Summer, 1959
“THIS MAN IS DANGEROUS”—the old post-office ads alerting the community to a malefactor at large, armed and with a record, are joyously brought to mind by the bold figure of Harold Rosenberg in his book of collected essays, The Tradition of the New. The man who invented the term action painting is an actionist critic. All his life, as these essays show, he has been interested only in action, in the “act,” a favorite word with him, succinct as a pistol-shot. Before action painting, there was the action poem (the poem as destructive agent—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, Valéry), and political action (Marxism). To Mr. Rosenberg, action and the imitation of an action—drama—are essentially the same. He is exhilarated by the hero in history, which means that he sees history as a stage of sublime or ridiculous gestures; the hero’s historical “task,” what used to be called the deed, is finding the appropriate gesture. This requires a willed transformation of the merely given self, as in the evolution of the dramatic character of the Bolshevik, a secular convert; in some instances, the “transformation” may be only a disguise for a bald spot, like a toupée, which turns the historical drama into comedy. In either case, Mr. Rosenberg, who has commandeered a loge seat for the performance by the authority of his intellect, genially applauds. He knows that the problem of action is serious, dead serious for our pistol-point time, and yet his very fascination with the problem makes him also a critical spectator, indeed an ideal connoisseur of the spectacle. His geniality, which has something of the pirate in it, is a product of detachment, a quality which, contrary to common belief, is often found in the true actionist in his moments of leisure—the balletomane commissar, the bandit-chief in the forest watching a Cossack sword-dance. The performer of deeds can be objective, just because he appreciates acting. Hamlet, with the Players, got the pun too, which runs like a mystification through language.
The great joy of this book is its zestful freedom, again the result of objectivity. The essays, written over the past twenty years, have been assembled in four sections, on painting, poetry, politics, and intellectual history, and are interrelated in a way that at first appears casual, until the light dawns and the reader becomes aware that he is following the greatest show on earth—the international human comedy of modern times, a mixture of genres, from tragedy to vaudeville, whose only heroes, finally, are artists. Thanks to his detachment, Mr. Rosenberg views the twentieth century as all of a piece: a century of the new, of invention, transformation, remaking, fresh gestures. In other words, Mr. Rosenberg’s idea is that if you don’t remake yourself in this century, somebody else will remake you—in a gas chamber. If modern history is a panoramic stage, it is also a scientific laboratory for the production of new human beings, new identities. The action painter who “gesticulates” on canvas so that he may see himself, as it were, in silhouette and discover who he is, is experimenting on himself just as Rimbaud did, and as the Communists did to manufacture, out of the “iron” process of logic, the figure of the Bolshevik, and the Nazis in their concentration-camp workshops, to make a new “scientific” humanity—as well, incidentally, as a new kind of lampshade. The purge indeed (Mr. Rosenberg does not happen to mention this, but he would surely agree) is the first obligatory step, whether it is the infantile castor-oil purge of Mussolini, the mass purges of the Soviet Union, the brainwashing of the Korean prisoners-of-war, the pseudo-purge of religious conversion, the prefrontal lobotomy, or the self-purgation of the artist. Mr. Rosenberg is not afraid of this amalgam, as it would have been called in the thirties. When Anthony West declared in The New Yorker that the poems of Baudelaire led straight to the death-camps, he was asserting in a hysterical way a Philistine and semi-totalitarian doctrine of “responsibility”; Mr. Rosenberg sees a connection between all these modern events that is neither causal nor criminal. His detachment permits him to observe a likeness-in-difference without feeling obliged to confess up and withdraw his support from Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or De Kooning.
Similarly, Mr. Rosenberg’s eagle’s-eye view of the twentieth century has made him the first to discern tendencies and correspondences that became only slowly visible, if visible at all, to other critics. In an essay on the Fall of Paris, written in 1940, he rapidly sketches out the whole idea of Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire (1949); it might be objected that Mr. Rosenberg did not “do” anything with his idea while Malraux made a book out of it, but a better way of putting it is that Malraux “got” a book out of it, i.e., labored it to yield him a return. Mr. Rosenberg was also the first to see through the guilty-liberal racket and the mass-culture racket; in a number of essays now grouped under the general heading, “The Herd of Independent Minds.” This new body of parasitic literature—the True Story confessions of ex-Communists and ex-liberals and the mass-culture symposia—produced for kicks for a mass audience, is itself of course a sociological phenomenon, reflecting the vast growth of a class of professional intellectuals who are the tour-directors of modern society on a cruise looking for itself. The architects, designers, psychiatrists, museum men, questionnaire sociologists, “depth” sociologists, students of voting habits and population patterns, are all engaged in providing identities (“Tell me how you voted and I’ll tell you who you are” or vice versa), showing their publics how they can yet be somebody through art-appreciation, music appreciation, good-design-appreciation, self-appreciation, i.e., knowing Values. As Mr. Rosenberg says, “Today everybody is already a member of some intellectually worked-over group, that is, an audience.”
Mr. Rosenberg himself is a permanent revolutionist in politics and the arts. Still, sitting in his loge seat in the intervals of partisanship, he enjoys the farce by which the New is converted into the Old, by being turned into a profit-commodity, as modern painting has been by fashion designers, educators, and wallpaper firms; this in fact is the Handwriting on the Wall. Art movements “sold” to the consumer are consumed in both senses. The position of the revolutionary critic is itself comically subject to erosion under these circumstances—a point Mr. Rosenberg has noted.
His sense of proportion and balance prevents him, almost everywhere (“Politics as Dancing” is the exception), from being mastered by one of his ideas so that he would fail to see its implications. This knowing what you are letting yourself in for constitutes audacity. Take action painting; while arguing strenuously for it, Mr. Rosenberg perceives where the hitch is. Action painting cannot lay claim to being judged aesthetically; by being an act, an experiment, it deliberately renounces the aesthetic as its category, for it cannot be recognized by the pleasure-faculty as objects of beauty are. If, indeed, by some accident—the passage of time or fading—such a painting became beautiful, it would cease to be an act, since the element of risk and hazard would depart from it, and it would come, as it were, to rest. In the same way, an act in history by becoming strikingly beautiful or noble slides out of the historical arena into a constructed frame—such actions, incidentally, are usually acts of sacrifice or heroic immolation. They become, precisely, a picture: a tableau or a statue. But if an action painting cannot be judged aesthetically, how can it be judged? Not at all, cheerfully admits Mr. Rosenberg, though he qualifies this somewhat by saying that a genuine action painting can be told from a fake by the amount of struggle in it. This criterion, though, is highly arbitrary—how is the struggle to be measured and who is to be the judge? Mr. Rosenberg, then, is taking a risk, with his eyes open, of polemicizing for a kind of art of which no one can say whether it is beautiful or ugly or in between, but only that it is something, that it exists and represents a decision. This decisive coming into existence, in fact, is action painting’s best plea for itself—a plea entered in history’s court, which is where Mr. Rosenberg always argues. And it is true that the most convincing argument that can be made, really, for action painting (Mr. Rosenberg does not make it) is that Mr. Rosenberg himself, in his earlier essays on poetry, described exactly those qualities that action painting would later have. This suggests either that Mr. Rosenberg like a god invented action painting out of his own brain (and the movement certainly seems to have clarified from the date of his naming it) or that its appearance was inevitable in the history of art; that is, Mr. Rosenberg’s prediction or hypothesis validates the painting, and the painting validates Mr. Rosenberg’s hypothesis. This is perhaps untenable logically, but in practice such a coincidence really does hint that there is something to action painting.
In Mr. Rosenberg’s opinion, this painting has assumed the binding authority of a historical necessity. We are forced to accept it as we accept other historical changes and advances. If we don’t, we admit ourselves to the Academy, which (excuse me, Mr. Rosenberg) seems to me another version of the ash-can of history; if we don’t accept it, in short, we are dead. Mr. Rosenberg is at once allured and repelled by the ever-present dead; the problem of burial is central to his book. Some of its finest passages touch on this theme; for example this, about Melville: “... while from the silent recesses of the office files, he drew forth the white-collared tomb deity, Bartleby.” The spectral death-in-life of other contemporary critics, moreover, is made clammily apparent by contrast with Mr. Rosenberg’s own vitality. His phrasing is a gleeful boyish exploit: “it would be just as well to bump the old mob off the raft”; “... to the tattoo artist on Melville’s Pacific Island who covered the village headman with an overall design previously tried out on some bottom dog used as a sketch pad, the problem [of the audience] did not present itself.” He is picturesque without forcing, like some veteran trapper or scout chatting on in the American lingo. The range of the voice is remarkable, and so is the control of volume. The accusation sometimes made against him, that he is abstract, is absolutely untrue of his writing, which moves from graphic image to graphic image (sometimes as in a really great comic strip) and is sensitive as a hearing-aid to sound. This plain talk nearly persuades you that he is right, not only in general, but in every particular of his reasoning, for what he presents is the picture of a man in a state of buoyant health. To resist his theories at any point it is necessary to draw back from this blast of vitality and ask, for instance, whether the theory of action painting is not just a new costuming of the old Marxist myth, in which the proletariat, having so long been acted on by history, decides to act into history and abolish it. By the violence of his “attack” on the canvas, the action painter abolishes art. But is it really possible to abolish art? Will not the aesthetic as a category of human experience perversely assert itself, as history did in the Soviet Union by refusing to come to an end? This in fact is happening to the school of action painters and was bound to happen regardless of the activities of museum people and popularizers. Once you hang an act on your living-room wall, a weird contradiction develops, which is inherent in the definition (or myth) of action painting itself; an “event” or gesture becomes, at worst, just as much an art-object as the piece of driftwood on the coffee table or the seashell on the Victorian whatnot. At best, it becomes art. The truth is, you cannot hang an event on the wall, only a picture, which may be found to be beautiful or ugly, depending, alas, on your taste. This applies to a Cimabue “Crucifixion” just as much as to a Pollock or an African mask. You can decide of a new painting or a painting new to you that it is “interesting,” but this only means that you are postponing, for the moment, the harder decision as to whether it is good or bad; a painting cannot stay “interesting,” or if you keep on calling it that you have made “interesting” into an aesthetic judgment—a judgment, by the way, which leads, by the broad path, to the populous cemetery of the Academy, where all but the immortal are buried by Father Time.
A review of The Tradition of the New, by Harold Rosenberg.