THINKING ABOUT THE CIA using the content free abstract expressionism of the 1950s and 60s*, supposedly a direct expression of the true, inner subconscious of the artists freed from thinking, reliant on alleged raw sensory experience and muscle movements without the pollution of thought, it is no surprise that the dopes who produced that movement in making saleable items were of such use to a CIA that not only had quite different goals, based in instrumental reasoning and calculation aimed at goals quite different from the painters and constructors of the pieces the Museum of Modern Art bought, sometimes with the money of wealthy oligarchs with direct or indirect ties to the CIA and its associated institutions, none of it is at all surprising. Of course the pretenses of the "artistic movement" are based in now antique scientific theory, which the now junked psychology that the artistes picked up through their reading was explained through. The idea that the "subconscious" was where the truth of someone's mind lay is absurd. That they thought that something that by-passed thought (as if anything we do can) to directly access raw sensation was where you could find a truth that would surpass articulated reason only adds to the absurdity of it and exposes the decadence of an intellectual milieu that was taken for such dupes by the CIA. Of course, the more famous of them were well paid for it, which is funny considering how many of them figured they were rebelling against commerce and the capitalist system for something purer and truer.
Modernism has, since the construction of its chief jewel, scientific method, increasingly eschewed moral consideration and moral restraint. That might do if you are describing the movement of objects in space and time, the identification and combination of elements and the nature of their smallest units. Though what is done with those in application is allowed to remain divorced from moral restraint at the greatest risks to life and, especially the attempt to provide a decent life for all. Modernism, especially in the 20th century, has had an increasingly destructive and malignant effect. The extent to which that has been aided and abetted with things like psychology, the theory of natural selection, the naive and, in many of its conclusions, quite inaccurate reduction of genes into something that is the real and enduring thing about us (the wedding of those two in evo-psy in the 1970s). I don't think either of those has much to tell us that will help us survive as a species and certainly are a danger to the attempt to have equal justice and economic justice. The record of both is that they are more likely to help drive us into moral disaster. That the ideologies favored by such of the abstract expressionists were also deadly to equal justice and economic justice, anarchism, quasi-marxism, as much as what they opposed, capitalism is a good indication of the consequences of the amorality of modernism, of which, all three are expressions. Though many of them hardly had any real ideology, as someone once asked why were they supposed to care about the inner minds of violent, misogynistic drunks like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning?
The idea that you have to embrace modernism or you are a reactionary wanting to return to an oppressive, terrible past is clearly absurd. Wanting to relive the past is never about the real past, it's about a ridiculous cleaned up, make believe in which all of the evils of the past are papered over. It is immoral to want to do it. Oddly, those who sometimes think they see those evils of the past most clearly are as willing to overlook the evils of the present right in front of them.
The list of modernist artists and writers and those who have been fixtures of the intellectual structure of modernism who embraced the terrible dictators of the 20th century or the entire idiocy of anarchism which would certainly lead to the gangsters taking control, as they do in any place where civil authority breaks down, is a long one. If you are honest and include capitalism as one of the older and earlier ideologies of modernism, as it is, it is true of just about all of it.
The word, itself, is used in ways that really don't work very well. It certainly doesn't work very well in music where about the only thing that comes close is the sterile and meaningless idiocy of the post-war indeterminacy of John Cage and his acolytes and camp followers. They certainly, looking for a way to get notice and fame, latched onto the similar PR angle that abstract expressionism and absurdist lit were profiting from. Though some of it was also a product of Western exoticism about things like Zen, as seen by American romanticism.
I saw through that when I was taking a course in 20th century American music in the early 70s and stupidly chose to announce my choice to write a paper about Christian Wolff, one of those "composers" associated with Cage. Wolff was known as a lefty composer and I was a lefty, though I was never that kind of one. The teacher approved of the subject, I looked at his scores, I listened to some recordings, I read what had been written about him and his work, I read a little of what he said and had to tell my teacher that I couldn't write a paper about it because there was absolutely nothing to write about. The "chance composers" hadn't actually made compositional choices of any but the most banal kind, sometimes associated with getting paid for commissions by people with money. Odd, how those who pose as the purest artists go for the big bucks the fastest. I wouldn't just repeat the crap I'd read about it and thought even that was pretending to find something there that wasn't there. My teacher (who was also my advisor) was pissed off that I wouldn't play along with the then fashion but he knew I could be stubborn. I managed to pass off a paper I'd written for another class that, luckily, he didn't know I'd used in another class. If he'd challenged me I think I could have made a good case that I'd learned a lot more by doing the research for the paper and really thinking about what was said and the experience of listening to the recordings and going over the scores. In fact, it taught me more than I learned about a lot of the other things in the course. Trying to escape a choice, trying to escape a moral decision is to accept evil, either of a banality that the CIA can use you with or worse, such as that arch modernist Gertrude Stein nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize in the late 1930s. Or to actively support Mao even as he's murdering tens of millions and oppressing hundreds of millions.
* See the comments here.
Note: The idea that our sensory and kinetic senses can be removed from or isolated from our minds' actions of articulate thought or reasoning or making decisions is silly. The choices made might result in an imprecise result, one that doesn't follow a predetermined plan or form but those choices, the thinking involved in those, the influence of past experience and habits are there. Why removing reason and moral consideration from the process as if those were the source of all evil was pretty silly. Maybe it was something they thought of while they were sloshed. Alcohol and drugs seem to go with modernism like an affection for violent dictators does.
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