(1990s)
One of the hallmarks of the MICROPRESS in the 1990s has been its insistent movement away from the paper copy culture and into cyberspace. From the mid-1990s on, there has been a definite and inexorable migration of the avant-garde press from the difficulties and anonymity of the paper press to the moderate ease and the possibly greater exposure offered by the I NTERNET. This change has occurred, of course, concurrent with a similar change in American culture away from printed matter towards the liquid paper screen of the computer. At the beginning of this transition, the term “e-zine” was born, meaning a zine presented over the Internet. Sometimes these zines were distributed via e-mail, but most frequently they were loaded onto the World Wide Web for viewing by the entire world. Such e-zines still flourish, but the term has been appropriated by the Internet community at large, and the term now refers merely to any electronic periodical, most of which are commercial in nature.
—Geof Huth
(17 June 1907–21 August 1978; 15 December 1912–21 August 1988, b. Bernice Alexandra Kaiser)
In addition to being prominent industrial designers, very much for hire, the Eameses, husband and wife working with equal credit long before such acknowledgment became more frequent in art, produced for their clients several remarkable innovative films. These were composed initially not from footage but photographic stills and then made mostly not in Hollywood studios near their Southern California home but in their own workshop. Glimpses of USA (1959) consisted of seven films, composed from still photos projected simultaneously on seven screens that were 20 by 30 feet in size. Glimpses was shown continuously for twelve-minute stretches at the Moscow World’s Fair. For Kaleidoscope Shop (1959) they filmed their own creations through lenses that increasingly abstracted them. House of Science (1962) was a six-screen film, fifteen and one-half minutes long, created for the Seattle World’s Fair. Think (1964–65), made for the New York World’s Fair, featured twenty-two screens of various shapes.
A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (1968) became the preliminary version of their indubitable masterpiece Powers of Ten (1977), both of which deal concretely with questions of scale. (A later videotape produced by Charles Eames’s grandson, Eames Demetrios, reverses the sequence of the films.) Though these two shorts were made for instructional purposes (with funding from the IBM corporation, no less), the concept of enlargements (and then contractions) of a human body on a beach by powers of ten at a quick and regular speed is so original and brilliant that purposeful pedagogy attains genuine esthetic quality. After pulling back continuously from the hand of a sleeping man into the galaxies (10 to the 24th power), in every ten seconds moving ten times the distance traveled in the previous ten seconds, the camera returns at a yet faster pace, entering the man’s skin, reaching finally the structure of the atom (10 to the minus-13th power), in sum traversing the universe and the microcosm, all in less than eight minutes. On the left side of the screen in the earlier film are three chronometers measuring distance and time. This sort of conceptual tripping makes even KUBRICK’s 2001, say, seem elementary at broaching scientific exposition.
The French arts historian Frank Popper credits Charles Eames alone with constructing a Do-Nothing Machine (1955) powered solely by solar energy, while several histories of contemporary architecture acknowledge the originality of residential studio house that the Eames built for themselves in Santa Monica, California.
At the design of large instructional exhibitions, initially of their own works and later on such grand themes as mathematics or “The World of Franklin and Jefferson” (1975), they also excelled, though all but one of these, much like theatrical performances (which they essentially were), survive only with descriptions and photographic documentation. (The exception is Mathematica [1961] long on permanent display in the Museum of Science in Boston, MA.)
Working not just differently but profoundly differently, the Eames are also credited with the inventive design of chairs and the discovery of alternative materials, particularly molded plywood, for their manufacture. Awarding recognition more typical of smaller countries with greater cultural sophistication, the USPS (government postal service) in 2008 memorialized some of their designs on postage stamps.
(1960s, aka “earthworks” and “land art”)
Perhaps as a reaction to the visual tedium and the sleek, boxy technological polish of Minimalist sculpture, or perhaps in an effort to break out of the commercial system that treated works of art as commodities, a number of artists in the late 1960s began executing enormous projects that altered the land in areas remote from civilization. Earth Art works existed primarily in situ and involved large excavations, the transferral of earth and stone to new sites in artificial configurations, and the burial of objects. These works became publicly known through exhibiting of photographic records of the projects, which often did not long survive their completion. Earth Art made its first appearance in an exhibition in 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York City with SOL LEWITT’s Box in a Hole (1968), in which a steel cube was, presumably, buried in the ground in the Netherlands, and WALTER DE M ARIA’s Mile Long Drawing (1968), in which two parallel white lines were drawn in the desert in Nevada. Other artists involved in Earth Art were ROBERT S MITHSON, ROBERT M ORRIS, MICHAEL H EIZER, RICHARD L ONG, and RICHARD S ERRA. Regardless of the initiating motivation, Earth Art certainly was an expression of the typical Romantic impulse to combine art and nature, and the congenitally American urge to return to the wilderness. However, Earth Art projects lacked any Huckleberry-Finn deliberate naivete. They often were guided by complex, attenuated, and elusive intellectual programs, so elusive that this form of art did not continue for long after the early death of Smithson in 1973. By the end of the 1970s, Earth Art was going out of fashion, and later artists who followed the inspiration to fuse together art and nature, like David Nash, returned to the creation and exhibition of object-based art. If there is one work by which Earth Art is primarily remembered through its photographic records, it is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), which was a piled-up runway of basalt rock and dirt that corkscrewed its way along the surface of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
—Mark Daniel Cohen
(12 July 1854–14 March 1932)
As the inventor of photographic film that could be put on a spool and rolled through a camera, he changed not only the production of visual art but everyone’s perceptual and cultural experience. Forming the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1884, Eastman patented film that depended upon a paper roll. In 1889, he replaced the paper roll with celluloid and, in 1924, improved his invention further with cellulose acetate. Once a camera could roll film, professional photographers could take numerous shots in quick succession, while the avoidance of cumbersome procedures encouraged amateurs to take a lot more pictures, incidentally enriching his company. Eastman’s invention enabled THOMAS E DISON to develop a camera for moving film. No dope, Eastman gave away more than $75 million to various scientific, educational, and cultural organizations, including the Rochester-based School of Music that still bears his name. The other great inventor in photography was Edwin H. Land (1909–91), who invented after World War II rolled film that could be developed, so to speak, within the camera, producing a positive print within a short time, thus enabling the photographer to decide swiftly if he or she wanted to take another shot. The last development became the precursor of digital photography, which enables to photographer to view his picture immediately after shooting it (wholly without celluloid film that became technologically obsolete).
(5 January 1932–19 February 2016)
A protean Italian, he wrote many books, some better than others; some deliciously more remunerative than others; some more relevant to the new avant-gardes than others. In the last respect, the key texts appear in Opera Aperta (1962; The Open Work, 1989). Apparently echoing Joseph Frank’s notions of SPATIAL FORM, Eco regarded certain avant-garde art as formally open, rather than closed, to be best “understood as dynamic and psychologically engaged fields.” This insight defines texts so disjunctive that a prerequisite for understanding is the reader’s mentally reassembling. Relevant though this thesis is for some radical works, it’s not generally true. Additionally, his favorite example of a JACKSON POLLOCK painting seems less formally open in the 21st century than realizing its own form. In his later critical writings, Eco moved down through SEMIOTICS to other positions less substantial. At worst he was a windbag.
(6 February 1903–4 January 1990)
Though by trade a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became one of photography’s greatest inventors. The development of the rapidly flashing STROBE LIGHT enabled Edgerton to freeze within a single photographic print a succession of moving postures –literally compressing MUYBRIDGE into a single image. A classic Edgerton photograph, Golf Drive by Denmore Shute (1938), artfully documents over four dozen different positions within a single golf swing. Other Edgerton photographs reveal details never seen before, such as the movements of a dancer or the flailing arms of a jazz drummer. These were pictures that no painter could make, unless, of course, he was duplicating the image of an Edgerton photograph. Nor could a film-maker. In the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART’s 1939 retrospective, an exhibition and book both titled Art of Our Time, he was one of seven featured photographers.
Edgerton also produced aerial reconnaissance photography during World War II in addition to artful photographs of the undersea and marine organisms, a bullet passing through an apple, and an atomic bomb exploding.
(11 February 1847–18 October 1931)
If GEORGE E ASTMAN belongs here, so does his near contemporary, Edison, an inventor who contributed not only to such pure technologies as the telephone, electric light, and the wireless telegraph, but to such artistic machines as the phonograph and the motion-picture projector. If not for Edison, modern life would have been different; likewise, modern art. Edison’s life resembles that of some avant-garde artists in that he was thought uneducable and taken out of school. At the age of twelve he took odd jobs, becoming, while a teenager, a telegraph operator whose deafness enabled him to concentrate on the telegraph’s clicks, much as some advanced artists learn to exploit personal incapacities to practical advantage (e.g., JOHN C AGE, GERTRUDE S TEIN). Inventing the phonograph in 1877, Edison found it a dead end until he developed a wax-coated cylinder on which sounds could be encoded, and then a floating stylus for playing back the sounds, and finally an electroplated master recording from which copies could be pressed, completing the processes necessary for the dissemination of acoustic materials. Surrounding himself with teams of engineers and researchers, Edison founded the first industrial laboratory, incidentally establishing a corporate model that, in later hands such as BELL LABS, created other inventions with esthetic applications.
(1949–62)
Because emerging visual artists, in contrast, say, to composers and writers, learn so much from each other, they tend to meet physically, customarily in local cafés, but sometimes in informal settings, as happened in Manhattan in the late 1940s, regularly at 39 East Eighth Street, south of FOURTEENTH STREET in the eastern precincts of Greenwich Village. Open several nights a week, the premises particularly filled on Friday evenings, when a member, or sometimes a member’s guest, gave a presentation that generated later discussion. Here was the nucleus of the DOWNTOWN hothouse that spawned ARTISTS’sOHO after 1965.
It was here that the art critic HAROLD ROSENBERG developed his sense of “American Action Painters” and here as well where the composer JOHN CAGE delivered the lectures that made him a favorite of the visual artists. New noncommercial films were sometimes screened. I regret missing AD REINHARDT’s 1958 presentation of approximately two thousand slides that he’d made from a trip around the world a few years before. Ever personally challenging, he reportedly flashed them as rapidly as possible, refusing to accept interruptions, to the consternation of all who were nonetheless impressed to see that everywhere in the world that Reinhardt went he appreciated the geometric configurations more typical of his home city. (Someday these images should appear as a book or a website.) This Club didn’t so much die as peter out.
Later attempts to duplicate the level of cooperative enlightenment marking this gathering were never as successful, not even in DOWNTOWN Manhattan, where so many visual artists resided in the late 20th century. Similar artistic hothouses probably exist in other cities, less within a circumscribed space, as was this, than in patrons’salons or in public venues; but few, if any, have been as consequential.
(26 April 1885–5 July 1940)
Trained in philosophical esthetics, Einstein published at the beginning of the 20th century a pioneering book on African sculpture that influenced both CUBISM and D ADA. His novel Bebuquin (1912), subtitled “The Dilettantes of Miracles,” incorporated principles of pictorial cubism into prose narrative, broaching incoherence. “Too few people have the courage to talk complete nonsense,” he wrote. “Nonsense which is frequently repeated becomes an integrating force in our thought; at a certain level of intelligence we are not at all interested in what is correct or rational any more.” As Bebuquin became a milestone of advanced fiction, a limerick written about another German with the same surname is applicable to this writer as well: “Remarkable family Stein, there’s Ep and there’s Gert, and there’s Ein. Ep’s sculpture is junk, Gert’s poetry is bunk, and nobody understands Ein.”
This (Carl) Einstein fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), after which he went to Paris. When it fell to the Nazis, he escaped to southern France; but, unable to emigrate to America because of his prior service against Franco, he committed suicide (as did his near contemporary and countryman in roughly the same place, WALTER B ENJAMIN).
(23 January 1898–11 February 1948)
His Battleship Potemkin (1925; aka, simply, Potemkin) was the first distinctly Soviet film to receive international acclaim. Exemplifying the power of montage, or the rapid cutting between scenes to portray conflict, this film showed how radically different the medium of film could be from the theatrical staging or from the filming of staged activities. His reputation established, Eisenstein became enough of a cultural celebrity for Soviet officials to worry about and thus to restrict his subsequent activities. While the original negative of Battleship Potemkin was mutilated, his next film, October (1927), had to be reedited after Leon Trotsky’s demotion, reportedly under Joseph Stalin’s personal scrutiny. Invited to work in Hollywood in 1930, Eisenstein made several film proposals that were not accepted. With the help of the American writer Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), he began a feature film about Mexico that was not finished until decades after Eisenstein’s death, albeit in an incomplete form.
Returning to the Soviet Union, Eisenstein was allowed to work on only a few of several possible projects, and then production was often halted before the films were complete. Before dying at 50, of a second heart attack, Eisenstein also wrote classic essays that have been read by everyone seriously interested in film. Decades after his death, gallerists discovered a rich collection of his remarkable drawings, many of which, as they portrayed erotic experience between men and animals, would have been suppressed by puritan Communism.
(6 July 1898–6 September 1962)
Generally ranked after Alban Berg and ANTON W EBERN among ARNOLD S CHOENBERG’s more distinguished early Viennese pupils, Eisler had a different sort of musical career. Reportedly influenced by his brother and sister, who were devout communists, he moved to BERLIN in 1925, joined the Communist party the following year, and wrote songs for party choirs and plays. By 1929, he was regularly collaborating with the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Leaving Germany in 1933, he moved first to Moscow, then to New York, where he taught at the New School from 1935 to 1942, and finally to Hollywood, where he became involved in composing for film, collaborating with Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), even coauthoring with THEODOR A DORNO a short book about film. (Meanwhile, some of Schoenberg’s Los Angeles pupils, such as Leonard Rosen-man [1924–2008], were beginning to incorporate serial music into film scores, popularizing Schoenberg, so to speak, without ever making Schoenberg’s music itself more popular.)
There, in the heart of capitalist culture, Eisler incidentally wrote the national anthem for East Germany –Aufstanden aus Ruinen. When their sister Ruth Fischer (1895–1961) testified against them before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Hanns and his brother Gerhart Eisler (1897–1968) both left for East Berlin, where Hanns resumed his collaboration with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, his music nonetheless reflecting his serial history. Because major modern composers were scarce in East Germany (and his brother headed the radio station), Hanns Eisler initially became more prominent there than he could have been in the West. However, by the mid-1950s, some DDR commissars severely criticized his work. After the death of Brecht, Eisler suffered a depression from which he never recovered. His misfortunes in the DDR are reviewed in a major documentary, Solidarity Song (1995), by the Canadian Niv Fichman (1958), who has become classical music’s greatest documentarian.
(14 March 1947)
Born Jewish in Casablanca, he immigrated to Israel as a child and then studied in Paris before coming to NEW YORK CITY, where he has lived since 1972, his art reflecting his final residence. Honoring the Jewish (as well as Moslem) proscription against graven images, as well as the traditions common to both cultures of microscopic writing, El Hanani has since the early 1970s made by his own hand drawings composed of tiny, delicate dots and lines. As ink on timeless paper, his drawings suggest both patterns and fields that appear visibly to recede and emerge, if not rhythmically undulate, in the tradition of OP ART. For Alphabet Grid (2002), El Hanani repeats the Hebrew alphabet from end to end in a tight grid. In Letters (2002), by contrast, Hebrew calligraphy is scattered across the page to evoke intrinsic optical rhythms. One constraint observed in his highly rigorous art is that only one kind of mark can be used in a single piece, which is to say that every mark must be similar in size.
(1965; Farmworkers’ Theater, aka ETC)
Formed by Luis Valdez (1940), who had worked with the SAN F RANCISCO MIME T ROUPE and retained the SFMT’s love of signs and songs, ETC recruited untrained, instinctive performers, initially to publicize a grape strike in California and, by extension, to organize Mexican-American itinerant farm laborers into the United Farm Workers union. Addressing Chicano audiences during the working summers, ETC presented short plays, called “actos,” in a mixture of Spanish and English, showing stereotypes of workers and bosses in the manner of commedia dell’arte. ETC staged such highly original theater that, thanks to prompt critical recognition, it toured American universities during the off-farm seasons. A skilled scenarist-director, Valdez subsequently produced the play Zoot Suit (1978), which transferred from Los Angeles to Broadway, in addition to feature-length films, such as La Bamba (1987), which was likewise about Chicano culture.
(21 April 1930; b. James Edward Leonard E.)
Working with both text and images, this eccentric American artist creates simplistic black and white images with near-biblical stylistic certitude. As an Associate Professor of art at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio from 1957 to 2014, Aethelred (a former University of Michigan footballer and a Navy officer/ pilot) self-published thousands of image/textual works with various technologies, including the hectograph, the mimeograph, and the photocopier. These self-described “invective pamphlets” are both cryptically pedantic, and at times autobiographical, all within his own mythopoeia. Larger works include earlier paintings and an expansive mural-in-progress that adorns an archway of Siegfred Hall on the OU campus. The black and white mural has been repainted several times since it first appeared in 1966.
Similar to the texts accompanying his images (e.g., “Were you there when your feet came out all fittingly abluted” –Golgonooza #20), his class lectures and student critiques were themselves works of art akin to a more rabid David Antin talk. Aethelred would weave playful, sometimes invective speech tapestries between hand-held images with outlandish word associations, electrically charged phonetics, and scrambled catch-phrases that succeeded or failed his often-baffled listeners. He also founded The Church of William Blake on his property outside of Athens near the foot of Mt. Nebo, a spiritualist mecca since the 1830s (for the Shakers prior to the Shawnee, and much earlier, to the pre-contact Adena-Hopewell cultures of late BCE early CE). In the restored “Koons Cabin,” a one-room building with a spiritualist history dating back to the 1850s, Aethelred regularly hosted “happening-like” gatherings and ceremonies for nearly three decades until the cabin-turned-Blakean church, adorned with Aethelred’s art, was tragically burned down in the 1980s.
—Michael Peters
See MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE.
(c. 1910)
Used accurately, Electronic Music describes not one new thing but several new developments; for music, of all the arts, has been the most constant beneficiary of recent technological developments. These inventions include not only new instruments but technically superior versions of older ones for both composers and performers, in addition to editing and structuring technologies far handier than their predecessors. Do not forget that modern technologies created new listening situations for music, beginning, of course, with the capacity to record musical sound to be played back at a later date (initially through a phonograph), and then with the capacity (initially provided by radio) to transmit in live time musical sound from one source to many outlets. Neither of those capabilities existed in the 19th century.
The same American who co-invented night lights for outdoor sports arenas, Thaddeus Cahill (1867–1934), also built at the beginning of the 20th century the Telharmonium, a 200-ton machine that could synthesize musical sounds for distribution over telephone lines. The machine had to be big and loud, because Cahill did not know the later principle of acoustic amplification that became familiar. Nowadays, even a common home-audio system can radically transform an existing instrumental sound, not only making it louder but also accentuating its treble or bass, if not redefining its timbre and extending the duration of such enhanced sound to unlimited lengths.
By the 1960s, microphone pickups were incorporated into a whole range of instruments –guitar, double bass, piano, saxophone, clarinet, flute –to give the natural sound of each more presence than it previously had. Whereas early electronic pop musicians performed with only single speakers, groups new to the 1960s used whole banks of huge speakers to escalate their sounds to unprecedentedly high volumes, thereby also creating such technical dysfunctions as distortion, hum, buzzing, and ear-piercing feedback. Among classical musicians, PHILIP G LASS and ANDRE KOSTELANETZ, among others, exploited the volume controls and mixing panel of a standard recording studio to radically modify the music made by live performers, so that what the audience heard –what became available on record –would be radically different from the sounds originally made.
The history of Electronic Music also includes wholly new instruments, beginning with the THEREMIN in the early 1920s. In 1928, the French inventor Maurice Martenot (1898–1980) introduced the Ondes Martenot (“Martenot’s Waves”), a keyboard that electronically produces one note at a time and can slide through its entire tonal range. In 1930 came Frederick Trautwein’s (1888–1956) Trautonium, another electronic one note generator that could be attached to a piano, requiring that the performer devote one hand to each instrument.
Unlike the Ondes Martenot and the Theremin, which were designed to produce radically different sounds, the Hammond organ was invented in the 1930s to imitate electronically the familiar sounds of a pipe organ, but performers discovered the electronic organ had capabilities for sustained reverberation and tremolo that were unavailable to the traditional instrument. The original SYNTHESIZERS were essentially electronic organs designed to generate a greater range of more precisely specified (and often quite innovative) musical sounds. Synthesizers became something else when they could incorporate sounds made outside of the instrument and process them into unprecedented acoustic experiences. This tradition became the source in the 1970s for Live Electronic Music and, later, for SAMPLING.
Another line of Electronic Music depended upon the development of magnetic audiotape that could be neatly edited and recomposed; audiotapes also became the preferred storage medium for electronic compositions. Sounds previously recorded in the environment could be enhanced by being played at a faster speed or a slower speed, or by being passed through filters that removed certain frequencies or added echo or reverberation. Extended echoing dependent upon tape-delay was also possible. Both Electro-Acoustic Music and MUSIQUE C ONCRÈTE was based upon these techniques.
The next step was to work entirely with electronically generated sounds, beginning with those from elementary sound generators, such as sawtooth, triangular, and variable rectangular waves. Among the best early endeavors in this vein was Bülent Arel’s Music for a Sacred Service (1961). One step after that involved mixing sounds that were originally live with artificial sources on a single fixed tape. Once stereo-phonic and then multitrack tape became available, sounds from separate sources, even recorded at separate times, could be mixed together. When played back, these acoustic compositions could be distributed to speakers that would surround the spectator with sound; materials in individual speakers could conduct pseudo-conversations with one another.
Because wholly Electronic Music did not depend upon instruments, it eschewed conventional scoring. Indeed, if a piece were created entirely “by ear,” so to speak, there would be no score at all, initially creating a problem with the American copyright office, which would accept scores but not tapes as evidence of authorship. Partly to deal with this problem, tape composers developed all kinds of inventive timeline graphings in lieu of scores.
A half-century ago, the composer VIRGIL THOMSON suggested, in the course of an article on JOHN C AGE, that any sound emerging from loudspeakers (and thus electronic at some point in its history) was fundamentally debased. Although his opinion was dismissed then and is perhaps forgotten now, can I be alone in having the experience, usually in a church, of hearing music that initially sounds funny? I know why, I must remind myself –no amplification.
Since the arrival of Robert Moog’s SYNTHESIZER in the late 1960s and then the personal computer in the 1970s brought other kinds of Electronic Music, some of these are discussed separately in this book. By the 21st century, when nearly all music included electronics, this term as such became irrelevant.
(26 September 1888–4 January 1965; born Thomas Stearns E.)
Where and when was Eliot avant-garde? Not in his pseudo-juvenile Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), or in the solemn footnotes at the end of The Waste Land (1922). One could make a case for Sweeney Agonistes (1932) as a CONCEPTUAL play, because it cannot be staged as is; but to my mind, Eliot’s greatest departure was publication, even in his initial Collected Poems (1930), of several works that are explicitly introduced as “Unfinished.” The heirs and editors of a dead poet might have inserted that qualifying term, but rarely has a living poet done it, especially in his or her early forties. The assumption is that even in an admittedly unfinished state a text such as “Coriolan” can be read on its own. His near contemporary, MARCEL DUCHAMP, around 1923 stopped work on his Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), declaring it “definitively unfinished,” although it was later counted among his principal achievements. On the critical level, this move represents a GESTURE available only to certain artistic leaders.
Advocates of poems composed from words “found” in the works of others, rather than wholly created from within, have cited Eliot’s essay on Thomas Massinger for this rationale:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
However, by no measure did T.S. Eliot himself produce FOUND POETRY. That visionary he wasn’t.
(14 December 1895–18 November 1952; b. Eugène-Emile-Paul Grindel)
Generally regarded as the second most important SURREALIST poet after ANDRÉ BRETON, whom he first met around 1920, Éluard was also a political activist who joined the Communist Party and kept reminding his literary colleagues of his radical politics. Nonetheless, his best poems portray heterosexual passion. In a translation by the American poet Michael Benedikt (1935–2007), “Ecstasy” opens:
And closes:
In addition to publishing his own poems, many of which purportedly transcribed his dreams, Éluard collaborated with MAX E RNST on two pioneering visual-verbal books (1932) and with Breton in writing L’lmmaculèe conception (1930), which attempts to portray a variety of mental disturbances.
The hundred and fifty castles where we were going to make love were not enough for me a hundred thousand more will be built for me tomorrow I have chased out from the boabab forests of your eyes the peacocks and panthers and lyre-birds I will shut them in my strongholds and we shall go walking together in the forests of Asia of Europe of Africa and America which surround our castles in the admirable forests of your eyes which are accustomed to my splendour.
To some this is an authentic psychological representation; to others, it epitomizes studied affectation, either because of or despite the absence of internal punctuation.
Éluard’s French reputation gained from more traditional poems collected into books published during World War II, as he, unlike Breton, chose to remain in Europe. He also collaborated with painters such as Max Ernst and PABLO P ICASSO in producing not VISUAL POETRY but fields in which text and image complement each other. What should be made of the fact that his first wife Gaia went on to marry S ALVA-DOR DALI and become the Svengali behind her new husband’s progressively more dubious career?
See TELEGRAPHIC WRITING.
(16 February 1925–27 July 1990)
Emshwiller began as an illustrator, particularly of science fiction, renowned especially for his book covers, before producing his first film, Dance Chromatic (1959), combining live action with animated abstract painting. In addition to working as an expert cameraman on numerous television documentaries and independent films, he produced Relativity (1966), which he called a “film poem.” While continuing to work with film, he pioneered video art, particularly in Scape-mates (1972), which uses an animation technology partly of his own design and ranks among the earliest artistic videotapes that can still be screened without embarrassment. Independent for most of his professional life, Emshwiller became in 1979 a dean at CAL ARTS where he remained to his death. His wife, Carol E. (1921) has published several collections of scrupulously strange short fictions.
(1945–)
Back in the spring of 1965, at the end of my year as a Fulbright scholar at King’s College, London, I proposed a renewal that aimed to discover what was radically excellent in literature published initially in Britain after World War II. I noticed that most of it was produced by writers born outside of Britain. In mind were the familiar examples of GEORGE ORWELL (India) and Doris Lessing (Persia, 1919–2013), of course; but I’d already appreciated the novels of Wilson Harris (Guyana, 1921–2018); AMOS TUTUOLA’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), which was told in a “pidgin” English uniquely Nigerian, and the formally ingenious Morning at the Office (1951) by Edgar Mittelholzer (Guyana, 1909–65). The last was then, and probably still is, the most extraordinary novel isolating racial prejudice in a culture (Trinidad) where people have many hues.
My assumption was that this foundation would lead me to discover additional appropriate texts. One wrinkle I needed to consider was whether writers such as SAMUEL BECKETT, DYLAN THOMAS, DOM SYLVESTER HOUÉDARD, STEFAN THEMERSON, IAN HAMILTON FINLAY, and Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–74) were non-English by virtue of the fact that they hailed respectively from Ireland, Wales, Guernsey, Poland, Bahamas and Scotland, and New Zealand and Scotland. (The most prominent precursors with alien origins in Eng. Lit. were, of course, Joseph Conrad [1857–1924; b. Ukraine] and the American T. S. ELIOT.) Indicatively, most of the recent literary Nobelists residing mostly in England were born outside the British Isles: not only Lessing but V. S. Naipaul (in 2001), Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), and Kazuo Ishiguro (2017), their number perhaps reflecting a conscious bias among the Nobel electors.
Though my renewal wasn’t funded (and I returned to New York), I learned later that my avant-garde thesis was not just true but subsequently influential, albeit in my absence and thus without any acknowledgment of me, alas.
(15 May 1948; b. Brian Peter George E.)
A prolific producer of recordings, though formally untrained in music, Eno adapted avant-garde ideas for more popular purposes; only some survive as consequential innovative art. As a sort of CULTURAL LEADER, he founded Obscure Records (1975–78), which offered only ten disks, including one JOHN CAGE, to a larger audience. Another Eno creation is “ambient music,” most famously Music for Airports (1978), which is designed to be heard continuously as background in public spaces, as a more modernist version of what was once called “elevator music” or, more simply, “Musak.” His biography suggests that Eno must have remarkable skills in working with so many other artists, especially musicians.
The lost Eno classic is Portsmouth Sinfonia (1974), for which musically amateur art-school students were enlisted to perform such classical warhorses as The Blue Danube Waltz and the William Tell Overture. Less famous is his Oblique Strategies (1975, in collaboration with Peter Schmidt [1931–80]), which began as a box with a deck of small printed cards, each of which (reflecting perhaps John Cage’s influence) suggested challenging constraints to help artists, especially musicians, to move ahead. For examples: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” “Try faking it.” “Work at a different speed.” “Are there sections? Consider transitions.” Much like other successful self-help books, Oblique Strategies has been translated into other languages and reprinted several times.
What should be made of the fact that Eno’s surname is an anagram for ONE?
(forever)
This term describes an enclosed space that is artistically enhanced. The materials defining such space might be visual, sculptural, kinetic, or even acoustic or may contain combinations of all these elements, but the measure is that certain art gives that space a particular esthetic character it would not otherwise have. To put it differently, thanks to what the artist does, the interior space itself becomes an encompassing, surrounding work of art. Among the classic Environments are St. Peter’s Church in Rome and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. In more recent art, consider Stanley Landesman’s multiply mirrored room, Walk-In Infinity Chamber (1968), in which spectators inside the Environment see themselves infinitely reflected; the kinetic galleries mounted by the artists’ collective known only as USCO in the late 1960s; CLAES O LDENBURG’s The Store (1962), which was filled with ironic renditions of seedy objects; and JOHN C AGE’s HPSCHD, which filled a 15,000-seat basketball arena with sounds and images for several hours (but could have gone on forever).
An Environment differs, on one hand, from a MIXED-MEANS theatrical piece that has a definite beginning and an end and, on the other, from an INSTALLATION, which describes art made for a particular site, theoretically to inhabit it forever or be destroyed when the exhibition is over.
(20 February 1916)
As a member of MARTHA G RAHAM’s dance company in the early 1940s, Erdman collaborated with MERCE C UNNINGHAM, who also danced with Graham at the time. Later on her own, Erdman wrote, directed, and choreographed The Coach with the Six Insides (1962), which ranks among the most extraordinary theatrical productions seen in my lifetime. Initially an adaptation of JAMES J OYCE’s FINNEGANS WAKE, on which her husband, the writer/mythologist Joseph Campbell (1908–89), had incidentally coauthored the first critical book, The Coach faithfully portrays the technique of multiple reference that defines Joyce’s classic, even if a woman, Anna Livia Plurabelle, played by Erdman herself, replaces H. C. Earwicker at the center of Joyce’s five-person mythology. As the dance critic Don McDonagh (1932) remembers,
At one moment she is the keening Irishwoman bemoaning the sorrows of her life and her race’s difficulties. At another moment she is Belinda the hen, who scratches and reveals a letter that no one can read, and she transforms herself into a dancing rain.
The piece offered a flood of puns and striking turns of phrase that, in my experience even after several visits, were never entirely assimilated. It was magnificent; I’d see it again tomorrow.
(2 April 1891–1 April 1976; b. Maximilian E.)
After six years studying philosophy, Ernst fought in World War I; soon after his demobilization, he became a leader of Cologne D ADA, personally dubbed “Dada-max” by 1919. Quickly moving over to Parisian S UR-REALISM, Ernst is credited with having introduced the techniques of COLLAGE and PHOTOMONTAGE to Surrealist art. Surrealist collage differed from Dada in aiming not to juxtapose dissimilars but to weave from “found” pictures a coherent subconscious image. Ernst’s best collages draw upon banal engravings, some of which he incorporated into book-art narratives that I rank among his strongest works: La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) and Une semaine de bonté (1934). The latter, subtitled A Surrealist Novel in Collage, is actually a suite of separate stories that depend upon Ernst’s pasting additions onto existing illustrations. He also developed frottage, which comes from tracing patterns found in an object (e.g., the grain of a floorboard, the texture of sackcloth) as a technique for freeing the subconscious by relieving the author of direct control, becoming the visual analog for ANDRÉ BRETON’s automatic writing. More handsome than most, Ernst went during World War II to New York, where he married successively PEGGY G UGGENHEIM, a major patron of the avant-garde, and Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), herself an important artist and writer; he remained in America until 1952. While in the United States, Ernst collaborated with Breton and MARCEL D UCHAMP on the periodical VVV (1942).
(17 June 1898–27 March 1972; b. Maurits Cornelis E.)
The art cognoscenti can be divided almost evenly into those who appreciate Escher and those who think his visual art is slick kitsch. What is interesting about this particular dichotomy is that, unlike other opinion-splitters, this divisory test bears no ostensible relation to any other issue. After establishing a style of repeated symmetrical configurations of animals, Escher made profoundly ingenious geometrical illusions, such as a stairway that appears to be constantly ascending or a water sluice that is constantly descending, using images based on reason to portray what is, as a whole, not credible, which is to say that he made a rational art to portray irrationality.
As these images became more familiar in the late 1960s, when they appeared on T-shirts, posters, and even coffee mugs, Escher’s work was dismissed as decorative –a kind of contemporary Dutch equivalent of Irish illuminated manuscripts (e.g., The Book of Kells [c. 8th to 9th century]). The simplest measure of Escher’s originality is the recognition of a visual style that is easily identifiable as his SIGNATURE.
(1936)
Considering other ways of documenting external realities, writers have turned away from linear prose in paragraphs to consider charts, often with lines documenting flow, as in Alfred Barr’s 1936 classic single-image history of modern art and GEORGE MACIUNAS’s more complicated and detailed visual histories of avant-garde art. JOHN CAGE’s nonsyntatic exploration of key words, especially in his Harvard Norton lectures I-VI (1990), likewise represent alternative exposition. Perhaps the epitome of a more complicated polemical visual essays are AD REINHARDT’s “cartoons” of the ART WORLD in the 1950s. A selection of such printed alternatives appears in my anthology Essaying Essays (1975, 2013).
Consider as well that documentary filmmakers and videographers are producing essays. So are photographers with many images about a single subject. Within a circular multiplex hologram titled On Holography (1975), I mounted five syntactically circular statements about holography:
As the clear cylinder containing them (and only them) turns, whenever the longest bottom statement appears once, the next appears twice, the third three times, and the top two in unison four times, making my hologram an essay about itself, “printed” in the form where it appears best.
(forever)
One obstacle that makes avant-garde art different from mainstream work is that the authors of the most persuasive general understandings, have not been university philosophers, who are certified professional estheticians, but practicing artists thinking philosophically. While an academic philosopher’s hypotheses might realize a certain intellectual weight based in part upon internal consistency and acknowledgment of other philosophers, they rarely offer as much useful intelligence about avant-garde art as certain writings by artists themselves.
That became the theme of my anthology Esthetics Contemporary (1978), whose second revised volume appeared in 1989. Among the contributors to the first edition were ROBERT MORRIS, L. MOHOLY-NAGY, MARCEL DUCHAMP, MICHAEL KIRBY, WALTER DE MARIA, ROBERT SMITHSON, and JAMES WINES. For the revised edition, I added BRIAN O’DOHERTY, JOHN CAGE, RICHARD FOREMAN, and AD REINAHRDT, among others.
Curious I am to learn if someone, not I, could compose a comparable “esthetics” anthology mostly of artists’ philosophical writings in the 21st century.
(1987)
For his first opera, JOHN C AGE, commissioned by the Frankfurt Oper, simply copied random pages from 19th-century European operas to produce, with the assistance of Andrew Culver (1953), an encompassing pastiche, literally a recycling, of sounds and costumes from the repertoire that is no longer protected by copyright. The title, itself a shrewd verbal invention, not only incorporates “Europe” and “opera,” but it also sounds like “your opera,” which is to say everyone’s opera. Though flutists, say, each received music previously composed for their instrument, each flutist was given different scores. Thus, motifs from various operas could be heard from the same instruments simultaneously.
Noticing that operatic voices are customarily classified under nineteen categories (for sopranos alone, for instance, coloratura, lyric coloratura, lyric, lyric spinto, and dramatic), Cage requested nineteen singers, each of whom was allowed to select which public domain arias were appropriate for him or her; but only in the performance itself would each find out when, where, or if they could sing them. So several arias, each from a different opera, could be sung at once, to instrumental accompaniment(s) culled from yet other operas.
The costumes were likewise drawn from disparate sources, and these clothes were assigned to individual singers without reference to what they would sing or do onstage. From a wealth of opera pictures, Cage selected various images that were then enlarged and painted, only in black and white, for the flats. These flats are mechanically brought onstage from left, right, or above with an arbitrariness reminiscent of the changing backdrops in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935). Once a flat or prop is no longer needed, it is simply laid to rest beside the performing area, visibly contributing to the chaotic mise en-scène. A computer program ensures that the lighting of the stage will be similarly haphazard.
For the libretti offered to the audience, Cage simply extracted sentences from traditional operatic plot summaries, replacing specific names with pronouns like “he” and “she.” These sentences were scrambled to produce twelve different pseudo-summaries, each two paragraphs long (to coincide with the two acts), none of which has any intentional connection with what actually occurs on stage. Each program distributed at Europera’s premiere contained only one of the twelve synopses, which meant that people sitting next to each another had different guides, further contributing to the elegant chaos.
What Europera is finally about, from its transcriptions of phrases and images to its libretti, is the culture of opera, at once a homage and a burlesque, offering a wealth of surprises with familiar material; its theme could be defined, simply, as the conventions of 19th-century European opera after a 20th-century avant-garde American has processed it. Europera has two parts, subtitled I and II, the second being half the length of the former. As with his earlier HPSCHD, Cage made “chamber” versions –Europera 3 & 4 (1990) and Europera 5 (1991) –that, if only for their diminished scale, are less successful. NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, historically knowledgeable, sees them representing “a unique theatrical genre.”
(1947)
A post-World War II classic initially simple but ultimately complex, this RAYMOND QUENEAU novel tells in ninety-nine different ways about a narrator getting on a Paris bus and witnessing a fight between two passengers one of whom, a man with a long neck and a funny hat, he sees again two hours later at a train station adding a button to his overcoat. So attractive has this fertile concept been to other adventurous writers that translations, some more imaginative than others, have appeared in over two dozen languages, including, no joke, Basque, Zurich German, Galician, and Esperanto. Among the distinguished translators have been UMBERTO ECO (Italian), Danilo Kiš (Serbian), and Ludwig Harig and Eugen Helmlé (German). The first in English came from Barbara Wright (1915–2009), who, more than any other translator into English, consistently favored the more avant-garde French texts. Chris Clarke’s later English translation (2012) includes twenty-eight additional Exercises written by Queneau himself. The challenge of audaciously rewriting a single nut at least ninety-nine times has inspired other writers (including myself in Declarations of Independence [2019]).
One of the great truths of MODERNISM holds that an esthetic departure has a life, eventually exhausting itself; and although good work can be produced in the exhaust of an innovation, whatever appears too late can come to seem opportunistic, if not decadent. Most conspicuously, the innovation epitomized by COLLAGE, initially a great departure, seemed exhausted by the mid-20th century, though collages continued to appear well into the next century, not only in visual arts but, say, in literature and music.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM had a shorter life after World War II, barely surviving into the 1960s, though art reflecting its influence, if not imitating its forms, continued to appear. Sometimes dismissed as “a myth,” exhaustion rules.
(1959)
Traditionally writers, who are essentially word-artists, provided texts for publishers to print and for actors to perform, rarely considering such alternatives for making their words public as, say, handwritten prints for exhibition or public signage. Whereas E. E. CUMMINGS, for one, worked closely with his personal typographer (S.A. Jacobs) to make uniquely different printed pages, certain more contemporary writers have become their own typographers, so to speak, drawing letters by hand or with stencils for later printing. By the 21st century, some self-designing writers were exploiting radical typefaces that were easily available via a desktop computer.
In Sweden in the 1960s, published poets such as Bengt-Emil Johnson and Sten Hanson produced in electronic music studios, wholly on their own authority, audiotapes of SOUND POETRY. Other published writers produced videotapes in which their words (not themselves) appear on screen.
In the 1980s, FRED TRUCK developed his “Performance Bank” that existed only as computer print-out. With his Swallows (1986), PAUL ZELEVANSKY produced on a 5¼-inch floppy disk an interactive narrative made for an Apple computer (later accessible only through an Apple II emulator). After beginning as a poet, EDUARDO KAC made reflection holograms with words as a prelude to his later high-tech art. In my own activities I’ve produced a spinning multiplex hologram of syntactically circular sentences (1978), a two-sided transmission hologram of complimentary pairs of words (1985), a poem 200 feet long and a narrative 50 feet long (2004), and a computer-assisted multi-screen installation at the MIT Media Lab (2001), among other departures in formats for my writings. Whereas most Expanded Writing is necessarily self-published, the last work initially appeared in a group show at the organization that had commissioned it.
Others have made ebooks that exist only on web-sites, usually requiring from the reader certain cursor movements more various than flipping pages. Much as the genre of SCULPTURE, say, has expanded to include developments inconceivable before 1960, so will Literature in the coming decades continue to appear in unprecedented forms in media we can scarcely imagine now.
(1967)
Better than populous art exhibitions such as Documenta or the Venice Biennale, so beholden as they are to gallerists’ promotions, the world’s World’s Fairs often provide richer introductions to the new avant-garde art most likely to survive. The most distinguished in my experience was Expo 67, officially titled the Universal and International World Exhibition in Montreal. Here I had my first experience of a BUCKMINSTER FULLER architectural dome and the lightweight tensile architecture of Frei Otto (1925–2015). Beside the long escalator in the American pavilion was a very tall version of ROBERT INDIANA’s magisterial numerical sequence. An ALEXANDER CALDER ran 60 feet high. Also on the Fair’s premises was the prototype for MOSHE SAFDIE’s modular housing that survived successfully the show’s closing to become a desirable Montreal residence.
The most significant education for me came from appreciating films projected on surfaces other than the standard singular rectangular screen of the familiar movie house. I recall one set-up titled In the Labyrinth/ Labyrinthe where I looked down upon a screen parallel to the floor while beside one end was another screen running perpendicularly up a wall, each 12 meters in length, their simultaneous imagery complimentary. On the other end of a mirrored maze whose winding corridors was a chamber with five screens in the shape of a cross. Elsewhere, the New York filmmakers FRANCIS THOMPSON and ALEXANDER HAMMID contributed We Are Young!, which was simultaneously projected onto six screens different in size. This echoed their three-screen film, To Be Alive, which was featured a few years before at a World’s Fair in Queens, New York, its parts likewise establishing rich cinematic counterpoint.
In another venue at Expo 67 housed Canada 67, a sort of travelogue that was continuously projected on a totally surrounding horizontal screen –literally a 360-degree circle vision. In yet another venue, a Czech theatrical magician named Josef Svoboda (1920–2002) mounted in his Polyvision a wall with 112 small moving screens, developing beyond his Polyekran with only eight screens that was featured in Brussels’ Expo 58 several years before. In Graeme Ferguson’s Polar Life eleven projectors threw images onto eleven stationary screens while a turntable moved the audience. Elsewhere at Expo 67, while A Place to Stand had a single screen 20 meters wide and 9 meters high, the film shot with 70 mm (or twice as wide as the 35 mm then standard) incorporated within its frame many smaller moving complimentary images, mostly about life in Canadian Ontario, all blessedly devoid of any narration! (That last departure is still scarce in film/video documentaries.)
Never again would I witness a comparable anthology of alternative projections, which I came to admire enormously. Were the same collection offered fifty years later (e.g., 2017) it would still look fresh and revelatory. May I venture that other “World’s Fairs” around the world included at least some comparably avant-garde cinema.
(c. 1895)
(This concept is so unsympathetic to me that I fear misrepresentation, but here goes.) The central assumption is that, through the making of a work, the artist transfers his or her emotions and feelings, customarily anguished, to the viewer/reader. Such art is judged “expressive” to the degree that these feelings and emotions are projected by it; therefore, the success of such communication often depends upon the use of images or subjects familiar to the audience, the artist thus always skirting opportunism, if not vulgarity. The social rationale was breaking down the inhibitions and repressions of bourgeois society. (The trouble is that different viewers get different messages, especially in different cultures and at different times. That difficulty perhaps accounts for why the concept of Expressionism is scarcely universal, being almost unknown in Eastern art. Another fault is that light feeling and thus comedy become unacceptable.)
Arising from Romanticism that tied expression to the notion of “genius,” the term became popular around the turn of the 20th century, beginning with Edvard Munch’s (1863–1944) famous woodcut depicting a face proclaiming terror. Indeed, the term “Expressionistic” became an honorific, implicitly excluding whatever arts lacked such quality. It characterized work produced by disparate individuals, rather than a self-conscious group (such as DADA or SURREALISM). Responding to the examples of Munch and Vincent van Gogh in painting, as well as Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) and Egon Schiele (1890–1918) after them, critics began to confine the epithet Expressionism to art (and sometimes thought) produced in Northern and/or Teutonic European countries, in contrast to French and/or Mediterranean traditions. This last notion legitimized German Expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s, in poetry as well as visual art, and perhaps American ABSTRACT E XPRESSIONISM afterwards. The German dancer MARY W IGMAN appropriated Expressionist esthetics for her dance works.
(6 January 1882–17 March 1949)
Exter’s earliest distinguished paintings, from the time of the Russian Revolution, display geometric shapes in a larger field, somewhat more reflective of ITALIAN F UTURISM than other Russian Abstract Art in that period. For these planes that appear to float around one another, she favored the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. The Parisian art historian Andrei B. Nakov (1941), who published the first contemporary monograph on Exter’s work, speaks of a “centrifugal structure … based on a center of energy within the work. For this possibility is based not on the static weight of the mass but rather on its own dynamic potential whose principal role is to counteract the immobility of forms.” For Yakov Protazanov’s science fiction film Aelita (1924), based on an Aleksei Tolstoy story about Russians transported to Mars, Exter designed costumes that emphasized geometric asymmetry, black-and-white contrasts, and the use of shiny materials. Because Aelita was at the time the most popular Russian film in the West, Exter emigrated to Paris, where she worked mostly as a designer for stage, fashion, and architectural interiors. Her surname is sometimes spelled Ekster.