance. Referring to various styles of Western ballroom dance, “Butoh” was adopted by Hijikata and soon his dance was titled Ankoku Butoh or “dance of darkness.” Dance as a creative interaction between form and content conveying the spirit of the times was markedly different from the interpretation of existing forms as practiced in traditional dance/theater and classical ballet. For Hijikata the best body for a Butoh dancer is a corpse, a body that asks for and expresses nothing.