The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  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 Harlem—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 ti
mes 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.

  In a symposium on “all-over” painting in the early 1960s, Martin James identified another trend: namely, that the new painting did not lay claim to any fixed truth, but that through its intersubjectivity it carried validity and conviction in the context of its time. And this was perhaps the most radical notion of all, that the most socially significant art may be the most ephemeral precisely because it speaks to the moment and the situation for which it is created. It is, in short, art with no afterlife, a new form of minimalism. Art, like life, is an experience, an “intersubjective” experience, not a monument.19 Like life, art is an encounter with the resistance of the world, and this is what the meaning of life is: an encounter with the resistance of the world in which we produce change through action rather than, and as much as, thought.

  KINETIC KNOWLEDGE

  The boundaries between the plastic and the performing arts were the subject of experiments carried out at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. The college operated on Deweyan principles, in which art played a key role in education. Although it closed in 1957 after only twenty-four years, its roster of staff and alumni was impressive: Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Walter Gropius, Alfred Kazin, Robert Motherwell, Robert de Niro, Sr., Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

  The dance critic Roger Copeland has called Hans Namuth’s portrayal of Jackson Pollock painting “one of the world’s most significant dance films.” It showed, he said, that “the fundamental impulse behind abstract expressionism was the desire to transform painting into dancing.” This may be going a bit far, but there is no doubt that modern dancers and choreographers like Martha Graham used Jungian psychology, and its concept of the unconscious store of symbols, as the basis for their work, and that Merce Cunningham and Katherine Litz (also a choreographer), for instance, abandoned narrative dancing for plastic dialogue, investigating the body as an instrument, dance as an experience rather than a story, emphasizing what body parts could do.

  The “kinetics of the body” became central to the art form.20 Another idea was that of “body armor,” that every person, in seeking survival and fulfillment, organizes an outlook on the world. This outlook eventually becomes “routinized,” then recedes from awareness but remains active in governing the outlook, including the “physical attitude of the body.”21 Muscular tensions and blind spots in proprioception “represented learned inhibitions and self-aggressions, the physical counterparts to rigidities in mental attitude.” Our bodies come to reflect our attitudes to life.

  Charles Olson, onetime head of Black Mountain College, proposed that kinetic knowledge of the body was superior to knowledge that was merely descriptive; that for a full life, use of the body was as essential as use of the mind; and that such usage was simply beyond the reach of science. According to Olson, the body offers resistance: overcoming this resistance, as achieved by the best modern dance, can take us a good part of the way toward fulfillment. Early religions appreciated this (as did the Nietzsche cults in Ascona), but the main monotheisms have not.

  Merce Cunningham, who studied with Martha Graham in the early 1940s, then taught dance at Black Mountain College during the 1950s, left to start on his own because he wanted to present movement “in itself” and not as “an allegory of ‘inner’ emotions.”22 He worked hard to free dance from its dependence on both music and narrative, so as to explore the subjectivity of the human body and its range of expression. In particular, he developed what came to be called “all-over” dances; as in all-over gesture-painting, there was no center-stage or hierarchy of position. Cunningham and his longtime partner, the composer John Cage, called this “polyattentiveness.” No less than Jackson Pollock, Cunningham was relying on an energy field. As he himself put it, “The logic of one event coming as responsive to another seems inadequate now. We look and listen to several at once.”

  This, then, is also plastic automatism, the kinetic impulse originating in the body and not in the mind. Cunningham’s dances stemmed not from an idea about character or story, but from movement. The dance proceeds according to the dancers’ bodies, their movements, the space and time available. “It is not,” he said, “subject to a pre-arranged [intellectual] idea as to how it should go any more than a conversation you might have with a friend.” His dances do not have a chorus with soloists, but individuals with their different voices, all “intersubjective,” all aware at any one time of what the others are doing, and fitting in. This, by common consent, creates a high-energy field of great intensity—so that his dances are like a moving Pollock painting.

  CONVERSATIONS WITH CLAY

  The aesthetic of spontaneity and plasticity led artists to choose (and respond to) materials that lent themselves to bodily impulses, most particularly clay. In the 1950s, under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, “the craft of clay pottery was lifted to the status of a high art.” Plastic and malleable, clay offered excellent possibilities for “dialogue.” Manipulating clay requires a high degree of bodily movement as well as sensitivity, since the material cannot be “forced” beyond a certain point. As Peter Voulkos, the most famous of the Abstract Expressionist potters said, it is a spontaneous art form since there is not much time before the clay dries out, and this makes clay the ideal material for a “conversa
tion” between the artist’s unconscious and the environment, moreover a conversation mediated through the body.23

  This was another area in which Black Mountain College shone, attracting potters from the British Arts and Crafts movement—Bernard Leach in particular—and several Japanese potters influenced by Zen Buddhism. Mary Caroline Richards, who also learned her skill at the college, described the experience of pottery: “Potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts. It is like a handclasp between two living hands, receiving the greeting at the very moment that they give it. It is this speech between the hand and the clay that makes me think of dialogue. It is a language far more interesting than the spoken vocabulary which tries to describe it, for it is spoken not by the tongue and the lips but by the whole body, the whole person, speaking and listening.”24 Other potters, such as Toshiko Takaezu, compared plastic dialogue to “dancing with the clay.”

  Other metaphysical aspects of pottery were developed by Peter Voulkos. He rejoiced in making huge pots—some eight feet high—because these involved “wrestling” with the clay, struggling with the resistance it offered. This all recalls Martin Heidegger’s idea that we ourselves are “thrown” into the world and formed, as we age, by means of the resistances we meet. By this account, pottery was the perfect synecdoche for existence.

  PROSODY AS MEANING

  The final aspect of the culture of spontaneity was embodied by what became known as the “Beat” writers, a phenomenon that encompassed poetry, novels and travel writing. Most people think of Beat writing as beginning with the famous reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” in San Francisco, in 1955. But here, too, we find the background was more interesting, again featuring Black Mountain College, and the jazz clubs of Harlem and Greenwich Village. “Howl” was modeled on the tenor saxophone playing of Lester Young. As Ginsberg commented, “The ideal . . . was the legend of Lester Young playing through something like sixty-nine to seventy choruses of ‘Lady Be Good,’ you know, mounting and mounting and building and building more and more intelligence into the improvisation as chorus after chorus went on.”