The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (51 page)

Within two years of this encounter Parker was dead, at the tragically young age of thirty-five. He had had a legendary capacity for drugs and alcohol, which had led to his arrest, incarceration in a psychiatric hospital and the need to carry a pistol in his pocket, alongside the precious mouthpiece of his saxophone, just in case he should get “jumped” by one or other of the unstable characters that peopled the drug underworld.

Reisner, who later became curator-librarian of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, was interested in the wider significance of Parker, and of jazz itself. In the definitive biography,
Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker
, which he edited in 1962, comprising interviews with eighty-one contemporaries and assessing Parker’s cultural importance, Reisner identified “the hipster” as being “to the Second World War what the Dadaist was to the First. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and over-civilized to the point of decadence. . . . He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions—so what values are left for him?—except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that ‘be cool,’ and look for kicks.”
10

To be “cool” sounds like a minimalist ideal, and so it was. But Reisner
was identifying a different, though no less influential, trait: spontaneity, improvisation. The art forms of jazz (bebop in particular), the works of the Abstract Expressionists and action (or “gesture”) painters, the writings of “beat” novelists and poets such as Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson, the dance styles of Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp, the Zen potters like Mary Caroline Richards—all these employed spontaneity in much the same way as the Dadaists did, as Reisner foresaw. Its use aimed to avoid the constricting and restricting influence of the ego, to unleash what were felt to be the far healthier forces of the unconscious. And this applied to drugs, too, which were also felt to liberate inner impulses kept in check by our conscious minds.

The “spontaneous gesture,” says Daniel Belgrad in his study of the culture of spontaneity, was “a sign of the times.”
11
Science, corporate liberalism, the mass media were together
reducing
American life (and by implication Western life) in its aims and enjoyments. This was seen as a form of oppression and alienation not anticipated by Marx—amid material abundance here was spiritual poverty. Against this, Belgrad identified various enclaves around the country dedicated to resisting this ideology: Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the “bohemias” of North Beach, San Francisco, and Greenwich Village, New York. At the San Remo bar in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, a visitor would soon have run into scores of people engaged in some aspect of the post-war aesthetic of spontaneity . . . Paul Goodman, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollock, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac.

The culture of spontaneity developed an alternative metaphysics that can be summarized as “intersubjectivity and mind-body holism.” Corporate liberalism embraced objectivity, which was the basis of its advanced technological mastery over nature. Spontaneity countered this with intersubjectivity, “in which ‘reality’ was understood to emerge through a conversational dynamic. Objectivity understood ‘rationality’ to be defined exclusively by an intellect that separated objective truths from subjective perceptions; thus it posited a dichotomy of mind and body. By contrast, the [American-led] avant-garde defined ‘rational’ as a viewpoint determined by the interaction of body, emotions, and intellect.”
12

We have been here before: in the works of the Dadaists, when the aim
was much the same, to access the unconscious directly, bypassing the forces of the conscious ego in an effort to unlock and liberate the hidden—and theoretically more fundamental—aspects of our nature. Only by liberating the unconscious mind can we live more fully, allow all aspects of our being full expression; only in this way can we experience “wholeness.” This called into question Thomas Mann’s statement that “in our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.” But by now there were more traditions to build on. As a cultural movement, spontaneity boasted a formidable intellectual heritage, “including the works of John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead and Carl Jung, in addition to existentialism, surrealism, Gestalt psychology and Zen Buddhism.”
13

A final characteristic of this new aesthetic (new in American terms, certainly) was the notion that the body, as much as the brain or mind, was the “locus of unconscious knowing,” which “tangibly links internal experience to external reality.” The body is “a complex of occasions,” and art and life proceed by “plastic dialogue,” by the interaction of the body (as much as the mind) in an
encounter
, even a struggle, with the world. This is recognizably Expressionism as much as it is Dada or Surrealism, and it explains the art forms to which the culture of spontaneity gave rise: bebop, scat singing, Abstract Expressionist (or action, or gesture) painting, dance, beat writing and Zen pottery (a term that will be explained shortly).
14

IMPROVISATION AND THE BODY

Perhaps the most obvious cultural manifestation of this new aesthetic came in bebop, which grew out of the very different genre of “big band” swing. The big-band swing era (roughly speaking, the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s) was itself a racy legacy of turn-of-the-century New Orleans jazz, as adapted in a crossover form to the traditional high-culture orchestral concert—highly disciplined, highly syncopated, and playing to both black and white audiences as well as servicemen overseas.

Bebop began at the start of the Second World War during after-hours jam sessions after the swing gigs had finished, in the nightclubs of Har
lem—in particular, Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse, above 110th Street on the West Side. Although the elements of bebop have been identified as polyrhythm and prosodic tone, it was really the third quality, antiphony, or “call and response,” that determined its development and character.

Call and response, or “cutting,” had been a part of black music for some time, as one player (the saxophonist, say) would let rip with an improvised burst and was then “answered” by another musician (on the piano, perhaps). These exchanges had the quality of both conversation—call and response—and competition. They were virtuoso displays of individual skill, in both a technical and an imaginative sense—it was music shared, an encounter. Most of the body could be called into play, in addition to fingering, blowing and drumming.

As the war ended, the small bebop ensembles began to spread out from Harlem, farther downtown into Manhattan and out to St. Louis, Chicago and Los Angeles. There, the music quickly began to be associated with the new urban black consciousness demanding greater recognition for the African-American contribution to American society. The performers saw themselves less as entertainers and more as musicians and intellectuals—there was an unwritten rule, according to Belgrad, that they would avoid the traditional “clowning” or “showboating” image of the “Negro” entertainer in a predominantly white world. Formally, their music often blurred the line between harmony and dissonance, sometimes building on the innovations of Bartók and Stravinsky earlier in the century and creating “polytonality.” But that may mislead—Parker advised others to follow their intuitions when playing, to “quit thinking!”

Most of the musicians learned their craft by listening to others rather than in more formal ways; and that was important too, for the tone, rhythm and attack that they brought to their performances could not be caught on traditional notation techniques. Improvisation was key. One other way in which bebop differed from swing was the phenomenon of scat singing, in which prosody—the rhythm and tone and timbre of words—takes precedence over the traditional meaning. “It was nonverbal communication grounded in sensual perceptions and intended to appeal to unconscious emotions rather than to the intellect.”
15

Bebop was a catalyst. In the jazz clubs of New York City—the Five Spot, the Café Bohemia, Arthur’s Tavern and the Village Vanguard—the musical experimenting of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman was enjoyed by artists such as, among many others, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Grace Hartigan and the writer Frank O’Hara. The painter Larry Rivers, also a saxophonist, played bebop, and Lee Krasner has described the profound influence of bebop on her husband, Jackson Pollock, when he was developing his “gesture-field” style of painting. The beat poets took bebop prosody as the basis of their spontaneous poetics.

PLASTIC DIALOGUE: THE REVELATION IN THE ACT

Painting in post-war America overlapped with bebop in that it explored spontaneity and mind-body holism as a way to artistic fulfillment, though there were many other influences at work as well.

Two of these were Alfred North Whitehead and his “process philosophy,” and Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. Whitehead’s philosophy, it will be recalled, proposed that the universe is basically a domain of energy in its various forms, and this energy is the common unifying feature. According to Whitehead, all objects, whether animate or not, are nodes of energy, surrounded by fields of lesser force but which connect us all. Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious also connects us all, and it proved popular.

The defining moment, or at least the defining criticism, so far as post-war painting in America was concerned, was contained in Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters,” published in
Art News
in December 1952. Rosenberg was the first to draw attention to what Robert Motherwell called the “plastic automatism” of Abstract Expressionism.

According to Rosenberg, what distinguished Abstract Expressionism, what set it apart from other art styles, in particular Surrealism and Cubism, was “its intense dramatization of the
process
of painting, as if to imbue each gesture of the painter with the quality of a different moral decision [italics added].” And he didn’t stop there: “At a certain moment
the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce. . . . [H]e went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter. . . . What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.”
16
Appreciation of the new painting, Rosenberg insisted, required a new attention to the artist’s gestures, each stroke to be examined for its “inception, duration, direction,” for what that revealed about the “psychological dynamics” of the painter, in particular his “concentration and relaxation of the will,” his passivity, his “alert waiting.”

Arguably the best exponent of this approach was Willem de Kooning, in particular in his
Woman
series produced between 1948 and 1955. “[The paintings] depict the human body not as the container of an ideal essence, but as organic matter that confronts the mind of the painter: these are messy bodies, spilling outside projected boundaries, leaking into their surroundings, leeringly imposing their presence. . . . Their almost obsessive reworking implies that the artist conceived of the task as impossible or never-ending, a version of the mind’s struggle to impose order on existence.”
17
This recalls the struggles of Van Gogh and the German Expressionists, and there is also something existential about the paintings as they confront the sheer physicality of the world and of experience, as they fight the “tyranny of concepts,” as Sartre put it. What, who exactly,
are
de Kooning’s women? Rosenberg compared de Kooning’s struggle with paint with “crossing an ocean or fighting a battle,” and the artist himself said he was at times desperate and lost, that painting often seemed to him an absurd activity, “an arbitrary leap toward meaning.”

While de Kooning’s paintings, then, are laden with existential elements—not least, the notion that conscious choice is the only source of freedom in a meaningless universe—this should not blind us to the fact that most of the other action painters were more concerned with what came to be called “field theories” and with the continuum between mind and body that provided “a common foundation for conscious and unconscious thought.”
18

Here the best—or the clearest—exponent was Jackson Pollock, who in 1946 created a series of paintings,
Sounds in the Grass
, in which he put the
unstretched canvases on the floor and applied—even poured—the paint while walking around, or on them. He felt in that way he could be more a part of the painting, even be
in
it. In these and subsequent “all-over palimpsest,” “gesture-field” paintings, no single figure emerges from an undifferentiated ground but there is a multitude of figures which cumulatively form the “ground,” made up of entwined gestural strokes. There is a constant shift in attention as one part of the painting is foregrounded by the viewer, then recedes as another takes over, as if challenging him to constantly reorient himself toward the work. As Lee Krasner put it, “It breaks once and for all the concept that was more or less present in the Cubist-derived paintings, that one sits and observes nature . . . out there. Rather it claims a oneness.”

Such paintings exist on several levels. By their very nature, they represent the painter’s struggle with his or her materials. Their visual ambiguity challenges the viewer to conduct his or her own dialogue with the work, and underlying it all is the notion of what came to be called “radical subjectivity,” that there is no ultimate truth to be arrived at, only different perspectives that can, perhaps, be synthesized. The basis of reality is, therefore,
dialogue.
(This is not quite call and response, as in bebop, but close.)

And this was all built on by the concept of plastic dialogue. Pollock’s paintings are all about the relation between the painter—a holistic mind
and
a body—and his materials, a synecdoche for the reality and resistance of the world and, in its automatism, a release of unconscious forces. This is what plastic dialogue
is
; and, it was felt, no one is or can be external to this process. Pollock’s paint-pouring technique emphasized that the body is as important as the mind in determining the image, and that a painting is as much the product of an action as of thought. This links directly with André Malraux and Saint-Exupéry’s concept of the “warmth of acts,” that the reality we create is the result of actions that exert some change on the world, on reality, rather than mere thoughts.